Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I meant to post this when I first came across it last week and am reminded by coming across it again. It's still powerful and stimulating and definitely something I recommend.

In his book On Eloquence, Denis Donoghue discusses writing and speaking well. He writes not in a dogmatic or pedagogical way, but in pensive, considerate way, in a tone that invites ruminations of your own. The Wall Street Journal has posted the first chapter online.

The problem was not to make English copious but to make it honorable. English ought to be kept up, a project furthered by many poets from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Hopkins to Geoffrey Hill. It was taken up, too, by philologists and lexicographers, the Oxford English Dictionary their most telling achievement in historical recovery. The problem was to reconcile several concurrent demands: the style of commerce, the translatio studii of the classics at a time when it was yielding to the vernacular as the language of progress, the force of Enlightenment and its ideally univocal style.

[...]

It has occurred to me, during the past several years as a teacher of English, Irish, and American literature at New York University, that the qualities of writing I care about are increasingly hard to expound: aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, "how to do things with words." It has become harder to persuade students that these are real places of interest and value in a poem, a play, a novel, or an essay in the New Yorker.