Shayan Afzal

I have been watching Downton Abbey again, and I find myself increasingly reluctant to return to the language of ordinary life.

It is not the aristocracy that I admire, nor the rigid conventions of a society long departed. It is something much simpler. The way people speak.

There is an elegance to their conversations, even when they are being cruel. Their disagreements possess a certain dignity. Their insults are sometimes more beautiful than our compliments. They understand that words can wound without being vulgar, that affection need not be sentimental, and that intelligence can reveal itself in the smallest turn of phrase.

And then I listen to the conversations of our own time.

The Poverty of Everyday Conversation

I am increasingly struck by how casually we have surrendered the beauty of language.

Profanity has become punctuation. Vulgarity is mistaken for authenticity. An ordinary conversation can pass from beginning to end without a single memorable sentence, without an interesting expression, without any apparent affection for the words themselves.

I do not object to profanity on principle. There are occasions when a coarse word possesses precisely the force that nothing else can convey. But when every emotion is expressed through the same handful of vulgarities, something is lost.

Anger, surprise, admiration, disappointment, affection. All reduced to the same exhausted vocabulary.

We have a magnificent language at our disposal, capable of extraordinary delicacy and precision, yet we so often choose to speak as though we have inherited only a few dozen words.

And perhaps what troubles me most is that we scarcely notice.

Elegance Is Not Pretension

To speak beautifully is not necessarily to speak formally. Nor does it require an expensive education, an aristocratic upbringing, or an elaborate vocabulary.

It requires attention.

There is beauty in a simple sentence when it has been thoughtfully composed. There is grace in restraint, in the ability to disagree without descending into ugliness, or to express affection without borrowing the tired expressions of everyone around us.

I sometimes wonder whether we have confused informality with freedom, and freedom with the abandonment of all standards.

We seem embarrassed by eloquence, as though a carefully chosen word were somehow less sincere than a careless one.

Yet I cannot understand why beauty should be welcome in music, literature, painting, and architecture, but regarded with suspicion in ordinary speech.

I Want More From Conversation

Perhaps this is what I find so appealing about Downton Abbey. Beneath the costumes, the grand houses, and the social arrangements of another age, there is the persistent suggestion that conversation itself can be an art.

I know, of course, that real people in Edwardian England did not all speak like characters in a beautifully written television drama. I am admiring the writing, not imagining a lost civilization of perfect conversationalists.

But fiction can remind us of possibilities we have neglected.

I do not expect everyone to speak like a poet. I merely wish we cared a little more about how we speak.

That we might find pleasure in a beautiful sentence. That we might allow wit to replace vulgarity, precision to replace exaggeration, and silence, occasionally, to replace words that contribute nothing.

I miss a kind of conversation that I am not entirely sure I have ever known.

And perhaps that is the strangest part of all: to feel nostalgic for something that may never have existed, yet to believe, nevertheless, that we could still create it.

Related reading: Downton Abbey and the Lost Art of Beautiful Language.