Having recently seen for the first time the 1969 French film, “My Night At Maude’s,” I was amused by this afternoon’s report of Gerry Hadden’s night with Eric Honecker, but I was less amused with Gerry’s opaque statement in regard of the Ostel Hotel’s staff that their “attitude was positive.” In fact, I was wildly unamused, this being but one of a torrent of nonsensical expressions to be heard in several hours of this, and every, afternoon’s NPR presentations. Much more to the luster of the report would have been informing the listener of the staff’s character and work in specific terms, such as their warmthe, cordiaility, and efficiency, or lack of such, but no doubt those fluent in NEWSPEAK would be expected to draw the intended inference from the expression used.
I find that the compilers of dictionaries in the past forty years have aided and abetted the debasement of the language in a criminal way, one such example deriving from resort to Webster’s 3rd International Unabridged Dictionary, basic copyright dating to 1961, with the printing of the copy referenced in 2002, and in which I found definition designated, 4d, for the word, “attitude,” viz., A persistent disposition to act either positively or negatively toward a person, group, object, situation, or value. I have been uncomfortably aware for some time that one can now find in these dictionaries recognition if not approval of just about any of the vague and confusing words and terms which have come to pollute the language, so it is understandable that Gerry might have fallen into use of such.

Most college graduates now have no idea who was George orwell or what he wrote, much less the fact that that it was he who gave our language and culture the concept of BIG BROTHER, and even less the fact that in his speeches and essays he emphasized that his satires of Soviet Russia and Stalin, and by extension, Ulbricht and Honecker, were primarily intended to warn the West of what it might become. As with other prophets though, Orwell seems to have been without honor in his own land, if the gibberish which is being offered as the expression of nominally educated people is any guide.
The concluding part of today’s WORLD with Gemma Ray provided excellent example of an enviable standard of English usage, albeit one might harbor reservation that if the English can’t speak English then Orwell’s worst fears have been realized, and in which in answer to the question as to her place of origin she characterized it as “the most salubrious place in England.” Yes, a very good word, which has unfortunately gone out of use on this side of the Atlantic along with thousands of other words necessary to a language supposedly spoken by the populace of a power of continental dimensions. But it is not now a question of elegance, nor even of rythmn and euphony, but of the communication of essential sense, and this can be seen in the fact that words, laws, rules, regulations, signs, and postings no longer carry meaning or effect.

It was interesting that the interviewer asked Gemma Ray her age so as to disabuse me of the notion that from the sound of her voice her age was half of what she declared it to be. I have been dismayed by NPR’s dismissal of Brian Ungar from the first of the year, whose weekly five minute essays were something from which those despairing of English in America might take heart.
Paul Egan
143 Cambridge Boulevard, Apt. 1
Amherst, NY 14226-3057