Word of the day: purism

History

The word "purism" can be used to refer to norms of behavior, language and art. In each case, the shades of the meaning will be different. With the first, it seems, everything is clear: this is the pursuit of truth and strict observance of the purity of morals. And let's dwell on the rest in more detail.

Purism in art

In the 1910s –1920s, a painting trend emerged in France, which sought to convey the original forms of objects, cleansed of unnecessary details. It got the name "purism". In contrast to the avant-garde trends in painting of the 1910s period (for example, cubism), purism advocated clear geometric forms, often simplified and deliberately laconic, slightly muted pure colors.

The founder of this trend in painting was the artist Amede Ozanfan. In 1918, he wrote an article "After Cubism", where he canceled the emotional and sensory elements characteristic of this direction, applying an "industrial", "machine" approach to painting.

From painting, purism flows into architecture with the light presentation of Le Corbusier. In the 1920s, the Frenchman built the most striking examples of this style: several villas in Paris and its suburbs. By the way, Ozanfan lived in one of them. These buildings glorified the name of Le Corbusier all over the world, firmly connecting it with purism in architecture.

Linguistic purism

Purism is the rejection of any changes, the struggle to cleanse the language of foreign words and neologisms, as well as protest against the use of vernacular and jargon in literary speech.

The most striking example of the deterioration of the language from the point of view of supporters of purism is the reform of the Russian spelling of 1918, which abolished the hard sign and "yat".

Repressed "hard signs" and "yat" were doubles of those killed in the basements.

Andrey Voznesensky poet

One of the outstanding statesmen of tsarist Russia, Alexander Shishkov, became famous for his excessive purism. He insisted on the use of primordial Russian words, most often less successful, instead of borrowed ones: "mock-shoes" instead of "galoshes", "cure" instead of "medicine" and "body image" instead of "physics".

Today, linguistic purism is considered an occupational disease for librarians, school teachers, government officials and all those who, by the nature of their work, are hard to accept change.

Usage examples

"Much has been written about Icelandic purism, the desire to keep foreign words out of the language." Nora Gal, "The Word Alive and Dead".
"Behind the belligerent stance of aesthetic purism among the modernists lies a strikingly wide acceptance of the world." Susan Sontag, On Photography.
“First of all, mistakes are made not at all because it gives pleasure; errors, at least those that arise constantly and which are unable to uproot purism, are most often generated by deep tendencies in speech in general or in any language in particular. " Charles Bally, Language and Life.