In his Horizon essay Orwell spoke of language as an instrument for expressing thought rather than preventing it. We are familiar with the idea that language enables us to express our thoughts, but we are attuned to the ways in which this goes awry; we are attuned also to the suggestion by the French diplomat Talleyrand that language really exists to hide our thoughts – which Søren Kierkegaard amended, claiming that many people use language to conceal the fact of their not having any thoughts. Kierkegaard’s bon mot would have appealed to Orwell, whose focus was the way the corruption of language engendered distortions of thought. The engine of this corruption was, he argued, the political imperative to defend the indefensible: in support of grotesque or fatuous policies, the authors of political speeches and statements need to deploy a massive arsenal of euphemisms, clichés, inflations and smoke-bombs. If we express ourselves in a pretentious and obscure fashion, falling back on prefabricated phrases and decayed metaphors, we are doomed to succumb to foolish thoughts. Orwell praised the careful, the concrete, the simple. He was reviving the principles of the Royal Society, which from its foundation pressed for straightforward expression.
Orwell probably developed his views while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the 1920s. Colonial English was steeped in overcomplicated orthodoxy. As a remedy Orwell proposed certain rules. Although superficially they are rules of language, really they are recommendations about how we should think. To simplify one’s English is to free oneself from ‘the worst follies of orthodoxy’. This is his code:
(i)
Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii)
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii)
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv)
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v)
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi)
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.4
These are not far removed from the practical rules laid down by the Fowlers. They might well have pleased William Barnes and Percy Grainger, too. But Orwell’s motives are different from theirs. His main purpose is to try and ensure that there remains a language fit for reasoned political debate. The objection to the passive voice was one Orwell may well have learnt from Arthur Quiller-Couch, who demonized it in The Art of Writing (1916), a book he could have come across at school. It’s also, incidentally, a principle that Orwell often violates – not least in this very essay, where roughly a fifth of his sentences use passive constructions. In fact, there is such a construction in his opening sentence: ‘Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.’ In accordance with his third principle, the words ‘by conscious action’ should be cut, too.
Orwell created a model that has proved immensely popular, and the six precepts have been repeated time and again. His declared inheritors include the Plain English Campaign, an organization which since 1979 has been campaigning against poor expression. The Campaign offers editorial services and runs training courses. Since 1990 it has awarded something called a ‘Crystal Mark’ to documents and websites that its staff consider admirably clear. In case you are wondering what the criteria for achieving a Crystal Mark may be, they include ‘an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words’, ‘the use of lists’, and ‘words like “we” and “you” instead of “the Society” or “the applicant”’.5 Obviously, too, you need to pay a fee to the Campaign. Pretty quickly it becomes clear that the Plain English Campaign is a business, not a force for universal enlightenment, and that it is bent on promoting its activities. One of the most visible of these is its Golden Bull Award, which publicly ridicules examples of gobbledygook. In many cases these are statements by building societies and local councils. A lot of them are undeniably daft. But the Campaign has mistakenly labelled some serviceable words as clichés (I feel bound to reiterate that a single word is never a cliché), and has derided some perfectly sensible utterances. For instance, it mocked Donald Rumsfeld’s statement that ‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ Whatever you might have thought of Rumsfeld otherwise, this was an astute observation, and it could hardly have been better expressed. Gobbledygook it was not.
It is a mistake to think that plainness is always adequate. A 1986 publication entitled The Plain English Story, which is a manifesto for the Campaign, concludes with a quotation from Henry David Thoreau: ‘Our life is frittered away by detail … Simplify, simplify.’6 The quotation is from Walden, Thoreau’s account of his two-year retreat from society in the 1840s, and the simplicity he had in mind was of life, not language. The words immediately following ‘Simplify, simplify’ are ‘Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one’. It sounds austere, but the key words are ‘if it be necessary’. Thoreau wants people to revise their idea of what they need. Shortly afterwards he says he could do without the post office, claiming that in all his life he has not received more than one or two letters that were worth the postage. ‘And I am sure,’ he continues, ‘that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.’ I am sure that Thoreau, a great writer but one whose convoluted metaphysics meant that his gestures of simplicity were deeply self-conscious, is not a perfect model for modern living. Details, or what William Blake called ‘minute particulars’, are often the threads of amazing truths, and in a world more complicated than that experienced by Thoreau in his woodland cabin on the shore of Walden Pond we frequently need something more subtle and onion-layered than a detail-free plain English.
