Language

Grammar, Speech, Rhetoric & the Fate of Humanity

Could a fifty-year-old, small book on grammar, speech, and rhetoric by a nearly-forgotten thinker have the power to revolutionize and re-awaken our decadent intellectual life? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) might not recognize, in 2018, the...

Why Reality Ought to Shape Language

Let reality shape language. Reality in this sense means what is actually the case, which includes what people actually think, not what they are supposed to think. It means an order in which God provides the very grounding of the real...

The Problem of Language and Our Schools

The word “education” itself has become a political symbol co-opted by a secular government to mean career and college training for the sake of a mechanized society. A theoretical and conceptual recovery of the word “education” would be a return to the notion that an education is...

Studies in Words

Since the present meaning of a word is often vaguely swayed by past meanings which have dropped into the subconscious, a knowledge of particular semantic histories can increase our facility and sometimes save us from an inadvertent error... Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis...

How Liberals Abuse Language

As long as words are left undefined, their meanings are vague and are left up to the listener’s or reader’s imagination. Many on the left have manipulated language in this way... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Shannon...

Language Touches Nothing But Language

I have become convinced that language touches nothing but itself, that it never reaches beyond itself. But this is not the bad news that a lover of tradition or of Permanent Things might take it to be... I...

Finished in Beauty and Memories: The Poetry of Catharine Brosman

In their ego-centered quest for radical originality, too many contemporary poets fail to keep in mind what Catharine Brosman reminds us is the poet’s primary obligation in every age: “to say the oldest thing in the world as though it had never been said before”...

The Importance of Educated Preaching

A belief that all that is needed for living or even preaching is the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, has so invaded certain segments of modern American Christianity that an educated man might be looked at with suspicion...

Why Ladies and Gentlemen Are Forbidden on New York Trains

The seemingly insignificant suppression of ladies and gentlemen on New York’s trains represents a giant step backward. It affirms that we need no longer behave like ladies and gentlemen, but rather like whatever we want to be, or happen to be, at the moment...

Defending Dr. Johnson

Samuel Johnson believed that just as pedants can abuse the objective meaning of words, distorting them for their own purposes, so can scoundrels abuse the healthy love of home and homeland, parroting patriotic words for self-serving reasons...

In the Beginning Was the Word

If we do not understand words, through the apprehension and comprehension of their definitions, we cannot even begin to understand the wonders and glories of the cosmos that the Word Himself has brought forth... It seems that...

Definitions and Their Discontents

Words are not static. They are dynamic. Like the birth of a child, there remains always something mysterious, even miraculous, about the birth of a thought and about the words we use to bring that thought into being...

The Power of Names

Language has an extraordinary place in an education like ours because our aim is the restoration of the world and the transformation of culture through Christ the Word... Earlier this week, I was having lunch in the cafeteria...

In Defense of Splitting Hairs

We need to draw distinctions. The words we use are crucial to this endeavor. They matter. To deny this is to become a deconstructionist, and engage in self-defeating activities like writing lengthy books on how words have no meaning. Splitting hairs seems a far worthier past time...