Good Reads: on the politics of language, Genghis Khan, and the Beastie Boys

Nobody likes a language snob.

This is the person who corrects you in mid-sentence when you make a mistake. “Mr. President,” he shouts, at a press conference, “when you say ‘misunderestimate,’ do you perhaps have another word in mind?” And everyone laughs at you, for days.

Language snobs are everywhere, even in France, where they even have an “Académie française,” was designed to define, protect, and regulate proper French grammar and usage. In the English-speaking world, language snobs write dictionaries that practically frown at you when you can’t remember the difference between “parameter” and “perimeter.” (The first is a mathematical term for a constant in an equation; the second refers to a boundary. Trust me, I looked these terms up in a dictionary.)

It’s easy to ridicule the language snobs, as Robin Williams did in his “rip it out” scene in the Dead Poet’s Society.

But here’s the thing about language snobs: They are oddly egalitarian. While language snobs might giggle at people who choose the wrong words or who make grammatical mistakes, their underlying premise is that there are universal rules for language. Learning to use those rules is the ultimate ladder to success, integration, and acceptance.

In this week’s New Yorker, book critic Joan Acocella writes about the ongoing debate between language snobs (or “prescriptivists,” as they apparently prefer to be called) and “descriptivists,” who believe that “all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was.” Ms. Acocella is definitely in the prescriptivist camp, and when she reviews the new book “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English,” by Henry Hitchings, a descriptivist, you know you are in for a good fight. 

All of this might seem petty, but for writers such as George Orwell, the use and abuse of words had the potential to start wars, prop up dictatorships, and justify genocides. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. 

For those of us who do love words, and for fellow journalists covering wars and the politicians who use words to justify them, Acocella’s review is required reading. It is also that rare guiltless pleasure, a “Rumble in the Jungle” for the literary set. Bring popcorn.

Genghis Khan and leadership

In this same realm of self-improvement, you can usually tell something about the times by the historical figures we choose to emulate. During the 1980s, Machiavelli and Sun-Tzu were all the rage. Now, it’s time to learn business tips from Genghis Khan and Somali pirates.

Genghis Khan, of course, has always been the guy we didn’t want to emulate. Voltaire called him a “destructive tyrant,” and “the fiery Genghis Khan, who lays the fertile fields of Asia waste.”

Like Attila the Hun, another misunderstood Asian despot, Genghis Khan did carry out a few acts that would attract notice from the International Criminal Court at The Hague. But he also, apparently, left the world better than he found it.

Teasing out lessons from the excellent book, “Genghis Khan, and the making of the Modern World,” by Jack Weatherford, Ryan Holiday gleans a few useful leadership lessons for our uncertain times. Among them are these: Lead from the front, serve a greater good than yourself, understand your people, and change the world, but change gradually.

Read Holiday’s piece in Forbes, but those who are truly curious about how an illiterate Mongol village chieftain helped to shape our modern world should also read Mr. Weatherford’s book.

Adam Yauch, a Muslim hero

Finally, those who came of age in the 1980s would have noticed the passing of Adam Yauch (aka MCA), founding member of the hip hop band, the Beastie Boys. Most Beastie Boy fans reveled in the group’s mixture of punk and rap, and in their topical lyrics. But for Cihan Kaan, an American Muslim from Brooklyn, Mr. Yauch was a hero because of his courageous and early stands against Islamophobia, well before Sept. 11 and the war against terror.

On the Al Jazeera website, Mr. Kaan writes, that when Yauch – a Brooklyn Jewish kid who converted to Tibetan Buddhism – spoke out against American racism toward Muslims, Kaan began to believe again in an America that had rejected him because of his own Muslim beliefs.

“I still hoped Adam Yauch, my Brooklyn homeboy icon, and his crew would save the world. I hoped the Beastie Boys would save all of the US from the hatred in their hearts spread through covert funding programmes and religious zealots.”

Surely, just as words live on, Yauch’s own hopes can live on beyond his passing. Read Kaan’s touching tribute on AlJazeera.com.