Friday September 15, 2023; 7:26 AM EDT
- Does the quality and character of a people's language use matter? Victor KIemperer kept a very low profile during the Nazi years and somehow managed to survive. He had one scrap of good fortune: the Nazis for the most part didn't get around to murdering German Jews who were married to Aryans. He wore the star, he lost his teaching job and worked in an envelope factory, he suffered many deprivations beyond the usual in that war, and he and his wife were lucky enough to be away from the firestorm that destroyed Dresden, their home town. He kept a now-famous diary of the depravity, cruelty, and suffering of the Nazi period as he experienced it, but was a linguist and he also kept pages and pages of notes on the distortions and cruel perversions of language that were a key to Nazi domination. After the war, he cataloged and analyzed those in a book. The English translation of the book is called The Language of the Third Reich. #
- In chapter 17 he tells the story of a day at work at the envelope factory, where everyone knows in 1943-1944 to avoid being overhead by three of the other workers who like to inform on others. He wears a yellow star there (and everywhere else he goes outside the home) but most of the workers are Aryan. Klemperer describes a few of the most decent and honorable of the non-Jewish co-workers who, in spite of themselves, still traffic in some of the language categories learned from relentless Nazi propaganda. Words made familiar to them in broadcasts and on posters, reflecting patterns of thought handed down, now inhabiting their own everyday speech, even though they are careful not to put Klemperer into danger in the workplace. One even shares a bit of fruit for him to take home to his ailing wife.#
- For years to come, we can expect our fellow citizens to use phrases learned over the last few years here in the United States. We'll hear talk of fake news, say, as if the language of slogans is adequate for describing the challenges we face. Dog whistles we always have with us, intuited even if they are not understood. And so forth.#
- I'd like to learn more about tools that use language predictions to shape written texts. If these predictions are based on unexamined patterns found in today's language, they will uncritically hand down the worst of past language use, won't they? And the unquestioned concepts that are tucked in behind the facade of these seemingly neutral and everyday words?#