Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger Ascham

Style, for Ascham, is a kind of double citizenship: you live among ordinary speakers, but you keep your mind in the republic of the learned. The line flatters “common people” without romanticizing them. Their speech is prized not because it’s purer, but because it’s usable: plain idiom, familiar rhythm, words that travel. At the same time, Ascham insists that accessibility is not the same as shallowness. The thinking should be “as wise men do” - disciplined, structured, answerable to reason and tradition. The elegance is in the split: democratic surface, aristocratic engine.

The intent lands squarely in the Tudor humanist project. Ascham wrote at a moment when English prose was being actively argued into legitimacy against Latin’s prestige. Humanists wanted learning to shape public life, but they also feared learning could become a sealed social club, performed in imported vocabulary and self-regard. This aphorism is a corrective aimed at both camps: it scolds scholars who hide behind ornate diction, and it warns popular writers that charm without rigor is just noise.

Subtextually, “style” isn’t decoration; it’s ethics. If you can think clearly yet speak plainly, you respect your reader enough to be understood and respect your subject enough not to dumb it down. That’s why the sentence still feels modern: it sketches the ideal of public-facing intelligence - not anti-elitist, not elitist, but accountable.