A Philosophical Happy Hour questioning whether informal language has erosive effects on community—and how formal articulation might aid our relations.
How do we acquire language? We perhaps first need to understand what language is—and we might presume falsely that we do. But we may think, nonetheless, about how young children learn to speak, to communicate. Watching infants and toddlers, we see them trying to make known their wants or needs; they develop signals, and gradually learn the linguistic signifiers, by which they might give their providers increasingly specific information. A crying infant might want a change of diaper, to eat, to burp, or simply to be held—or it may be suffering a pain or discomfort that it cannot communicate, and every parent knows the frustration and worry that might accompany this vague signaling.
Thus, not only a joy, but a relief, when a young child learns to articulate its wants. Because of this common development origin, that is, many assume that language’s fundamental purpose is that which underlies such growth: clarity of communication for pragmatic ends. Given this assumption, linguistic expression of law, oath, liturgy, ritual, and formal address—titles and promises, deferential identification and respectful reservation—seem secondary and somewhat arbitrary. Formal language appears an adornment artificially layered atop the fundamental, rough and raw effort to express practical thinking.
But what if we have this backwards? What if the essence of language is formal, and the informal is an imperfection, at times necessary, but never the ideal?
Consequences of Informality for Community
“What’s up?” “Sup.” “Bro.” “Dude.” “He vibin’.” “Unc is low-key crashing out.” Slang comes about in myriad ways; but always as a slide away from something more formal and precise. Not coincidentally, many slang terms come about in the context of either vice or distinct socially-isolated groups. Put otherwise: they arise from opposition to the mainstream. The drug revolutions of the 1960s, for instance, produced much slang; as do military environments, or ethnic ghettos. In this, such a manner of speaking might appear as means of social cohesion—and in the short term, for those within the group, it is.
But it also produces a kind of friction between that social group and those outside of it. Most especially, when that slang escapes the isolated group and disperses into others, it tends to cause greater friction or even fragmentation, for instance, in families: youth adopting slang and informal modes of speaking tend to do so as a part of rebellion against their elders.
Furthermore, we must consider what these patterns of speech and language use—be they spoken or by text—do to our own patterns of thinking. When objects or environments are signified only through the ambiguous and imprecise term “vibes”, when someone is said to be “based” or “cringe” (terms at which I myself do in fact cringe), are we flattening out the reality signified to meet easy, lazy terms? What other consequences do we suffer from these modes of informal speaking?
Formality through Language
Contrary to not only the tendencies of informality but so too the supposed origin of language, the eclectic thinker Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (or Rosenstock, for short) argues that language is essentially formal, and only derivatively informal. The tendencies towards informality, he claims, do not form true social cohesion, but rather erode the bonds of community. We must therefore preserve our formality if we are to remain well-ordered in social life.
To exemplify his claims, Rosenstock focuses on the importance of names. These are, he says, the “greatest forms of man’s speech”. Why is this? What is so important about a name? I am Brian; would I be different in any meaningful sense had I instead been named “Martin”? Or “Aaron”? I would doubtless have resented being named “Chauncey” or “Norbert”, and perhaps my life would have, in some sense, gone differently. But perhaps this misses the deeper point: namely, what is it we are doing in the act of naming itself? What is the relationship between a name (or let us add: a title) and that which it signifies? What makes a name formal or informal?
Rosenstock seems to suggest that the act of naming, that is, constitutes the foundations of our entire social lives, as properly human.
Propriety of Speech
Is this a call to stiff-necked, starched-collar rigidity? Or perhaps simply a good opportunity to reflect on where and when which forms of speech, of language, are appropriate?
We formally invite you to join our conversation this Wednesday (15 April 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET)—no taxes to be levied—as we take up the thoughts prompted by Rosenstock’s brief discussion of the “authentic moment of speech” [PDF] and anything else which may come to mind:
- What is lost when language is treated chiefly as information-transfer rather than as something that founds or restores human relations?
- Is “informality” genuinely a liberation, or does it in fact depend upon inherited formal structures that it cannot itself generate?
- Are oaths, promises, laws, liturgies, and especially the act of naming more fundamentally revealing of what language is, and language’s ultimate purpose, than is everyday conversation?
- Can a society remain healthy if it dissolves the formal modalities of language by which reverence, authority, obligation, respect, and memory are not only instantiated but also preserved?