As the hands of the clock reach 04.31, I’d like to dedicate the following piece to Rosie Erin Semple Jones, whose nightly awakenings have provided me with the gift of insomnia & with it time to write, without which, for better or worse, this blog may have foundered long since.  I am living proof (so far, anyway) that it is possible to get by on 3 hours sleep a night.

LINGUA FRANCA

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell

Ever since the acquisition of words provided me with a receptacle for memory, I have loved language.  Its music, its power to evoke, its absurd variety delighted me as a child & my joy in it flourished into adolescence & youth.

My love of language took me into teaching – English first, then, for the greater part of my career, Drama.  As time has passed, teaching goals have shifted, routes have changed & strategies have altered. But one constant has remained at the heart of whatever version of whatever syllabus I have followed. It’s a small but perfectly formed lecture, not particularly original in content but delivered with a messianic zeal undiminished by time & repetition. 

In it I urge my students to take every opportunity they can to broaden their vocabularies & to recognise in language the key to knowledge, understanding, independence of mind &, ultimately, personal autonomy. I make reference to George Orwell’s 1984 & the mighty & potent weapon of Newspeak.  I ask them to examine their own speech forms – the unquestioning reliance that some may have on deliberately vague, oblique or discursive vocabulary or on ghetto slang whose terms of reference, however linguistically rich in their own way, are meaningless within the cultural territory that these middle class students occupy. 

I proselytise further about language as a universal resource whose capacity for articulating beauty & truth as we understand them need not be limited or constrained by social or cultural circumstances.  I use as exemplars of this certain Gypsies I have known whose illiteracy, far from being an impediment to the development of language, actually provoked the need for an enhanced flexibility & richness of expression because of reliance on the purely oral.  I ask them to see that there need be no conflict of interests between their acquisition of linguistic skills & nominal subscription to a resolutely anti-intellectual culture. The objective must be always to avoid being trapped within one register of language usage, unable to move with ease & grace from level to level. 

I tell them to read, to read anything & everything. Make it a habit. Regard every unfamiliar word, phrase, term, figure of speech as a challenge to understanding that must be met.  Master language & you need never be manipulated, exploited, controlled, owned by anyone. 

And they listen politely, only glazing over if I venture too far past the 10-minute mark.  Occasionally, very occasionally, long after the event, an ex-student will make reference to the sermon & express gratitude for my having nudged them towards a greater respect for language at just the right moment.  Which small triumph smugly recalled will always provide the impetus for the next delivery.

.o0o.

For all that I can sometimes add to a well-turned sentence a word too far, only to have it collapse in on itself like some poorly constructed architectural folly, I loathe promiscuous language.  Listening to cornered politicians turning on the tap & shamelessly letting it flow unchecked has me barracking from the sofa.  Hysterical Oscar winners in verbal free fall, pretentious artists endeavouring to translate piles of house bricks into meaningful messages, pop stars who read a book once & now imagine themselves to be sages – all who sling words around like frisbees – have me grinding my teeth down to stumps. 

But what really brings down the red mist is the use of language as a means to exclude all but the cognoscenti. When language becomes so abstruse, so convoluted, so comprehensively up its own arse, I know that I’m dealing with a man (almost invariably) who, were he not wielding a big fat pen, would be dealing with his sense of personal inadequacy by driving a very fast car very fast.  These professional intellectuals – almost all of them inhabiting the worlds of recherché philosophy, arts theory or, God help us, linguistics – have no interest whatsoever either in language’s capacity to communicate complex concepts with absolute clarity or in its intrinsic beauty in utterance or on the page.  The wielding of language is for them a kind of aristocratic sport by whose obscurantist rules & protocols they may celebrate their membership of an exclusive higher order of being.

Meanwhile, out in the bearpit a similar, if less refined game is being played. Consider the out-of-control IT jargoneer, the estate agent (realtor) describing a property & those drones who compose the letters that banks send you when you’re overdrawn. Each mangles & distorts language into something convoluted & grotesque, seeking to establish through it the aggrandisement of his or her particular agency. 

These are the true perpetrators of Word Crimes, not those whose earnest attempts to communicate are hampered because their command of classical grammar may be faulty & their non-colloquial vocabulary sparse.  The latter struggles for meaning & truth; the former intends obfuscation & obscurity.

.o0o.

There’s an organisation in the UK called the Plain English Campaign. Their principal aim is to eradicate completely the use of the elitist, special interest dialect that clogs up so much of the official documentation that we all have to deal with daily. This is their mission statement.

What is Plain English Campaign?
We are an independent organisation fighting for crystal-clear language and against jargon, gobbledygook and other confusing language. We are based in New Mills, Derbyshire in England.

What is plain English?
We define plain English as something that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it. Plain English takes into account design and layout as well as language.

Where should plain English be used?
Plain English is needed in all kinds of public information, such as forms, leaflets, agreements and contracts. The golden rule is that plain English should be used in any information that ordinary people rely on when they make decisions.

What's wrong with gobbledygook?
We can't put it better than a nurse who wrote to us about a baffling memo. She said that 'receiving information in this form makes us feel hoodwinked, inferior, definitely frustrated and angry, and it causes a divide between us and the writer.'

