If I is to start this post by quoting thou a line of verse, will thee forgive I? This line what I quoteth are practically unique, and on Thursday last some of we had to sing he no less than three time:
"Mary said: 'Why chooseth me? A lowly maid am I that knoweth no man? /But I will obey if what you say is God's own plan.'"
This contemptible couplet (or quatrain) comes (or cometh) from a recent, and quite otiose, translation of the 14thC poem "Angelus ad Virginem". Dost, my friend, or do you, my friends, know it? Dost raise thy cap to it, friend, or at it thine eyebrows?
What utter, abject, ill-informed, meretricious drivel it is, this stuff.
What I am talking about, if you haven't already twigged, is what happens when ignorance, in this instance of the use of the mediaeval suffixes -eth and -est, is no bar to publication. The supposedly archaic English of these quoted lines is utterly, mind-bogglingly, breathtakingly, bogus. It would be funny in Up Pompeii! or a Carry On film, but in a purported translation of a fine Latin poem - published, mark you, and no doubt copyrighted to the hilt - it makes you a) squirm with embarrassment when you have to sing it, and b) wonder why you bothered learning anything at all when people can get away with writing tripe like this.
It takes about fifteen seconds to learn about the two mediaeval suffixes and the correct use of thou and thee. It isn't something to argue about - there is a right way and a wrong way, period, full stop. So if you get it wrong in the public prints you proclaim yourself to be a twit and a laughing-stock and precisely the type for whom the pillory was invented, and serve you jolly well right when you get a faceful of rotten tomatoes and a pageful of contumely.
There is even more of this sort of linguistic bilge in the same volume: sentences which don't have a main verb; strings of ecstatic utterances which lack any sort of coherence and make you wonder what the writer had been sniffing; a description of the infant in the manger as a "love-child", a term which has rather a different meaning in colloquial English; and other horrors. There is so much good Christmas poetry, and good Christmas verse, that we need illiterate and poorly written doggerel as much as we need three left shoes to the pair.
But the truly awful thing is that this is a book of Christmas music and words - from a major publishing house that really ought to know better - that is aimed at schools, as though children are too stupid and pig-higgerant to know any different, or care. I rant, and I hope will continue to rant until I'm 110, about the mediocrity of much of the language and music used in churches today, and for one good reason - I really do believe that only the very best that we can offer is good enough for God. But don't children deserve the very best we can offer, as well? There is a wonderful Latin phrase coined by the philosopher John Locke - tabula rasa. It means "scraped slate" - a writing tablet cleaned and ready newly to be inscribed, with words that inspire, and give cause to aspire, and excite curiosity, and educe. Fill that slate with pap and illiterate nonsense if we will, but don't let us then moan that today's young people are ill-educated, because we only have ourselves to blame, as parents, as teachers, as guides and mentors - and as publishers.
Now you might think that it doesn't matter all that much if someone who earns a living by his (or her) use of language gets it wrong occasionally, in the same way that it doesn't matter all that much if the gas man (or woman) looks for your leak with the aid of a candle. We have become inured to mediocrity and incompetence: they have become a way of life, and we have lost our righteous and rightful anger (for which, you will remember, that is ample precedent in the New Testament - see Matthew, 21:12.) I am rather fond of the expression dumbing down, but I offer another useful little phrase that sums it all up: educational entropy. Entropy happens when the universe runs out of steam and starts to degrade. Educational entropy happens when every successive generation of children - whence cometh the future teacher and parent - knows a little less than its predecessor. Amen.
"When ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" - Thomas Gray
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