Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else?

I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seems, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error.

A friend of mine recently attended a conference on Sylvia Plath in Oxford. Plath was a good poet, but more remarkable for having, like Colbert, founded entire industries, in her case biographical, hagiographical, psychoanalytic and critical; though, unlike Colbert, she did not found them wittingly. If the change from coal to town gas had been made a few years earlier than it did, quite a number of academics would have had to seek elsewhere for a subject. Needless to say, they would have found it.

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The Merry Drinker

January 14th, 2008 4:37pm Report this comment

"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant". How true. A pity, then, about the unattached participle in paragraph 6. It wasn't the leaflet that opened the medical journal, Theodore, but you.

kay stern

January 21st, 2008 7:25pm Report this comment

Thank heaven for the voice of sanity! As a retired English teacher I wholly agree with his comments on the use of language to obfuscate and inflate egos and careers. Shame on these people.

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