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A kindly friend of mine drew my attention to an article in the Guardian newspaper about a British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who are currently being held hostage, or as bargaining chips for future use, in Iran. They were voyaging round the world, intending to stay but a few days in Iran, when they were arrested there as supposed spies. They have already spent eight months in a dungeon, where living conditions, given the known nature of that religious regime, may easily be imagined.

But it was not to this larger story, in which naivety met lack of scruple (“O cruel, irreligious piety!” as Shakespeare put it in another context), that my kind friend wanted to draw my attention, but rather to the article’s resort to informal language. I quote from what the son told the newspaper:

His stepdad, Craig, has been moved to Tehran’s infamous central prison, also known as Fashafouyeh, which is about 30km (18 miles) south of the capital and has similar notoriety.

Then:

But the 31-year-old sales manager, who used to speak to his mum nearly daily, fears overcrowding at their new prisons and that they may be abused, as well as a fallout from their enforced separation.

Why stepdad and mum rather than stepfather and mother? The latter are not, after all, very difficult words to comprehend. Given the somewhat somber nature of the story, one might have thought a little verbal formality would not be out of place. It is not a heartwarming family story to be told round a warm fire with children present on a cold winter’s evening. Would not a tiny concession to formality of language lend to the unfortunates a little dignity?

“Dignity is lost when people lose the appreciation that language that is right in one circumstance is not right in another.”

This informality, however, is now almost everywhere. Among other things, it is infantilizing: It is to use the language of the nursery in the drawing room (or their modern equivalents), on the supposition that the reader or interlocutor has not quite reached the age of adulthood.

It is frequently condescending, if not outright insulting. For example, I am, from time to time, invited to send a sample of my feces through the post to a laboratory where they will be tested for the presence of blood. This is one of the few medical screening procedures with which I wholeheartedly agree: It is cheap, simple, and relatively free of undesirable and unwanted effects. I am happy to comply for my own good.

Except for one thing: I am asked to send a sample not of my feces, or even of my shit, but of my poo. Given the centralized nature of the British National Health Service, this resort to infantile language (my urine is similarly referred to as my pee, not even as my piss) is decreed from on high. It is not by spontaneous decision of myriad actors, but probably of a committee of civil servants who think they are working, even working hard, when they decide such things. One should also bear in mind that the screening test is applied in this fashion only to those of a certain age, well past the nursery stage. One does not do a poo test on those who still poo and giggle at the word.

Informality and infantilization are to be seen in our cemeteries: Our very tombstones are made “friendly” by the use of diminutives and nicknames, as if death itself could be made a friend of if addressed with sufficient familiarity. Fathers (where they have acknowledged themselves, or have been acknowledged, as such, a breed becoming scarcer by the year, like cuckoos in England) have now disappeared in favor of more informal appellations; and granddads abound. As for the messages on tombstones, they treat death as if it were a minor interruption to continued earthly existence: “Goodnight, Dad, God bless.” See you tomorrow: This, I hasten to add, has no connection to any real religious belief.

Inscribed on tombstones are now such symbols as fishing rods and football shirts, for in heaven, Manchester United—or whatever team the deceased once favored—will always win in a season that presumably lasts an eternity. It is not unusual to see teddy bears engraved on tombstones now, giving a new meaning to the term transitional object, which used to be a comforting soft toy to ease a young child’s passage from complete dependence and security to relative independence with all its possible dangers. Clinging to a soft toy comforted the child; whether the engraved teddy bear is supposed to comfort the departed or those left behind, or both, I am unsure. If the former, it eases his transition across the Styx.

There is a tendency nowadays also to festoon the grave of a child—always, of course, the site of tragedy—with plastic windmills, birthday cakes, toys, and so forth, as if the depth of grief were necessarily proportional to the public expression of it. Needless to say, this sets up a kind of arms race of grief: He grieves a child most who most festoons a tomb. The result is a complete loss of dignity in favor of show.

Dignity is lost when people lose the appreciation that language that is right in one circumstance is not right in another. We have come to view any distinctions in dress, conduct, or language as inherently snobbish or even antidemocratic. I think it is for this reason that academics nowadays sprinkle their otherwise unreadable texts with demotic expressions, as if this will save them from accusations of elitism in some feared future show trial. If you can pepper your work with a little vulgarity, you thereby show that you are a man of the people and not some ethereal egghead (if eggheads can be ethereal).

It is not that the demotic should be eschewed altogether. In reported speech, it is often essential to employ it in order to convey not only what was actually said, but the way in which it was said. The great writers knew the use and abuse of the demotic and delighted in it. Dickens, for example, was a master of the demotic, and one’s heart leaps with joy when one reads some of his characters’ utterances. But this joy is available only to those who do not habitually use the demotic, or employ it to show that, at heart, they are good ol’ boys and not the elitist you would otherwise appear to be.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).