The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  Most of this is wrong. Research indicates that Whorf’s claims about the Hopi are untrue: in Hopi speech there are ways of quantifying units of time, there are grammatical tenses, and records are kept that make use of various means of measuring time. Whorf’s account seems to have been a mixture of wishfulness and romantic mysticism. Alfred Bloom’s findings resulted from flaws in the way he constructed his tests.11 The New York Times story about the Kawesqar does not stand up. Reflecting on it, the linguist John McWhorter comments, ‘Never mind that Japanese has no future markers either, and yet the Japanese hardly seem unconcerned with the future.’12 Quite so.

  We should be wary of believing that the patterns of a language’s grammar reflect the patterns of its speakers’ minds. Does every one of the world’s more than six thousand tongues encode a distinct world-view? No. Is it significant that in German the word for a little man, Männlein, is neuter, or that the words for knife, fork and spoon are respectively neuter, feminine and masculine? Mark Twain quipped that ‘In German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip does. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.’ It’s a nice line, but grammatical gender is an abstract, formal concept – not tied to biological sex, and not absurd.

  The claim about the number of Inuit words for snow is interesting chiefly on account of its reception. It has become one of those ‘facts’ that ‘every schoolboy knows’. (George Orwell kept a list of these fallacies, which included the beliefs that if you tell a lie you get a spot on your tongue and that a pig will not swim for fear of cutting its throat with its trotters.) The notion that Inuit pay more attention to snow because they have more words for it seems a strange reversal of cause and effect. In any case, linguists laugh off the idea that there is a noticeably large number of Inuit snow words. It has given rise to the term snowclone, which signifies a well-worn phrasal template such as ‘If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy’.13 If they want to sound tough in their opposition to popular myth, language experts say that it is racist to swallow unverified stories about unfamiliar peoples. Yet although the wild overstatements about snow words are the exaggerations of hacks straining for effect, it does seem plausible that many Inuit encounter snow more than I do, talk about it more than I do, experience a greater range of snow-related phenomena, and may therefore have a somewhat bigger repertoire of names for types of snow, snow events and so on. This is a point astonishing in one respect only: its banality. It has nothing to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. An enjoyably sceptical combatant in the language wars, Mark Halpern, comments that ‘In the minds of most observers, it is perfectly natural … to possess and use a large vocabulary for the most prominent concerns in one’s daily life’.14 That is all it is: a large vocabulary, not a radically different psychology.

  Only in a diluted form does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis hold true: vocabulary can affect the ways we perceive things and the ways we recall them. This partly has to do with our perceptual abilities being shaped during childhood, which happens under the influence of language. We are likely also to recognize that when we come across a new word, its novelty may be enjoyable, and, if we adopt the word, we may start overtly to identify the thing it denotes. But this is hardly a restructuring of our cognitive equipment.

  When we think about the relationship between language and thought, we quickly see how large a part our choice of metaphors and indeed of individual terms plays in framing our communication with others. Words have powerful associations. In part these relate to their most familiar collocations – that is, the company they tend to keep. For instance, the noun takeover more often appears with the adjective hostile than with benign, and rain will be accompanied by torrential or heavy more frequently than by fat or whirling. Collocations are an area of concern for people learning the language: to show a good command of English one needs to know that it is usual to speak of a great difficulty, a big smile and a large area, rather than of a great area, a large smile and a big difficulty. But there are associations of other kinds: those personal to us, and those fostered by society (for the most part invisibly) and redolent of magic, superstition, a primitive holiness – or its verso, horror. We think of words as having colours, faces, humours, scents – in short, character. Their accessories can sometimes seem the most important parts of them.

  In the 1960s two American academics, David Palermo and James Jenkins, researched this area closely. Testing 500 children in each of the fourth to eighth, tenth and twelfth grades in Minneapolis public schools, as well as 1,000 students taking psychology classes at the University of Minnesota, with a 50/50 gender split, they focused on the first response produced by each of 200 stimulus words. Just to take a single example of their findings, I’ll concentrate on sour. The responses show plenty of overlap – there are obvious ‘association norms’ – but there are striking differences. The word with which sour was most often associated was sweet; among the university students, this was the response of 232 males and 255 females. Aside from sweet, which was roughly five times more common a response than any other, the most frequent responses were bitter, cream, lemon and milk. Cream was about 50 per cent more common among females than males. None of the university students wrote hurt, which was by contrast the second most popular response of sixth-grade males. Younger respondents were more likely than university students to link sour with bad – and with good. Older ones were more likely to mention apple, grapes and pickle. A small number made connections with pain and sweat. Two male respondents of college age produced whiskey (as in a ‘whiskey sour’); and three fourth-grade males offered foot, though no one above the fifth grade made this connection. Idiosyncratic responses which appeared only once in the entire sample included arm, basement, English, horn, monkey, shepherds, teacher, vowels and work. And surprisingly uncommon, from my point of view, were dough, puss and taste – the responses of, respectively, ten, eleven and ninety-one young people out of a total of 4,500.15

