> > - Fie, and possibly Tush, Sirrah, how can you say such things in the face > of the sparkly linguistic freshness you see all around you, not least on > this list. > OK. Fair enough. Actually, one only has to look at the Peter Cole excerpts kindly posted by Anthony Frazer. Marvellous stuff, I must buy the book. To Eleanor Margolies: thanks for the recommendation, I'll certainly try it. American English does seems to be more capable of combining 'colloquialism and formality'. Maybe British English is more affected by Class - Kathleen Raine has asserted that in the past the 'educated class' spoke a different language to us commoners. Incidentally, while looking for that Cookson review I came across a review of Hughes' Ovid by Kathleen Raine in which she unfavourably compares some of Hughes' lines with Pound's magical translation in Canto II. Raine, of course, is a prime advocate of the 'decayed language' theory. Alan B. ---------- > From: R I Caddel <[log in to unmask]> > To: Alan Baker <[log in to unmask]> > Cc: British Poets <[log in to unmask]> > Subject: Re: entice new readers > Date: 10 February 1998 16:28 > > On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Alan Baker wrote: > > But the comparison does > > raise the question that maybe the English > > language has simply lost its freshness after > > 400 years of use and misuse... > > - Fie, and possibly Tush, Sirrah, how can you say such things in the face > of the sparkly linguistic freshness you see all around you, not least on > this list. > > When Zukofsky quoted the gobbit of Golding I lifted, he did so with > specific reference to its *modernity* - all the words and structures are > directly accessible to us today. The language which most quickly passes > its sell-by is surely the official, central "koine", the artificial > received language which seems so universally applicable at the time. As an > instance, try those old news bulletins from 20 years ago - already the > inflection and much of the vocabulary seem stilted as last week's > youthcult terms - usable with irony or not at all. > > On the peripheries - however they're defined - language remains a fairly > dynamic process, still capable of surprise (for me anyway). I'd be awful > sorry if it ever stopped. > > RC > > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%