Newspapers and broadcasters are happy to swallow statements by the Plain English Campaign and its kindred organizations. A BBC report in March 2009 revealed that the Local Government Association had compiled a list of the two hundred worst pieces of jargon used in the public sector. A spokeswoman for the Plain English Campaign was reported as saying, ‘This gobbledygook has to go. Jargon has its place within professions but it should not be allowed to leak out to the public, as it causes confusion. It could even be used to cover up something more sinister. Churchill and Einstein were both plain speakers and they did OK. Councils should follow their lead.’7 I am certainly not going to defend items on the LGA’s list such as ‘predictors of beaconicity’. But if it is true that ‘jargon has its place within professions’, it seems unlikely that it will not ‘leak out’ – particularly when the ‘professions’ in question are local and central government or any others where people are allowed to go home at the end of the working day. The notion that Churchill and Einstein were plain speakers is open to question, and their qualities as speakers are not relevant, since the people at fault are being judged mainly on their written documents. Besides, it is hard to believe that the affairs of local government in the twenty-first century are best conducted in a language modelled on that of an aristocratic politician who has been dead for nearly fifty years or a German-born theoretical physicist whose most famous statement is an equation.
Plain English is what we demand of others, while merrily carrying on with our own not-so-plainness. In any case, the use of language that isn’t plain can be a form of tact. Some people feel that to name certain things – such as death, for instance, or sickness – is to invite them. The simplest way of saying something may be too emphatic. There are departments of life better served by Latin words than by Anglo-Saxon ones. And sometimes the furriness of words, rather than their declarative simplicity, is what makes them eff
ective.
Moreover, there are some domains where plainness of expression causes a loss of vital detail. Scientific research would be an obvious example. You cannot discuss quantum mechanics or the different regions of the brain without using complex language. When critics complain of the obscurity of this language they are often revealing an antagonism to the things of which the language is used – a fear of its significance or of its complicated nature. There is a huge difference between the properly technical and the needlessly circumlocutory: one conveys the complexity of life, the other is fatigued by it.
What frustrates people who are attentive to the subtleties of communication is the way political language has absorbed the terminology of business and management, and has channelled it onward into education, healthcare and the military. One suspects that even in his more darkly satirical moments George Orwell could not have dreamt up such locutions as ‘welfare pathway’, ‘knowledge transfer’, ‘deliberative dialogue’, ‘negative territory’, ‘core competency’, ‘non-hostile weapons discharge’, ‘bespoke methodology’, ‘performance management solutions’, ‘patient outcomes’, ‘wrongsiding the demographic’ or a ‘think-feel-do’ model of practice. Nor could he have imagined Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, with his gift for expressions such as ‘the vortex of cruciality’ and for statements such as ‘We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation’ and ‘We do have a tendency to indulge in episodic preoccupation, if you will, with one another on the strategic horizon’. A more mundane example of this kind of thing, nevertheless salient, occurs in the diaries of the Labour politician Chris Mullin. Writing about his government’s obsession with setting targets, Mullin mentions a colleague telling him that there ‘had even been talk of setting targets for the number of people persuaded to walk to work. A later draft of our walking document had substituted “benchmarks” for “targets”. Later still, “benchmarks” had given way to “reference indicators”. Orwellian.’8
I have picked the terms above at random; we are daily faced with others far more poisonous. Indeed, the most toxic are the ones we no longer find wholly objectionable. The language of consumption, of ‘consumer choice’ and branded goods, makes us tourists in our everyday lives. When I visit the local library, travel on a train, receive medical care, deal with the UK Borders Agency or communicate with my local council, I am a ‘customer’ – the word in each case travestying the reality of the relationship.
What may not immediately be apparent but is surely significant is the failure of this type of language to invoke the tangible realities of the world around us. If we think about Chris Mullin’s example, we immediately understand what is meant in this context by a target, and we fix upon its concrete associations. The question of whether it is sensible to set a target for the number of people walking to work is not important to me at present. Rather, I am concerned with the effects of using the word target. Personally, when I hear this word I think of archery, and the image, if I dwell on it, is visually satisfying. Talking in terms of a target implies the need for skill – good aim, a steady hand, and so on. The word benchmark is more obscure. It denotes a mark made by a surveyor with a chisel, which can later be referred back to, but, when I hear this word, I don’t think of surveyors and their chisels. I know what the word means and am unlikely to puzzle over why it means what it does. Yet if I do think about this, I am likely to be confused by the ‘bench’ part of it. The ‘mark’ is fine, but the concrete associations of the whole word are unclear. Now let’s move on to ‘reference indicators’. There is scarcely a hint of anything reassuringly physical here. The term, when I try to anchor it in my physical experience, seems to swim away from me. If I grapple it into focus, I end up with a hazy image of attempting to locate something in a library.
