RESTORING THE ANCIENT VERITIES. The Quote of the Day comes from Oxford don Richard Jenkyns.

People care about their language because it forms part of their identity, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. But correct usage is not an elite affectation; it is a badge of competence.

That's the abstract. Here are some of the details.

For instance, universities are now expected to produce mission statements. That ught to be easy: "We teach, study and write, and try to do these things as well as we can." But of course such plain, frank words will not do, and we are driven to swathe simple meaning in the language of bureaucracy. I am unsure why the language of management, Don Watson's main target, is so deplorable, but it is a serious matter, as it clogs the working of schools, hospitals and other public and private businesses.

In the academic world, it may be easier to detect the forces which discourage good, plain English. Modern societies have created large salaried intelligentsias, which are required to keep publishing. Some subject matter is essentially difficult: philosophy, for example, must often be done at a high level of abstraction. But the aim ought always to be to make difficult matters as simple as the subject allows, and the conditions of modern academic life tempt people to do the opposite. History is an almost limitless field, and my impression is that historians usually write well. But the study of popular culture easily tends to statement of the obvious, and its practitioners naturally want to disguise that fact. The English literature industry is so big that in many areas there is not enough material to go around, and here the emptation is to claim that even the most perspicuous authors need the professionals to interpret them. It is like the plumber telling you that it will cost a grand to fix that leaky tap.

As for politics, all governments reasonably stress their successes and palliate their failures, but many people seem to feel that the present government is more widely and systematically dishonest with fact and language than any of its predecessors. In my view, this suspicion is justified.

But wait, there's more. Henry at Crooked Timber links to an article that suggests some of the Modern Language Association (yes!) are considering how to re-connect the humanities to the public.

"I can't say just how long this will take," [outgoing Association president Robert Scholes] said. "But I do believe that this is happening. There is more interest in these things ... grammar, rhetoric, and also logic. ... There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions."

Perhaps the literati have been mugged by reality.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, deplored the humanities' inability to give a "publicly intelligible account of what we are doing." If the greater public was uninterested in the humanities, he argued, "it is our fault, not their fault."

Professor Appiah is a member of the Left2Right collective, which advertises itself as such an effort.

A rediscovery of the eternal verities by the loopier precincts of the humanities would suit me just fine. There are plenty of other topics for me to comment on.