Logocracy: Richard W. Bailey's "Democracy in American English"

[alice wellintown]

De Tocqueville recognized the “vulgarity” of American newspapers and
the tendency of journalists “to set aside principles in order to grab
men; to follow them into their private lives, and to lay bare their
weaknesses and their vices” (De Tocqueville, 177).  He saw that the
vices of public figures would become essential rather than incidental
qualities, that newspapers would celebrate celebrity rather than
merely recognize the flaws attendant upon the human condition.  No one
did this better than the editors of the lurid press who did not bother
with the great issues of civic life but satisfied themselves with
crimes of violence, incidents of passion, deeds of derring-do.

The consequences of these democratic impulses for the language were
profound indeed.  Following Bakhtin, David Reynolds has described “the
carnivalization of American language.”   As Bakhtin shows in his
explication of Rabelais, a prior condition for “carnivalization” is
the detachment of word from referent.  Words must be seen as arbitrary
rather than natural; meanings as conventional rather than divinely
inspired.  The transcendent becomes human and then corrupt; old
certainties of Puritan America weredisplaced as temporal, flawed,
eccentric, comic.  Language leaked its magic away.

Bailey cites Reynolds, a book worth reading. Reynolds, in a chapter,
"The Carnivalization of American Lanaguage," reminds us to look to
Irving, where we find that M&D is no novel book. Reynolds, David S.
1988.  Beneath the American Renaissance:  The Subversive Imagination
in the Age of Emerson and Melville.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard
University Press.



http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rwbailey/ScottFN.htm