What kind of language forms the properly “modern” Arab subject? Writing in 1893 in the Cairo periodical _al-Azhar_, British engineer Sir William Willcocks called on Egyptians to shed a purportedly artificial, dead language—formal written Arabic (fusha)—and to write in the colloquial idiom (‘ammiyya). Lack of a “natural,” “living” literary language, he opined, stymies the originality that drives scientific progress, hence modernity. Juxtaposing engineering diagrams with his translations of Shakespeare into colloquial Egyptian, Willcocks brings his point to life, presaging the contemporary Egyptian psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan, whose _al-Kitaba wa-l-Sulta_ (2001) denounces the “hypnotic power” of fusha to submit the modern Arab subject to cognitive “despotism.” In 1912, Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Ruhi al-Khalidi likewise valorized ordinary language in a second edition of his 1904 study of French and Arabic literatures, _‘Ilm al-Adab ‘inda al-Ifrinj wa-l-‘Arab_. Al-Khalidi rejected the premodern Arabic conventions of rhymed prose, its “glitter” and “vain luxury of useless words.” Better “to be clear, precise, and accessible” to an Arabic-speaking world increasingly “organized on the European model,” to introduce French literature in a simplified language modeled on Europe’s and thus “propagate modern ideas” among his Arab readers. This paper will read Willcocks and al-Khalidi as pedagogues who invoke new ideologies of language to re-form the modern Arab subject in the image of the European. Both, I argue, tie the Arab’s potential to become “modern” to the use of vernacular language. For Willcocks, the vernacular means colloquial Egyptian. For al-Khalidi it refers, counterintuitively, to a standard written Arabic gutted from within, eviscerated of “useless” rhetorical flourishes, stripped to a plainspoken concreteness associated with the “real.” Speakers of Arabic once held the language to be “incomparable,” in part because, as the language of the Qur’an, it bespoke the inimitability of the word of God. Redefining eloquence as a feature that Arabic shares with other tongues, al-Khalidi premises that redefinition on the modern tendency, common to all languages, to make words mirror worlds. Literary Arabic is now “eloquent” insofar as it serves science and helps its users climb the imperial “ladder of civilization.” In a modern world in which empiricism and empire traveled together, language could no longer revel in itself; it had to point, clearly and precisely, to life. Taken together, I conclude, Willcocks and al-Khalidi reveal that the languages of literature and science that come to define the “soul” of modern Arab subjectivity are at once imperially and empirically worldly.