  If the work of Palermo and Jenkins seems almost antique, a simple experiment now might involve taking a word such as peace and asking a few volunteers to scribble down ten other words brought to mind by this ‘trigger’. When I tried this with three friends, peace prompted each of them to write war and quiet, but no other word appeared on all three lists. Only one included treaty, and only one dove, while the third’s selection contained pipe, grass and massage. Trying again with naked, I found that all three wrote down eye, ape and body; two wrote both lunch and aggression; only one wrote flame or ambition; and the quirkier one-offs included grape, rambler, fish and hotel. There is nothing terribly surprising about this divergence, but it neatly demonstrates that a word can have different associations for different people. Equally, according to your vantage point and values, you and I may respond in very distinct ways to words such as socialist and pudding.

  This may seem crude. It is crude. But it draws attention to a large problem: assumptions hide in everything we write or say. Word association tests provide evidence – incomplete, and not easily decipherable – of patterns of thought that are rarely articulated. Each of us contains a cognitive map, densely contoured and permanently invisible, which organizes our attitudes.

  In Nicholas Nickleby Dickens writes, ‘Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.’ Ralph in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country recognizes that for his mother and sister ‘the word “divorce” was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift.’ You may have similar feelings about these words. More likely, though, there are other words that for you are especially enveloped in significance. These differences may sound innocuous, but they cause problems.

  27

  Such, such are the joys

  Politics, George Orwell and the English language

  If you change perception, it’s often alleged, you change reality. And if you change wh
at things are called, you can change how they are perceived. This is true of the positioning and branding of, say, a breakfast cereal or an insurance company, but it is also true of other phenomena, and acts of renaming are political. Confucius in his Analects suggests that when a politician takes up the reins of government his first task should probably be to rectify the names of things.

  This is what George Orwell depicts in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The citizens of Orwell’s imagined dystopia – a creation influenced not just by the spectre of Stalinism, but also by Orwell’s experience of his miserable prep school and working for the BBC – are expected to use Newspeak, a reduced form of English which enforces civil obedience by eliminating subtle expression and rebellious statements. In practice, no state-enforced distortion of language can defeat subversiveness; there will always be resistance. Nevertheless, Newspeak is a cautionary vision of a language without history and colour. Orwell’s thinking was shaped in part by his hostility to Ogden’s Basic English; initially intrigued by Ogden’s ideas, he later concluded they were mechanical and degraded. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he was not predicting the future so much as satirizing the present, and Newspeak, which could be spoken ‘without involving the higher brain centres at all’, was a satire on the gibberish of totalitarian regimes.

  It is a bland sort of alarmism to say that today Newspeak is all around us. In reality, instead of the narrow and imperative language Orwell imagined we have an alternative Newspeak of persuasion and befuddlement. Newspeak paraded massive lies (‘Freedom is Slavery’, ‘Ignorance is Strength’), but the contemporary language that is sometimes dubbed Newspeak is really something different. It conceals its deceptions. And it grows like wisteria – hardily, invasively, twistingly, and yet all the while ornamentally. Sometimes it is roundabout and confusing; often it has the appearance of straightforwardness. Take, for instance, the word choice, beloved of modern politicians. It is appealing because of its connotations of freedom. Yet frequently it implies opportunity where none is available. When faced with the choices so enthusiastically heralded, we find that we are expected to pick from an array of options that are tediously similar and perhaps equally undesirable. We know what a choice is, and we like the idea in principle, but talk of choice in practice masks lack of flexibility – or sanitizes selfishness and unreasonableness.

  We have had a tremendous amount of exposure to advertising – enough, one might think, to be able to resist its persuasive strategies – but still we are dazzled by it. And when I say ‘advertising’, I mean more than just TV commercials and the glossy spreads in magazines. Traditional ‘interruption marketing’ (a term coined by the marketing expert Seth Godin) is being supplemented by new strategies that seek to emphasize the sensuousness of products and our relationships with them. Advertising is a pervasive feature of modern living. It clutters our environment, and increasingly it seeps into places we would tend to think of as sacrosanct, such as schools. While it often addresses us directly, it also uses subliminal messages to prime our preferences. The language of advertising is coded; though typically positive, exaggerated and repetitive, its persuasiveness can be indirect. But the idea of consumption is threaded through our lives. We are consumers first, citizens second. The package matters more than the product. A particularly insidious development has been the supplanting of need by desire at the heart of our culture – or rather, the smudging of our idea of what it is to ‘need’ something; for ‘need’ has become intimately bound up with ‘want’.