Physical imagery is accessible and potent. This is not to condemn abstract terminology: we need a vocabulary of the abstract. In any case, all words are abstractions. The problem is not the use of abstract words per se. But the abstract terms we choose to employ are ineffectual and annoying when they evoke concrete associations that simply do not fit the experience under discussion. To put it differently, we like our abstract thoughts to be grounded in bodily experience. Not all thought is grounded there – and there are strata of thought that are deeper than metaphor – but metaphor captures reality, rather than merely projecting images on to it. A metaphor is not a comparison; it asserts the essence of a thing. To underscore a point from my previous chapter: well used, it is an aid to reason. As Steven Pinker observes, ‘A lawyer is a shark says much more than A lawyer is like a shark.’9
The political and commercial infatuation with the abstract is evident in the widespread use of Microsoft’s PowerPoint. To quote Edward R. Tufte, described by the New York Times as ‘the Leonardo da Vinci of data’, this software package is ‘a prankish conspiracy against substance and thought’, which ‘allows speakers to pretend they are giving a real talk and audiences to pretend that they are listening’.10 Note that Tufte does not say that PowerPoint forces people to act in this way; rather, the program permits it. But maladroit use is the norm, and results in presentations made up of fractured discussion points and oversimplifications, which compress the true architecture of thought. The language of the PowerPoint-ed workplace is dehydrated.
More than fifty years ago Jacques Barzun wrote about the disappearance of the ‘as if all prose should resemble signs and captions’. He gives as an example ‘Appointment of Mr Jones was announced last night.’11 ‘The appointment of Mr Jones’ has a definiteness that makes us think about the appointers as well as the appointee. Doing away with the article makes the information blurrily general. The next step is ‘Jones appointment announcement’. This is an example of what is sometimes ironically dubbed the Noun Overuse Phenomenon.12 Instead of being skint or hard-up or broke, someone is in a ‘money shortage situation’. ‘There are more people taking part’ becomes ‘Participation rate spike’. Perhaps my imagination is running away with me. But on 23 July 2005 the BBC’s website really did open a news item with the headline ‘Cell death mark liver cancer clue’, and on 6 February 2010 I spotted ‘Mobility scooter river fall death’. Is it a mark of our sedentary society that we seem averse to verbs? Is this concatenation of substantives an attempt to make a slippery world seem stable? People, it seems, are replaced by processes – not in motion, but in the abstract – and verbs of action make way for nouns. More generally, the stringing together of nouns can be seen as a symptom of the complexity and dizzy pace of life. But it’s not as new as we may imagine: in Barchester Towers (1857), a progressive bishop is gently satirized by Anthony Trollope for proposing to set up something called the Bishop’s Barchester Young Men’s Sabbath Evening Lecture Room.
Much of the language of modern public discourse magnifies the trivial. We live in an age of experts, and experts like to create mystique about their expertise. Expert, incidentally, is one of those words that has drifted away from its etymological moorings. It once denoted someone with experience; now it denotes a person who has a record of making mistakes. At the same time, much of what is debated in the political sphere is technically complicated. The issues surrounding, say, stem cell research are too elaborate to be communicated in a straightforward way. Instead of analysing and evaluating the content of what we are told, we may simply judge the people who do the telling. This accounts for the emphasis modern politicians place on their reasonableness and personal qualities. It also suggests, if we move beyond politics, why celebrity endorsements have become so important. The science behind many new products is far too complex to be explained, but an association with a trusted and revered public figure means the science does not need explaining. Or rather, that is how we are meant to feel.
28
Envoi
The word is ‘very self’
I began by asking why issues of grammar, spelling and punctuation trouble us, and why we are so concerned with other people’s accents and the
words they use. As I tentatively suggested then, the answer is that language is at the heart of our lives. It is the instrument that has enabled us to create the world in which we live together.
We contest language because it is so important to our relationships and to our definitions and images of our selves. When I was a child I was presented with the schoolyard wisdom that ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. Soon enough I gathered that this was not true. Language can hurt us because we are linguistic creatures: language makes our world – we are constituted by it, or within it – and we are therefore vulnerable to it.1 There is an irony at work here, too, for by repeating this little incantation we perform a feat of word magic: we can chant, or simply speak, our convictions into bloom.
Here is the schoolmaster John Yeomans, writing in 1759:
Words are not, as some gross ears interpret, only a grinding or chafeing of sound of types and letters, striking the outer ear by the operation of the breath or spirit; but they are very man or mono, principle and very self, everlasting, of infinite, dread-united meaning, the express disposition of his nature in the heart, and not in the inked or graven sign. They are spirit, and they are life; they are death, and they are destruction … The word is very God and very Devil, good and evil, virtue and vice; and letters are as shadows.2
This is alarmingly expressed, but vividly also. It reminds me of the opening of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In the beginning was the word – and the word, we infer, will be present at the end.
The Language Wars Page 40