Beautiful language, wherefore art thou?

Lately, I’ve found myself in mourning over the escalating loss of something that clearly distinguished the South from the rest of America’s regions for over 200 years.

“Where,” I have mumbled repeatedly to myself, “has the beauty of our language gone?”

It comes and goes – mostly it goes – like the fog that settles over the Smoky Mountains on an early morn then burns away with the sun’s hot glare. Once, though, our pretty words lingered on our lips and fell sweetly on our ears.

I so enjoy my conversations with my beloved Southern mentor, Miss Virgie, who hails from Pascagoula, Miss., and still salts her stories with words like “mirth”, “shan’t”, “hearken”, “prance”, “here forth”, and “tis.”

Her language, once the norm, not the exception, in the South, is lyrical, poetic and just downright interesting.

After I read a quote in Time magazine by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, from the horrendous after-throes of vicious Katrina, I was more perplexed by this, even deeply saddened.

He pointed out that so much attention was being focused on New Orleans in the horrendous aftermath, “but it was Mississippi that received the most grievous blow.”

Grievous blow. What a unique way to say what others would have said by using more generic adjectives like “terrible,” “biggest,” “worse,” “horrible,” or “massive.”

Having been enthralled by Gov. Barbour during a speech he gave at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, I consider him to be a great orator and vigilant protector of the Southern language.

For months, I pondered that our beautiful language, though not yet lying in repose six feet under, is definitely struggling for the breath to survive. It occurred to me that perhaps it was that we are so many generations removed from our Scotch-Irish and English ancestors that we had simply, over time, lost the memory of their lilting, poetic words that had traveled with them across an ocean’s span.

Then, suddenly without expectation, I was able to pinpoint what is happening.

I was reading a biography of the legendary Atlanta Constitution’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Ralph McGill. There, buried in its pages, I found the answer.

McGill, raised a Calvinist Puritan, retreated from religious beliefs for many years, but eventually the roots of his Tennessee raising returned him to the Bible’s ancient truths. Even during the time that he was agnostic, according to the book, he faithfully wrote and spoke in the language of the Bible Belt’s people.

The riddle was solved.

What has happened here is that the Bible Belt is no longer reading the King James version of the Bible. It, with its difficulty in language, has been traded in by the majority of Southerners for simpler translations that tell stories straight out by using today’s contemporary language. These versions are bland, uninteresting but completely understandable.

By moving en mass to plainer versions of the Bible, we have sacrificed our gorgeous language, laying it, without thought or concern, at the altar of simplicity.

Though I have always preferred the King James Bible, I must admit that I, too, own less complicated Biblical tomes, all of which have been gifts. I, too, own up to the fact that I have read them. But going forth, I shall embrace exclusively the poetic language of King James and pray – in my simple language – that I absorb the mystical beauty of its words.

I started this morning. And now I have a new mantra, courtesy of the book of James.

Be ye doers of the word, and not just hearers only.

So it is my hope that I will do unto my words as my blessed ancestors did unto theirs and as Miss Virgie still does unto hers.

Tis important, I believe.