Reply #16: I do find that elegance in language doesn't necessarily [View All]

[hyphenate]

mean overly complex language. While a healthy vocabulary can be a palette for a richer painting of words, the imagery can be seen with much smaller words as well. Witness Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a lot in short sentences, with non-complex words to convey his meaning. We can look to John Steinbeck as well--authors who chronicled death, dying and living in their novels, whose blunt, unadorned writing showed that flowery language was not needed to invoke strong, real characters and situations.

However, many people will miss out on some works over several hundreds of years, it is true. One might not want to tackle Shakespeare without a translation of 16th century English, for example, or find joy with John Milton, read the satire of Jonathan Swift or the works of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, or so many others.

We have a great need to preserve the words of so many, through so many different eras. We can be thankful, say, for the ability to translate Sir Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, as one of the most noted early English writing, or for the many tomes of ancient Greece and Rome, or those of other parts of civilizations in ancient times. Must we also, sadly, rely on mere handfuls of scholars who have the ability to translate many of the works of the 20th century in a few hundred years? When language has deteriorated to words without vowels, or words compressed to only several consonants, as though writing was suddenly once again the playing field of stenographers or shorthand experts?

Surely, we won't be in that place, of limited understanding, or misinterpretation of language! I hope we can impress upon our youth that language is going to another world, where the stories are as bold or as real as the imagination! Where we can bring our own lives, and interact with classic heroes or dreadful antagonists. Where nowhere is there anything less than what we can dream about and hold in our mind's eye! I can only hope that I will be able to see some of that world unfold.