Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationspricious. This explains the tutti unisono which, notwithstanding thegeneral debility and sickness, greets every newly invented solecism:such impudent corruptions are an act of revenge on the language forthe unbelievable boredom it inflicts upon its day-labourers. I recallhaving read an appeal 'to the German people' by Berthold Auerbachin which every locution was an un-German distortion and falsificationof the language, and which as·a whole resembled a soullessmosaic of words stuck together with an international syntax; not tospeak of the shamelessly slovenly German with which Eduard Devrientcelebrated the memory of Mendelssohn. Thus the solecism - this isthe remarkable thing- is felt by our philistines, not as objectionable,but as a stimulating refreshment in the arid and treeless desert ofeveryday German. But the truly productive he does find objectionable.The most modern model author is not merely forgiven his distorted,extravagant or threadbare syntax and his ludicrous neologisms, theyare reckoned a merit in him which gives his work piquancy: but woeto the stylist with character who avoids these everyday locutions asseriously and persistently as he does 'tie monsters of present-dayscribbling hatched out last night', as Schopenhauer puts it. Whenplatitudes, commonplaces and hackneyed and feeble language arethe rule, and badness and corruption received as stimulating exceptions,then the forceful, uncommon and beautiful falls into disfavour:so that in Germany there is constantly being repeated thestory of the traveller who came to the land of the hunchbacks andwas shamefully insulted by its inhabitants because of his supposedlydefective physique, until at last a priest had mercy on him and said tothe people: 'Rather pity this poor stranger and sacrifice to the gods ingratitude for having adorned you with this stately hump.'If anyone should compose a grammar of current everyday Germanand trace the rules which, as an unwritten and unspoken yet compellingimperative, govern everyone's writing-desk, he wouldencounter some strange notions of style and rhetoric, taken perhapsfrom recollections of school and enforced Latin exercises, perhapsfrom reading French writers at whose astonishing crudeness anyproperly educated Frenchman would have a right to scoff. It seemsthat, though reputed thorough, the Germans have never yet reflectedon these strange notions, under the rule of which more or less everyGerman lives and writes.Then we have the demand that from time to time a simile or ametaphor should appear, and that the metaphor must be a new one:but to the poor writer's brain new and modern are the same thing,50