Admirable.  Where do I sign up?

Now. How about this document?  I stumbled across it whilst doing some Internet research & as I read it I searched in vain for irony. I present it as evidence for the prosecution, item 1. It comes from a Ph.D dissertation entitled Immersive Ideals/ Critical Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms. Okay, I might be accused of emulating Hermann Goering & reaching for my revolver at the utterance of the word ‘culture’, but, please – is this simply utter bollocks or is it utter bollocks?

A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged in art and established a seemingly unrestricted area of prodigality which I identify as viractuality. With the increased augmentation of the self via micro-electronics feasible today, the real co-exists with the virtual and the organic fuses with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested in a new interlaced sense of artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As such, viractualism strives for an understanding and depiction of an anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for no privileged logos. Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic viral disturbances they cannot contain. Here thought detaches itself from the order and authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.

Right. Any questions?

.o0o.

I wrote above about the use of language as a means deliberately to obfuscate & confuse.  In 1962 the British playwright Harold Pinter made a statement about his perception of the real function of much the speech that we utter, ostensibly for the purposes of communication.  It’s a difficult statement that requires careful reading & subsequent reflection. But there’s a world of difference between the narcissistic game playing of the writer just quoted & the elegant & painstaking proposition that is now seen as informing at the deepest level Pinter’s extraordinary work.

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished, or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

.o0o.

In conclusion, I must acknowledge that much of the above may be seen to achieve little more than to prove through example the author’s claims. If that is the case then I’ll just have to try harder to pursue Samuel Beckett’s paradoxical aim of trying to pare language back to the bone through the use of language. Now, for a brief while, I shall stop talking…

.o0o.

Comments

[Disintegrating Clone]

It certainly reads like utter bollocks, but it's written by a person seeking to advance in their social grouping. Their target audience would understand it, and it's not clear to me that the underlying meaning is actually bollocks. Is it deliberate obfuscation, or just fitting in with the expected terminology of the subject?

I mean, it is a PhD dissertation.

But why have certain arts like literature developed an impenetrable sub-language similar to that used by scientists? Because it's needed, or from a collective need to impress and exlude outsiders. I'm not sure.

[Mike]

We need a "plain english", or whatever you call what we speak over this side of the pond, movement here. The use of $10 college words has gotten out of hand. Of course it's always fun to insult someone without them knowing it by using "big words." I recommend "The Superior Person's Book of Words" by Peter Bowler, it's invaluable!

[Mike]

I can obfuscate with the best of them.

[Natalie]

Please please send that PhD guy a copy of your whole post on this subject. These people have to be shown the error of their ways. Even though I agree with Disintegrating Clone that it's very likely an attempt to fit in and advance within a social group, the whole idea that obfuscation is necessary in order to belong to such groups should be exploded. Bravo for plain English,

[Chay]

"Occasionally, very occasionally, long after the event, an ex-student will make reference to the sermon & express gratitude for my having nudged them towards a greater respect for language at just the right moment."

Quite.

[beth]

Excellent post, Dick. Couldn't agree more. And thank you for that Pinter quote - I hadn't seen it before.

[Dick]

I guess the real question, DC, is: has the writer selected the language register he employs because it alone can render his meaning? Or to put it more plainly: couldn't he have said what he said in plain English? No one has a problem with the odd neologism being coined to cover a precise meaning within a new context. But in the passage there is such a coagulation of indigestible language that any honest seeker after truth in the writer's area would go blind before they managed a single page! Unless, of course, they were members of the lexicographical priesthood who concocted the crap in the first place...

I shall google "The Superior Person's Book of Words" by Peter Bowler as soon as I'm out of here, Mike!

I suspect that our PhD pal would be too far up his own semantic fundament to hear our cries, Natalie...

Hi Chay. Long time no etc. I suspect that you might be paying me a small compliment. If so, I'm delighted.

Thanks, Beth. The Pinter utterance is a very rare early mission statement & one of my all-time favourites. It's moved from my noticeboard at St Christopher School (where I had the pleasure of teaching Chay) & it now sits atop my noticeboard at my present school. A 14-year-old girl explained it to me with absolute clarity the other day so good for old Harold..!

[Disintegrating Clone]

Having read it again, I don't think I can wholeheartedly support that writer, as they do indeed appear to be speaking gibberish.

But I'm not sure about this whole Plain English idea. I remember the newspaper saying someing using heteroscedasticity must be a pseud. But, though it's not commonly used, heteroscedasticity is a perfectly acceptable statistical word, and there's no obvious simpler alternative.

In our PhD example, are we complaining solely about the use of language, or do we suspect their ideas are also cobblers, and they're using jargon to cover it?

And what about poetry? Most of it is anything but pared down. I remember reading Mayakovsky's

"I know the power of words, I know the tocsin of words"

as

"I know the power of words, I know the toxin of words"

just because I'd never come across "tocsin" before. Maybe everyone else knows that word already, but assuming for a moment that "tocsin" is too obscure for a literate audience, was Mayakovsky wrong to use it? Was his translator?