The Princess and the Dictionary
Before an elitist princess rose to make her claim,
She polished each credential before giving her name.
She came from the finest preparatory school,
Where Latin was breakfast and Greek the rule.
In Yale, on lawns kept impossibly green,
At private clubs commoners never had seen.
She learned moral courage astride a polo steed,
For nothing says wisdom like pedigree and breed.
You haven’t tasted pasta, not truly, not quite,
Unless the Pope’s mother rolled it by candlelight.
In Napoli, naturally, in a sanctified pan,
Then served on the Grand Tour by a liveried man.
Well read, well groomed, surrounded by books,
With honors, good posture, and cultivated looks.
“An elite education,” she said, “shaped my mind,
So civilization itself should be judged by my kind.”
Yet opening Schiller, she found the prose old,
It’s difficult phrases impenetrably cold.
She stumbled through Carlyle, page after page,
And diagnosed language decline in the modern age.
The German Romantic had darkened her tongue,
So surely our civilization was dying young.
Each word she had never encountered or known
Became proof that our minds had turned into stone.
“Our vocabulary,” she warned, “has dwindled to few,
And fewer available words mean fewer things we can do.”
Then Orwell was summoned, his Newspeak was brought,
To prove that plain English had murdered all thought.
Since even a princess with honors degree
Couldn’t read Ruskin with effortless glee,
The West had grown stupid, its language would fall,
Because her private schooling had not taught it all.
But the Bible’s vocabulary is strikingly small,
Yet Genesis and Isaiah still tower over all.
A handful of words can carry exile and flame,
Blood, covenant, judgment, redemption, and God’s name.
Great thought doesn’t need language swollen and vain,
Or pompous sentences that drag like a ceremonial train.
Homer made epic poetry from words people heard,
Not by awarding a pedigree or PhD to every word.
And why should Schiller define the Englishman’s air,
Or German Romantic vocabulary prove wisdom is there?
A translation feels foreign because it is of its kind,
Not because common people have forfeited the mind.
So place the grand resume back on the shelf,
Difficulty sometimes reveals the reader, not the world itself.
You don’t save civilization by guarding a verbal throne,
When Her Highness needs a glossary to read one page alone.
Ecclesiastes already answered the princess with ease:
“Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” At last,
Nothing grows wiser merely by belonging to the past.
References and source
The War on Beauty by Julia James Davis
