Ducks and Drakes is a blog about language written by Neil Verma.
The title comes from one of the classic texts on writing in English, George Orwell’s essay “Politics and Language” (1946), available here.
In the essay, Orwell chastises Professor Lancelot Hogben for the following sentence:
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
“Ducks and drakes” refers to the game of skipping stones or shells across pools of still water. The precise origin of the term is wonderfully uncertain; there are more details here. Many readers probably know the phrase best from Mother Goose:
A duck and a drake,
And a halfpenny cake,
With a penny to pay the old baker.
A hop and a scotch
Is another notch,
Slitherum, slatherum, take her.
Orwell has a little fun with Hogben’s appropriation of this metaphor, pointing out:
Professor Hogben plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means.
Orwell’s aim isn’t just to mock poor Hogben. Instead, he wants to illustrate that it is folly to let meaning lapse while language skips along – as a stone across a still pool, so to speak. In fact, Orwell goes so far as to suggest that “political chaos” itself increases with “the decay of language.” And he has a provocative remedy for this trouble: “one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
The DaD blog is suspicious of such lofty goals, but it is interested in them. Using examples drawn from a number of sorts of writing and speech, this blog aims to give students and other readers a better sense of how I think about words, arguments, voices and rhetoric. This blog is also a tool for my students as they prepare writing for me to evaluate. All readers are at least a little mysterious to their writers, but I think that it is both useful and fair to provide a resource for diminishing this mystery, particularly in pedagogical relationships.
So this blog is definitely not about purifying American grammar, nor is it about great and interesting scholarly scrums among logicians or linguistics scholars. I’m not qualified to participate in such matters. Instead, Ducks and Drakes is a series of observations about language that mulls over the merits of Orwell’s idea that there is a meaningful synchronicity between thought and language. In the posts that follow, I entertain the possibility that Orwell articulates “If thought corrupts language” then “language can also corrupt thought.”
What follows looks at both of these sorts of corruption, to see if they may be reduced – or perhaps increased - in interesting ways.
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April 14, 2008 at 2:46 pm
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