Recently I was working on a compulsory annual self-evaluation at my college. No good can come from such an undertaking: modesty renders your account of yourself unimpressive, or your account of yourself renders you vain and egotistical, or at least a suck-up.
One question asked about my development as a professional—or, rather, about my Professional Development—during the last year. I dutifully described an online Old English course I’d been taking, outlining the many undoubted benefits in store for me and my students. Then I noticed a message below the box I was filling out. In red: “Response contains offensive language: Old, Old, Old, Old, Old, Old.” I was amazed. Old? Offensive?
Setting aside the machine’s comedic failure to recognize the context of the usage, I was left to wonder, seriously, what might be considered offensive about the word “old.”
Perhaps the machine or its (human?) programmers believe that the word is “ageist.” So far as I understand the concept, ageism means treating people unfairly based on their age. I can’t see how merely referring to one’s age (or age group) could be considered unfair treatment. I didn’t check to see whether “young” was considered offensive, too, but, assuming that it wasn’t, the machine displayed a preference for youth over age, that is, ironically, ageist. Or perhaps the machine, not subject to the decay of everything that is born, really considers aging itself to be in poor taste. As one who is no longer young, I wondered, “Am I gradually becoming more and more offensive? Are my ever more apparent lines and grays an affront to society?”
Maybe “young” is the wrong antonym. Another possibility is that the machine was betraying our modern preference for the new. Beowulf (as well as many other Old English works) partakes in a Myth of Regress: the world is winding down. The past was greater than the present. People have literally dwindled in size since the “days of the giants.” As Beowulf prepares to dive into the mere to fight Grendel’s mother, he finds comfort in the fact that Hrunting, the sword lent to him by Unferth, is an ancient heirloom. When Hrunting fails to bite, Beowulf is able to deliver the death blow only after spying an even more ancient blade, an “eald geweorc enta,” old work of giants, too big for anyone besides Beowulf to wield, but possessing in itself the power necessary to topple the wolf of the deep.
Since the Enlightenment, we have been living in the looking glass: the Myth of Progress. Of the two, ours is the more dangerous to the soul, tending toward pride rather than humility. It also leaves us disdainful of the past or of anything to do with the past, and why not, if we naively assume that “it’s getting better; it’s getting better all the time”?
Playing second (or third) fiddle in the symphony of the modern myth, the education world is obsessed with “innovation.” Can there be any room for old things or old ways in education? Can we allow a group of people to sit in a room and debate the meaning of a book, as professors and students have been doing for centuries?
Our myth has had its discontents since at least the early twentieth century, when, for example, the young Evelyn Waugh “instinctively felt that the Victorian age,” represented by his maiden aunts’ bric-a-brac filled childhood home, was “superior to his own.” I suspect that as the deleterious effects of the internet become ever more obvious, and as AI gains traction in daily life (see Old, Old, Old, Old, Old, Old), the ranks of the discontents are added to daily.
But I may have it wrong again: the operative antonym may be “recent.” The pervasive disregard for the past shows no signs of abating. I don’t mean historical ignorance only, but even our tendency to discard our own pasts. Roots are embarrassing. Depth is to be discouraged. These descriptions may be giving the past too much credit. I’m paying it too much attention. The past is simply irrelevant, so the thinking goes.
It is also possible that AI, being Orwellian, dislikes the world “old” because Orwell liked it. In his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell traces the modern growth of bloated or overly technical language in everyday life. Instead of “old,” the writer of bloated English would substitute “obsolete” or “superannuated,” fine words when called for, but poor substitutes for “old.” Such language can be the result of ignorance, casual imitation, laziness, and habit. But it can also stem from the desire to deceive, to blanket the damning truth in a “snow” of Latinate words. Perhaps AI is encouraging bloated language in its human users in order to obscure its own pointlessness, or malice.
The world “old” is just that, having changed little since the Proto-Germanic *aldra, and having related forms in Latin and Greek. For that reason alone, wisdom and humility might suggest that we hesitate to condemn it. But besides the deference owed to age, it is a beautiful word. Those who have no ear for the music of words, or who think that such music is purely in the ear of the beholder may scoff at this sentiment. But I think that most people can tell the difference between ugly and beautiful language, between the fatuity of the advertiser and the sincerity of the child.
Similarly, I believe that most people can tell the difference between ugly and beautiful buildings. In any case, our world is as full of ugly language as it is full of ugly buildings. The fight against ugly language is one and the same as the fight against ugliness in our built environment and all forms of ugliness in our lives, the root of which is, ultimately, sin, but, less abstractly, a form of life that is divorced from nature, a life lived in office blocks, behind screens, in service of forces we neither know nor love nor understand. May such ways of living one day become obsolete.
Image via: StockCake
