Letters from Our Readers

Mob Mentality

As a cop who was at the Capitol on January 6th, I read Adam Gopnik’s article on mobs with interest (A Critic at Large, November 25th). Gopnik invokes many fascinating precedents to help illustrate the distinction between crowds and mobs. I wish, though, that he had focussed more on contemporary social-scientific insights, especially concerning the more destructive elements of crowds; as is, his historical focus evokes a sense that the social and psychological factors driving our current conflicts are nothing new. While comparisons with lynch mobs and medieval rustici may be constructive, they should not overshadow the massive, multidisciplinary contemporary study of social action and crowd psychology, including recent insights into digital media and influence operations. This urgent and important scholarship is precisely the kind of “hard work” that Gopnik refers to at the end of the article.

James VanderMeer
Alexandria, Va.

Tongue Twisters

Samanth Subramanian skillfully narrates the rise and demise of the languages and dialects that define India’s “polyglot identity” (“Hold Your Tongue,” November 25th). I was born, raised, and educated in the triangle between Aligarh, Agra, and Lucknow, until I left India for good, in 1975. I grew up speaking Braj Bhasha, a language common to the area in and around Mathura, my grandfather’s home, then learned Hindi, English, and Urdu during the long, arduous cultural journey that followed. I wish that Subramanian’s detailed piece had spoken further about the post-independence exclusion of Urdu, which is the language of many Indian Muslims and the national language of Pakistan. The Islamization of Urdu is just one of the many sad consequences of India’s Partition, in 1947, and an example of how languages don’t die; they are suffocated.

Brij Mohan
Santa Barbara, Calif.

Subramanian contends that English is so widely used “not thanks to any inherent syntactic or grammatical felicity but because it is an artifact of the British Empire and the American twentieth century.” I’d like to draw his attention to a contradictory view from Jorge Luis Borges. In a 1977 television interview with William F. Buckley, Jr., Borges—a polyglot who didn’t spend appreciable time in an Anglophone country until his sixties—praised English for its intrinsic linguistic versatility, saying, “English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. . . . English is the most physical of all languages. You can, for example, say ‘He loomed over.’ You can’t very well say that in Spanish. . . . In English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions.” Another polyglot, James Joyce, who left his native Ireland in 1912—never to return—and who in the decades to follow likely spoke Italian and French more than English, nevertheless chose the English language as the template for his polymorphous bouillabaisse of some sixty languages, “Finnegans Wake.”

Mark N. Grant
New York City

Subramanian describes the use of “echo words” as a peculiarity of South Asian languages. The example he gives is “puli-gili, in Tamil, where puli refers to tigers and gili is a rhyming nonsense word meaning ‘and the like.’ ” Speakers of Yiddish and English might be familiar with a similar practice, known as “shm-reduplication” (tigers-shmigers).

Lorin Stein
New York City

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