To the Barricades!

What fresh hell is this? Gone are the circumflex hats over words such as maîtresse (mistress), hôte (host), coût (cost), vêtements (vestments) — the accents were inherited from the Latin “s,” which vanished from French but is still present in English. An “oignon,” meanwhile, will henceforth be spelled “ognon” because, we are told, the i is redundant: the new word will be simpler for schoolchildren to learn. Verb tense rules are to be “relaxed” along with many logical grammatical rules. “Adults,” the official decree loftily allows, “can still use the old spellings”; but the young will now be taught in manuals using this terrifying esperanto of unsurpassed ugliness. .  .  . This dumbing down of the French language is supposed, after many other similarly “inclusive” reforms, to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds obtain the degrees the Ministry has set targets for and find jobs. The result, of course, is the near illiteracy among undergraduates of all but the most prestigious French universities. You don’t need to be George Orwell to see that there is something sinister in any regime that sacrifices the memory and structure of the language to convenience and political fiat. When the Bolsheviks came to power, one of their first edicts was to do away with several letters of the old Russian alphabet, even though that, in effect, changed the pronunciation of many words: my own Russian grandmother, half a century after the fact, still bitterly rued the disappearance of the chtch every time she came across one in her pre-Revolutionary edition of Lermontov. .  .  . Tinkering with such a long-developing organic structure for the sake of facility is not just stupid: it is ugly, actively evil. I’ll vote for whichever presidential candidate next year will promise to reverse the .  .  . decree. In the meantime, they’ll pry the last circumflex from my cold, dead hands.