Inkhorn; Don't Truckle

I have been very happy with the last two words of the day from the Merriam Webster website - ‘truckle’ and ‘inkhorn’.

‘Truckle’ is just a fantastic and simple good ol’ anglo-sounding word, and, for some reason, is just now used. It means ‘to act in a subservient manner.’ Imagine the succinct insults: Stop truckling to me. Stop be such a truckler. Trucklehead.

The other word is great, and for far more interesting reasons than concise insults. ‘Inkhorn’ and its etymology sum up, in a single word, highly visual and based on material object, a whole tension within the English language I often think about and feel - the tension between latinate words and anglo words. The ‘inkhorn’ itself refers to the horn of ink scribes would use in the 16th century - and as was the vogue, they would introduce into English text many latin and greek words, rather than use the vulgar English ones. The term ‘inkhorn’ became an insult to this practice.

For as long as I can remember, I've had very emotionally colored relationships to words in English - warm, direct feelings for this of Anglo descent, cold, detached, clinical feelings for those of latinate descent. The quickest way to give an example of this is with quite vulgar words, dealing with sex, genitalia, excrement. A doctor says penis, a child says pee-pee, an adult (barring mixed company) says dick. See also: Vagina, hop-hoo, Cunt. Feces, poo-poo, shit. To have sexual intercourse, to fuck.

All of these examples are colored by a specific historical-social structure: medicine. Professionals in medicine, as well as in law, preferred latin terms. That was the professional language, which also was the language of the upper-class. I feel this presence is still somewhat felt - latinate words, when used in place of just as clear anglo ones - feel bother clinical and pretentious.

When recently reading a Martin Luther King biography, I was surprised a bit when reading on the college student MLK’s rhetoric training - and MLK’s love of finding as many latinate and high-sounding words he could to replace any pedestrian ones in his speech. Surprised because his later speech doesn’t have that kind of abstruseness, and is heavy on biblical and folk idiom, which avoids inkhorn words. I wonder, though, about race and class… and adolescence. When I was a student in high school and college, I also felt like these words - precise, esoteric - contained some innate power, like they truly showed or inculcated knowledge. That line of thought has completely given way for me to the more basic (and I suppose ‘democratic’) American style.

As for class and hierarchy though - I do think that the desire to showcase one’s education and verbal superiority must arise in certain social configurations. MLK was a young black man in 20th America, and he was planning to be a public speaker. He must have felt the compulsion to excel in the craft of language in order to impress and cow whites, in order to not feel less-than.

I think of some of my soviet students, too - some of them have what seems like a holy reverence for inkhorn words, for latinate errata. This seems to me to be connected with soviet people’s reverence for experts, for authority - a gross generalization, but one I’ve encountered (a soviet biologists who would not discuss homosexuality in a class debate, for instance, because homosexuality ‘is not natural, and how can I talk about it with all of you who do not know the science?’). I suppose it’s safe to say that when there is a class divide or desire to assert power and cow others, language is always a field of that battle and subsequent discrimination.