Anglo-Futurism: Simplicity of Language

One of my frustrations with the Modern world is when academics use language to complicate a topic or even hide what they actually mean. Whether done intentionally or not, it creates barriers to the average person to understand the topic under discussion. Those uninitiated into the discipline will struggle to make ‘head nor tai’l of a text or a discussion.

Another frustration is when I have assumed a word or phrase meant something based upon a common understanding, but once I went back to the source texts, I found it was very different to what I first thought.

A good example is utilitarianism. For years, I thought it meant whether something or someone had utility or usefulness. This is incorrect, it is a philosophy of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. I’m sure we can think of many other examples like this from our own experiences.

One word which annoys me is pedagogy. Why can’t people just use the word ‘teaching’? Every time I hear this word, I have to change it to ‘education’ in my mind, so the sentence makes sense. The word is a waste of time and I wonder if people only use it to hide their true intentions from the average uninformed person.

The benefit of English is how there are many words from the same concept. For example, rather than love we could use tenderness, fondness and devotion. This makes English a wonderful medium for poetry and prose, but can cause problems with more technical documents and discussion.

French was the diplomatic language of choice in the last century, as it has less words than English, which are more strictly defined. This would allow better negotiations as everyone could understand the meaning of what was being conveyed.

Anglo-Futurism does not suggest we learn French, but to help the English people to communicate in a more clear and transparent way, we need to use less ambiguous language.

Anglish is such a tool. It is a constructed language built from English, and avoids using non-Germanic words. So words ftom Latin, French, Ancient Greek, Hindi and the myriad of others languages the English have borrowed words from over the centuries are ignored.

By using the Germanic root, English becomes clearer. A good example is ornithology. In Anglish, this is changed to bird-lore. Even though the Greek term feels more academic, ‘bird-lore’ is easier for the common person to understand.

Today, Anglish practitioners have developed new words based upon Old English, to take into account of our Modern cultures and technologies. Fur example, an Anglish writer might use the term ‘starship’ for a space rocket and ‘starfaring’ to describe travelling through space.

One of the pillars of Anglo-Futurism is competency. By opening up the discussion to include the common people, then academics can be better scrutinised. Ensuring a greater degree of accountability will improve standards as it will be harder for faux-academics to hoodwink the public and their peers.

This would also allow more people to get involved with academic discussions, and possibly offer new ideas or points of view. We shouldn’t assume common-sense is outdated and useless. Sometimes it is more coherent than many of our modern philosophies.