‘Speak well enough to be unintelligible’

Abstract

When Jane Austen expressly warned her niece Anna against the use of the phrase ‘vortex of dissipation’ in her novel, she was evidently making some playful distinction between the ethics of human behaviour and the aesthetics of language use: ‘I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang — and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.’¹ But the concerns in her own novels, both with language and with human conduct, repeatedly make such a distinction untenable, because lexical precision in her system of values is usually a positive moral index pointing towards clarity of perception — and possibly even integrity of character. Naming confers reality upon objects; and even states of mind until exactly verbalised can remain fluid and indeterminate. Lazily verbalised, they not only become imprecise but are also transformed and falsified. Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, who is particularly fastidious about keeping language unsullied by ossified words, declares, ‘Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself because I could find no language to describe them but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning’ (ch. 18).

… ‘I understand you perfectly well.’

‘Me? Yes, I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.’

‘Bravo! an excellent satire on modern language.’

Northanger Abbey