Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  FLK: funny-looking kid

  ABITHAD: another blithering idiot – thinks he’s a doctor

  ART: assuming room temperature (recently deceased)

  FFFF: female, fat, forty and flatulent

  GOK: God only knows

  GLM: good-looking mum

  TTGA: told to go away

  MFC: measure for coffin

  NFWP: not for War and Peace (dying so no point in starting a long book)

  Lawyers too are renowned for baffling their clients with a prioris, ibids, idems and obscure case references. The critic A. P. Rossiter wrote in Our Living Language in 1953: ‘It strikes everyone as an extreme case of the evils of jargon when a man is tried by a law he can’t read, in a court which uses a language he can’t understand.’

  In English civil courts, attempts have been made to demystify the language with the abolition of some of the most archaic legal jargon and Latin maxims. Since 1999, people bringing cases to court are claimants, not plaintiffs, a writ is called a claim form, and minors are children. The new legal terms are designed to help people understand the law, so in camera has become private, a subpoena is a witness summons, and an Anton Piller, named after the plaintiff (sorry, claimant) in a court case in the 1970s, is now simply a search and seizure order.

  Legalese, the term for legal writing that’s designed to be difficult for the layman to read or understand, may be harder to eradicate. The long-winded sentences, countless modifying clauses and complex and often unnecessary vocabulary have been annoying non-lawyers for centuries. Four hundred years ago, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote had this to say about legalese: ‘But do not give it to a lawyer’s clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.’

  Lawyers are renowned for baffling their clients

  Lawyers want to write contracts which are legally binding and cover all possible contingencies but even they often have trouble decoding the legalese. Documents are peppered with subsequent to and forthwith and double-barrelled keep and maintain and goods and chattels. Campaigners for the use of plain language give this example of legalese:

  Upon any such default, and at any time thereafter, Secured Party may declare the entire balance of the indebtedness secured hereby, plus any other sums owed hereunder, immediately due and payable without demand or notice, less any refund due, and Secured Party shall have all the remedies of the Uniform Commercial Code.

  The plain-language alternative? ‘If I break any of the promises in this document, you can demand that I immediately pay all that I owe.’

  Plain English in the Workplace

  The battle for plain English in the world of politics and government has been raging longer than you might think. In 1948, a British civil servant, Sir Ernest Gowers, was invited by HM Treasury to produce a manual for government officials on how to avoid over-elaborate writing. Plain Words, a Guide to the Use of English was so successful that Gowers followed it with The ABC of Plain Words and The Complete Plain Words.

  Sir Ernest cites the example of a circular sent from a government department to its regional offices which began: ‘The physical progressing of building cases should be confined to … ’ Sir Ernest writes:

  Nobody could say what meaning this was intended to convey unless he held the key. It is not English, except in the sense that the words are English words. They are a group of symbols used in conventional senses known only to the parties to the convention.

  A member of the department explained to him that the phrase meant going to a building site to see how many bricks had been laid since the last visit. ‘It may be said that no harm is done,’ continues Sir Ernest,

  because the instruction is not meant to be read by anyone unfamiliar with the departmental jargon. But using jargon is a dangerous habit; it is easy to forget that the public do not understand it, and to slip into the use of it in explaining things to them. If that is done, those seeking enlightenment will find themselves plunged in even deeper obscurity.

  He included a list of ‘overworked’ words, which he described as ‘good and useful … when properly used; my worry is only against the temptation to prefer them over other words which would convey better the meaning you want to express’.

  More than half a century later, most of the words contained in the list remain firmly entrenched in government-speak: utilize, envisage, implement, viable, visualize, rendition … But these overworked words are nothing compared to a deluge of non-words which has gripped the English language. This jargon, according to the American poet David Lehman, ‘is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false’. It’s called, variously, corporate-speak or bureaucratese or offlish (for office English), and its terminology of blue-sky thinking and benchmarking and thinking outside the box and synergizing and conditionality has spread throughout the world of corporations and government departments and offices. Our language thrives on innovation, but the baffling phrases, power words, tortured verbs and pointless adages of corporate jargon have little to recommend them. This jargon appears to be neither inclusive nor humorous nor very clever.

