Clarifornication

"Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

"In the book it said: 'Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.'"

~from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, English translation by Katherine Woods

"As soon as he got home, he went to the larder; and he stood on a chair, and took down a very large jar of honey from the top shelf. It had HUNNY written on it, but, just to make sure, he took off the paper cover and looked at it, and it looked like honey. 'But you can never tell,' said Pooh. 'I remember my uncle saying once that he had seen cheese just this colour.' So he put his tongue in, and took a large lick. 'Yes,' he said, 'it is. No doubt about that. And honey, I should say, right down to the bottom of the jar....'"

~from The World of Pooh, stories by A. A. Milne

["Dear Diary..."]

There are some things I don't miss about elementary school. The daily intonation of the pledge of allegiance. The way everyone in middle school appeared infinitely larger and tougher. The way certain grown-ups sometimes seemed to be addressing you as an infant. "Mrs. So-And-So," one of them might say, referring to herself in the third person, raising up her eyebrows impossibly high on her forehead, "Mrs. So-And-So would be so happy if you could stop playing with those sharp scissors right now, because those are big boy scissors..." Maybe I suspected even then that some of these poor, overworked souls could probably use an all-expenses-paid vacation or at least a couple stiff drinks.

But I do miss the books. Picking up a copy of The World of Pooh, I notice a few oddities that escaped my attention as a Kindergartener--why, for instance, is The Hundred Acre Wood almost exclusively an all-boys club?--but mostly I enjoyed reading it as much today as the first time on my mother's knee.1

Children's books like The World of Pooh and The Little Prince use simple language to convey complex ideas. Consider the quotes at the top of this post. The first scene is brutal and viscerally awesome. It conveys itself in a few words--a snake devouring an animal whole--while leaving some details for the imagination to "chew on", like whether the animal is killed instantly or what it would be like to be inside a boa constrictor. The second is full of subtlety; the reader knows almost from the beginning that Pooh's tongue-in-cheek aside, "but you can never tell..." probably functions as a justification for mischief. Both of these scenes demand intelligence; the reader must "get" that the snake is without conscience while Pooh is possibly acting against his own.

Obviously, complex or sophisticated language is not a bad thing. It is sometimes extremely beautiful and sometimes extremely necessary. We would be much poorer if English literature was subjected to the rules of the Simple English Wikipedia. But I do wish public speakers and writers--especially people in the political sphere--were sometimes required to speak and write more simply. Truthful statements and good arguments would be better understood. Dishonest statements and bad arguments would be more easily disproved or disregarded.

See also:

1. Although I did find one jarring moment in the first chapter: in light of the recent shooting of a 2-year-old girl by her 5-year-old brother, Milne's depiction of Christopher Robin traipsing around with a gun "just in case" doesn't have quite the same charm as it used to.