LAZY LANGUAGE, LAZY THOUGHT

GOING THE WHOLE HOG | February 26th 2008

Anyone trying to impress, to sell or to obfuscate is likely to brutalise the language, laments John Grimond. Businessmen bungle, and politicians love empty phrase-making. Language should evolve, but its lazy use leads to meaninglessness ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2007

Open a newspaper and you are likely to find a pundit putting you right about language. Pedants bemoan the misuse of such words as "execution" (which means "putting into effect the verdict of a court of law", not "murdering a hostage"), "presently" ("soon", not "at present") and "enormity" ("great crime", not "big thing"). They have a point. Language is impoverished when words lose their meanings.

But it can also be enriched when words gain meanings. One of the strengths of English is its readiness to change, to allow words and phrases to gain new uses. Publications no longer have to appear daily to be journals, nor salaries to be paid in salt. And "making love", which once involved only a bit of billing and cooing, now means going the whole hog, a phrase, incidentally, that derives from the inability of Islamic scholars to decide which bit of the pig was forbidden to Muslims. So said the poet William Cowper, anyway:

But for one piece they thought it hard
From the whole hog to be debarred.

Languages, like French and Spanish, that are supervised and censored by a board of self-important overseers, risk becoming fossilised, absurd or just useless, unable to carry out the tasks that their users demand of them. And in the age of booting up, corporate governance and waterboarding, new tasks appear all the time.

One task that users demand is communication. This does not need perfect English. No one is really misled by a sign that says, "This door is alarmed" or "Disabled toilet", still less by "I ain't done nothing." The task that suffers most from mangled language is thought, when people communicate with themselves. If they cannot express themselves to themselves, they have no chance of expressing themselves to other people.

Anyone trying to impress, to sell or to obfuscate is likely to brutalise the language. Prominent offenders are businessmen, with their on-board customer-service representatives, collision damage waivers, non-incremental growth opportunities and enhanced information-management activities, providing innovative solutions and significant leverage in the use of resources, and thus permitting an increasing percentage of senior professional time to be expended on value-added solutions.

Politicians can effortlessly match this. Their stock-in-trade is sustainable development, key performance indicators, the knowledge-based economy (any takers for the ignorance-based alternative?), inclusiveness and empowered communities, all offered up with mandatory passion, vision and excitement. Put politicians together with soldiers and you get Islamofascism, extraordinary rendition, self-injurious behaviour incidents and the war on terror.

'Twas ever thus. Orwell pointed out in 1946 that, since political language is usually the defence of the indefensible, it has to consist "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness". And long before him Tacitus remarked, "They make a desert and call it peace."

That euphemism, word-twisting and empty phrase-making have been around for ever does not make them any less pernicious. In an age of mass communication they are quickly absorbed by lazy thinkers who believe they are saying something important when they declare, "It is this combination of hard-edged critical thinking and innovation with commitment and perseverance that will be the hardest challenge."

From here it is but a short step to explaining, as a prominent British politician did recently, that "If I did use the word meaningful, I didn't mean it to mean anything at all." Confused? Don't be: it was an honest admission. Such talk is mere background noise created by people who have nothing to say but think they must say something.

This can sometimes have serious consequences. Once it took a face to launch a thousand ships; now a slam dunk is enough to send America to war. "Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is," wrote Virginia Woolf. "How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?"

John Grimond is writer-at-large for The Economist. He is also the author of the paper's "Style Guide".