"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary"
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Fitzgerald is smuggling a practical claim inside what looks like a genteel observation about style: if you want to sound fully persuasive in English, you will end up leaning on Latin-derived words. The key word is "inevitably". He is not merely praising a fancier register; he is pointing to the architecture of English itself, split between its Germanic bones and its Latinate wardrobe. Anglo-Saxon tends to be short, blunt, bodily, immediate: break, blood, heart, right. Latin (often via French) supplies the abstract machinery of public life: justice, liberty, consequence, authority. When you move from lived experience to argument - from "it feels wrong" to "it violates the principle" - the Latinate lexicon is sitting there, preloaded.
The subtext is also cultural, even classed. "Eloquence" has long been policed by institutions that prefer the vocabulary of law courts, universities, sermons, and bureaucracies - domains historically administered in Latin or shaped by Latin rhetoric. Fitzgerald, a poet and translator steeped in classical tradition, is quietly defending that inheritance against modern temptations to equate plainness with honesty. His line nudges the reader to admit an uncomfortable truth: the language of power in English often sounds Latinate because power trained it that way.
Context matters: mid-20th-century debates about "plain English" and democratic speech were loud, and Fitzgerald's classical sensibility resists the idea that stripping away Latin makes prose purer. He implies the opposite: English becomes most forceful when it can pivot between punch and polish, between the gut and the mind.
The subtext is also cultural, even classed. "Eloquence" has long been policed by institutions that prefer the vocabulary of law courts, universities, sermons, and bureaucracies - domains historically administered in Latin or shaped by Latin rhetoric. Fitzgerald, a poet and translator steeped in classical tradition, is quietly defending that inheritance against modern temptations to equate plainness with honesty. His line nudges the reader to admit an uncomfortable truth: the language of power in English often sounds Latinate because power trained it that way.
Context matters: mid-20th-century debates about "plain English" and democratic speech were loud, and Fitzgerald's classical sensibility resists the idea that stripping away Latin makes prose purer. He implies the opposite: English becomes most forceful when it can pivot between punch and polish, between the gut and the mind.
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| Topic | Writing |
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