the Good, the Bad, and the Obama

    You know by now that I've been focusing on words that have a Saxon equivalent rather than the common French words that we adore and use every day. But I wanted to ask the question: what is the political end of this focus on choosing certain words in speech or in writing? For the sake of explaining my title, I'd like to get to the grounds for why those, who prefer the barbarous Germanic words over high class Francophone phrases, have an authoritarian bent to them, even in a civil setting. So our beloved president's name was used a gimmick to move us to think about the political nature of Anglish.

    I have chosen Milton as my guide through this discussion because if there is one thing that describes the best poet after Shakespeare, then that would be power through what he wrote. If you compare Paradise Lost with Shakespeare's Lucrece, for example, you would conclude that the verse of PL > L because of their style and diction. PL is high and lofty, while L has a steady flow that does not rise and fall as much as PL does. So if you compare Miltonic epic with Shakespeare's best long poem, you have to conclude that Milton does indeed surpass Shakespeare at least with this comparison.

    If you look at Milton's political tracts, he dismisses the barbarous past and looks to places like France and Italy as model societies. And they have derived their ways from the Classical past. So the proper way to govern would not be to look at Beowulf, but to behold the Greek polis that had a much better way to conduct state affairs, than that of how the Germanic tribes worked out theirs.

    And I think that the nature of this artificial language is such that it will not be used to craft state policy, but rather it gives its users a power to craft what their thoughts desire. So since this tung has the barbarous Old English language in sight along with the other Germanic languages of the same sort, there is a longing to see how Germanic societies governed themselves during the Migration Periods after the fall of Rome. When civilization as we knew it collapsed, the Germanic invaders borrowed Classical customs but essentially retained their own Folkways including the way that they practiced governance.

    To conclude, Milton would cast me aside when it comes to preferring other customs of government than that of the Classical past, but he would look with favor on how language might be shaped for our own ends. And if those ends lead to a greater care to preserve our current state of affairs within our own burgs, moots, and rikes, then he may nod with a sigh of relief from the circuitous route that I took to get there.