Words, Words, Words
I knew there was a reason. I knew it, I knew it. Right – the next time someone tells me I’m an elitist and pompous and pretentious and a show-off and generally horrible and intolerable, merely because I accidentally use a word that one might not find in a five-year-old’s vocabulary – the very next time, I say, I will have an answer ready. It’s because I don’t yet have Alzheimer’s. Surely that’s a good enough reason! Surely even the most dedicated warrior for populism will recognize that not (yet) having Alzheimer’s is quite a sensible reason to use words one was foolish and malevolent enough to pick up by accident at some point. Surely. I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to pick up pretentious words, but now that I’ve done it, well – it’s nice to know that the Alzheimer’s scenario is postponed for awhile.
Scientists have discovered the very first signs of Iris Murdoch’s final illness within the text of her last novel. Her vocabulary showed signs of damage at least a year before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, they say…Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, remarked: “There was something different about Iris’s last novel. It was moving but strange in many ways.” Now his suspicion that the degenerative disease had damaged her literary skills long before it became obvious has been backed by a statistical analysis. This reveals that while the structure and grammar of Murdoch’s writing remained consistent, her vocabulary dwindled and her language simplified.
There you are, you see. Her vocabulary dwindled. And joking aside, it’s actually quite interesting. Her vocabulary got richer as she got older, and then as she got older than that, it went in the other direction.
“The smallest number of word types occurred in Jackson’s Dilemma and the largest in The Sea, The Sea, and new word types were introduced at a strikingly higher rate in both earlier books compared with Jackson’s Dilemma,” he said. “Moreover, the vocabulary of Jackson’s Dilemma was the most commonplace and that of The Sea, The Sea the most unusual. “This suggests an enrichment in vocabulary between the early and middle stages of Murdoch’s writing career, followed by an impoverishment before the composition of her final work,” said Dr Garrard…”Her manuscripts thus offer a unique opportunity to explore the effects of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease on spontaneous writing, and raises the possibility of enhancing cognitive tests to diagnose the disease.”
It’s not only interesting, it’s also useful. So you see, having a very slightly (accidentally, humbly) enlarged vocabulary is not something to shout at people for, it’s something to say ‘well done, you’ll help medical research if you become ga-ga as you almost certainly soon will’ for.
Joking aside again, it really is interesting. That nun study fascinates me. Mental activity does ward off Alzheimer’s – it is somewhat protective against it. Learning is protective against it, apparently. Which is quite good. Gives people an incentive to do something that they might then find of value for additional reasons. Somebody ought to suggest to George Bush that he might try it.
Yeah, that nun study is interesting, but does keeping the noggin active somehow ward off Alzheimer’s, or does Alzheimer’s show itself subtly in young adulthood via simple syntax and limited vocabulary? BTW, nicotine seems to ward off Alzheimer’s, too. Nicotine users have about half the rate of Alzheimer’s as the general population. See, I KNEW smoking was good for you!
Well, my father didn’t suffer from limited vocabulary & he smoked a lot. He preferred simple syntax, but I always thought it was for the sake of clarity.
Seriously though, this study whilst interesting is an exercise in hindsight. To test its hypothesis a double-blind test needs to be set up using a group of young authors and tracking the verbal complexity of their works over the next forty years or so.
See you in 2044.
Unlikely, I prefer simple syntax.
Just yesterday, my freshmen literature students complained that poetry is often elitist, pompous and pretentious because of its vocabulary (although they didn’t use those words–heh). Can’t we read poems without big words? I actually had to spend class time explaining that one often learns by reading something one doesn’t understand until one understands it. Gah!
I’m in agreement with Chris Whiley here. Perhaps the simpler syntax and vocabulary of the latest novels indicated early Alzheimer’s. But perhaps the writer merely came to prefer simplicity in language. We’ll never know. It all seems terribly post-hoc.
I’m happy to hear nicotine helps, though. But I’m hoping new therapies coming available for Alzheimer’s in the fifty years I gather I have before getting into the danger zone myself. Heh, might as well hope for new therapies for emfysemia and lung cancer as well.
M.
Perhaps Murdoch was just trying to simplify and focus her later work? Perhaps authorial intent trumps disease? As Wiley notes, you need an actual test, not retroactive guesswork.
I might be a might sensitive to this ‘diagnosis based on a text’ business; I’ve seen books which posited that Emily Bronte ‘s talent for mysticism was a result of visions brought on by bulimia. (Perhaps the skinny women woodcuttings on the cover of Blackwood’s Magazine prompted this?) I’m sure there are other glaring examples of medical/psychological studies carried out on a body of fiction.
“Can’t we read poems without big words?”
Just so. Sure, we could. We could also play football without having to run and kick fast or score goals, we could listen to music that consisted of four notes repeated over and over, we could all wear beige uniforms. We could stop trying to change and improve anything, we could just sit down in the mud and eat whatever passed by and die quickly. But why?
“Perhaps Murdoch was just trying to simplify and focus her later work?”
But she actually had Alzheimer’s – a physical disease, not a mere idea. And in fact she herself was aware of it and did not like it, as the article mentions. She didn’t like losing words, she didn’t like the dark place. So given that she did have Alzheimer’s, it seems quite reasonable to study her work to see if there seems to be cognitive loss. Yes, she could have made an aesthetic choice, but it appears that she didn’t. In other words there is some evidence on the matter.
I only read a brief, probably garbled newspaper account of the nun study. Did the researchers work backwards from already known outcomes and try to find clues in the nun’s early essays or did they start with the essays, note the stylistic differences, and then track their authors’ medical conditions through the years? Did they look only at the early essays or did they look at the nuns’ writings throughout their lives?
You know, for years quite a few people had wondered about Ronald Reagan. Even back when he was governor of California, he spoke simplistically and (more significantly) often didn’t know where he was (his handlers had to keep reminding him what town it was he was speaking in, which audience he was addressing, etc.). Later, as President, he would confuse movies he had seen with his own personal experiences, most notoriously when he told Israeli Prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he, Ronald Reagan, had personally liberated a concentration camp during World War II, when in fact he had spent the entire war stateside making propaganda movies. Yet his condition was not diagnosed until years after he left the Oval Office. Too bad he wasn’t a heavy smoker….
Having known several “absent-minded” middle-aged people who eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s many years later, I can readily believe that this disease begins its evil work long before it’s officially diagnosed.
I don’t know, about the nun study. I think I’ve read and heard (on radio) various fragmentary things about it – as opposed to thoroughly reading any one systematic study. In short, don’t pay much attention to what I say about it. Now I’ll have to look into it…
I’m pretty sure about the one nun who had no symptoms though. I was very struck by that, so remembered it (I think).
That’s interesting about Reagan. I had wondered about him, certainly, but only on the level of thinking he was dim. If he did have it as governor…my, that has some disturbing implications.
“Can’t we read poems without big words?”
Personally I prefer to read big words without having to read poetry.