  Re-packaging is the way to change perception: to make the merely desirable seem necessary, and also to make the undesirable less appalling. Do you, for instance, remember ‘global warming’? You could hardly fail to. Now it’s more often ‘climate change’, which is arguably more accurate – and definitely sounds less sinister. Imagine if we called it ‘global heating’ or ‘global burn-up’: for many this would seem too patently emotive, but it would foster a different kind of debate about climate, politics and the future. ‘Intelligent design’ sounds scientific and credible, where ‘creationism’ does not. (To whom, I wonder, is the intelligence being attributed – the designer, or by foxy implication the theorists who push the idea of intelligent design?) In aviation there are ‘safety events’, which traditionally have been called ‘near misses’; in finance there is ‘subprime’ lending, aimed at borrowers with no credentials; in many fields there is ‘standard procedure’, which is a pompous way of denoting an arbitrary, probably stupid and possibly also costly way of doing something that most of us, exercising a little discretion, could briskly polish off. ‘Crime’ is repositioned as ‘tragedy’. A much older example is the ‘concentration camp’; ‘death camp’ would be nearer the mark. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ sanitizes the practice more damningly known as ‘genocide’; ‘extraordinary rendition’, though many now understand it to mean something along the lines of ‘torture by proxy’, sounds like a sophisticated and important legal process; and ‘torture’ itself is often more nebulously presented as ‘abuse’.

  These are not ordinary euphemisms, designed to shield us from unpleasant odours. Normally euphemisms are exercises in discretion, which conceal from us what we actually know is there: when a friend pops off ‘to powder her nose’ I know she’s going to excrete some waste matter, but on the whole she is not desperately keen for me to think about this, and I am happy enough to be complicit, since it means I am spared an image of her discharging this waste. However, these new pumped-up euphemisms conceal from us a truth we want to see, and they are used not out of a concern for modesty (be it mine or the user’s) but out of a concern to keep sensitive or embarrassing information from flowing freely to places where it may cause dissent.

  The use of the passive voice is another technique of denial; it adjusts our focus by changing the grammatical subject of a sentence. Conventionally, whatever is of greatest interest or importance in a sentence is made its subject. Consider the difference between the active statement ‘We shot the protester’ and the passive ‘The protester was shot by us’. Then note how often in the passive version the statement is clipped short; so, instead of ‘We shot the protester’, one learns only that ‘The protester was shot’. Even before ‘by us’ is removed, the focus has been shifted on to the protester (and on to the fact of his being a protester); the next step is easy, and it gets rid of the embarrassing little matter of agency. Instead of saying ‘I made mistakes’, the politician says that ‘Mistakes were made’ – a favourite formula of Richard Nixon’s. A feature of this rhetorical device is its implication that the mistakes were made by someone else.

  Besides the language of denial, there is a language of self-legitimation, in which the names things are given are used to justify the way they are treated. Not euphemism, then, and not dysphemism (which is substituting a nasty word for a pleasant or at least innocuous one), but ‘dyslogy’, which is the opposite of eulogy. Terrorist, a word which was originally a badge of honour during the French Revolution, has become a conveniently alarmist way of denoting rebels, enemies, freedom fighters, insurgents.

  As Steven Poole has commented, a related and loaded term is ‘terrorist suspect’ (or ‘terror suspect’). A suspect is someone who is under suspicion and is being accused, but who has not yet been found guilty. Yet by attaching the word terrorist to the suspect, one signals an assumption of guilt. As Poole puts it, ‘the person is first defined as a terrorist … and only then is it grudgingly acknowledged that the basis for such a categorisation is as yet untested.’1 Similar in effect is ‘legitimate force’, which justifies the use of force – perhaps to restrain a prisoner – by implying that the degree of force used was judged to be within the law at the time it was used, even though in fact any such judgement will have happened retrospectively, if at all.

  Poole writes with appealing clarity about the peculiar weaponry of modern public discourse. He clearly has a following. But his reasonable voice struggles to be heard above the cacophonous orations of the public figures and popular writers he dec
ries. We have become pitifully familiar with government-endorsed sophistry and the flatulent rhetoric of politicians and political pundits. This is not exclusive to English-speaking nations; it probably goes on everywhere.

  In several of his essays George Orwell wrote about the worn-out metaphors, pretentiousness and obscurantism of political language, and he has become a touchstone for all who tackle this subject. In ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’, published in 1944, he emphasized the gulf between language as presented in political writing and language as it is used by people in their normal lives. In pamphlets, manifestos and the statements made by government spokespeople, ‘clear, popular, everyday language seems to be instinctively avoided’.2 To be effective, he argued, political language needed to be ordinary and colloquial.

  Orwell returned to this subject in an essay published in Horizon in April 1946. ‘Politics and the English Language’ discussed at greater length the defects of the language used by politicians and political writers. It has become his most-cited essay. As I hope I have made clear by now, I think the two nouns in its title are inextricably linked; the first two words of the title could be considered redundant. Orwell was not the first to examine the abuse of language for political ends. Locke, for instance, saw the ‘affected obscurity’ and ‘learned gibberish’ of different sects as posing a threat to ‘humane life and society’, bringing ‘confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind’ and, if not destroying, certainly rendering useless ‘those two great rules, religion and justice’.3 But Orwell has become the person commentators and arbiters turn to when in need of crisply phrased support.