A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Historical Materialism)

earthworms are a different matter: in French, they are neither obviously
harmful, nor even altogether repugnant. People do say le ver est dans le fruit
[the rot has already set in], but they also say nu comme un ver[as naked as
the day she was born], where the main characteristic of the earthworm, as
inscribed by commonsense – i.e. the language – is that it is defenceless, the
humblest of God’s creatures. For my earthworm to be dangerous, inspiring
fear or disgust, it must be solitary or plural, like the worms that devour
corpses. The result of all this is that the French reader does not immediately
grasp how Chirac est un verconstitutes an insult.
Everything changes if I translate (I should say retranslate) the headline into
English:

CHIRAC IS A WORM

In fact, the earthworm as seen by the English – i.e. through the prism of the
English language – is an animal that is both contemptible and repellent. It is
not humble; it is humiliated. The employee who has just been publicly
humiliated by her superior might exclaim: ‘He made me feel like a worm’
(the closest French translation of this sentence would doubtless be: il m’a traité
comme un chien[he treated me like a dog]). The kid who sulks might be
mocked by her little friends with the help of the following nursery rhyme:

Nobody loves me.

Everybody hates me.

Going into the garden,

To eat worms.

And we should not forget that an archaic meaning of ‘worm’, still present in
the titles of fairy stories, is ‘dragon’.
The import of the insult is now clear. Chirac is both contemptible and
repellent; and his opposition to the imperialist coalition roundly denounced.
The Sun’s operation is not notable for its subtlety, but the insult is at least
intelligible.
The problem is that my opening utterance is not in English, but in French.
Or rather: even though it has been formulated with French words, it is still in English.
Since provocation is the order of the day, I want to yell: ‘And what’s more,
these idiots don’t even know French!’. But this is precisely where the problem
becomes interesting. Why on earth didn’t the Sunget hold of a competent
translator? In truth, however, the translator is not the problem: the article

2 • Chapter One