What Our Written Language Illustrates About Our Culture

real. We, as a culture, distrust formality, fancy writing, elevated diction as elitist and pompous. He found this distaste reflected in the children's textbooks and readers. Here are three examples spanning the years. For example, the fourth McGuffey reader was used as late as the 1920s; this is a typical reading passage for middle school students (an excerpt from Joseph Addison's Reflections in Westminster Abbey):

When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey, where the gloominess of the place and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.

McWhorter has this to say: "American schools were still operating under a sense that on the page, one dressed the language up, and that no citizen was to escape schooling without learning the rudiments of literature" (148).

This excerpt from Stories from the Arabian Nights is from a textbook last distributed in early 1960s:

I decided, after my first voyage, to spend the rest of my days at Bagdad. But it was not long before I tired of a lazy life, and I put to sea a second time, in the company of other merchants. We boarded a good ship and set sail. We traded from island to island, exchanging goods. One day we landed on an island covered with several kinds of fruit trees, but we could see neither man nor animal.

McWhorter: "The vocabulary here is less rococo than in the 1920s excerpt, and the syntax avoids written tricks like 'the use to which it is applied' and the interlude of '... or rather thoughtfulness...' Indeed the level had already sunk a good couple of notches." (149).

Here is a passage from the same sixth grade textbook's 1996 edition:

Tahcawin had packed the parfleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Another travois lay on the ground ready for the new tipi. Chano was very happy when Tasinagi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time.

McWhorter: "This sounds like something from a Golden Book-we read it thankful that we are too old to have to

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