  A wadge of gung-ho transitive verbs are favoured: to action, to incentivize, to leverage, to strategize, to downsize. Everything is upbeat. Problems aren’t problems, they’re challenges; commitment is 110 per cent; anything done in the future is on a go-forward basis. Other monstrosities include I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the situation rather than ‘I don’t have the time’; end-user perspective instead of ‘what the customer thinks’; cascade down information for simply sending a memo.

  A new office pastime has been created. Employees play Buzzword – or Bullshit – Bingo in the boardroom, ticking off a predetermined list of jargon words uttered during the meeting. The first person to have a full card is supposed to yell ‘Bingo!’

  Corporate-speak is inveigling itself into every corner of officialdom. The jobs section in a British newspaper had the following advert: ‘Proactive, self-starting facilitator required to empower cohorts of students and enable them to access the curriculum.’ That’s a teacher, to you and me.

  There’s no British institution that has ridiculed pretentious or obfuscatory language more than Private Eye, the satirical magazine. The magazine’s editor, Ian Hislop, has tracked and excoriated the rise and rise of business and political jargon since he took the job in 1986.

  Using language as a way of obscuring the truth rather than revealing the truth is always dangerous, and so I think that’s part of the point of attempting always to monitor these excesses. And English is a very precise language. It can be used to convey anything beautifully but it’s also very amenable to nonsense … The British are obsessed with their own language, and Private Eye gives them a way of monitoring it. So a lot of these columns were actually started by readers just saying, ‘Have you noticed that everybody is using the word “solutions”?’ You can’t get your windows replaced now, someone does ‘window solutions’. You can’t get a garden hose, you have ‘water irrigation domestic solutions’.

  Hislop has a theory on how management-speak has spread like a virus through institutions like the BBC, the NHS, the civil service and local government.

  It starts in management consultancies, which are firms designed to make a science out of what used to be an art or common sense – management, dealing with people. Management consultants make this into a science. You hire management consultants usually for two reasons. One is you want to sack people and you don’t do it yourself or, two, you want to create verbiage to describe non-existent jobs. So you’re either getting rid of people who do a real job or you’re inventing non-jobs. And the jargon does perfectly for both of those. So the people in non-jobs can send each other memos about rolling out milestones and delivery and competence, and the people who are being sacked are told that they’ve been restructured.

  Th
e language of management seems to have deteriorated at such a breakneck speed in terms of its warmth and emotional directness that it’s hard to imagine it getting any more impersonal. Ian Hislop says companies are aware of the problems.

  John Hurt as Winston Smith in the film version of 1984

  What amuses me is the same management who basically are bringing in systems to make sure people fall apart then are told there’s no bonding going on. So they have to organize paintballing weekends and start bringing in members of the SAS to give talks about getting across bridges without using rope and forcing people to socialize because they’ve become so disparate inside the office.

  In the brave new world of management speak, harsh realities get hidden. This is the language of doublespeak, deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous or obscure. In some cases it actually reverses the meanings of words. ‘Doublespeak’ is a term which can be traced back to George Orwell, who invented the words doublethink and newspeak for his novel 1984.

  American linguist William Lutz writes:

  Doublespeak is language which pretends to communicate but doesn’t. It is language which makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant seem unattractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids, shifts or denies responsibility; language which is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language which conceals or prevents thought. (‘Doubts about Doublespeak’, State Government News, 1993)

  Doublespeak with Political Intent

  The uglier side of doublespeak is its use as camouflage to hide the reality. In the world of business, euphemisms are bald: workers aren’t sacked, they’re down- or right-sized, derecruited or involuntarily terminated. Companies don’t suffer losses, they have negative cash flows or downward adjustments or negative growths.

  Most disturbing of all is how the doublespeak of business and management has been adopted by governments and politicians who use deliberately ambiguous phrases to make us feel better about politically sensitive subjects like war or killings or torture. To kill becomes to take down, take out or neutralize, or the ‘unlawful and arbitrary deprivation of life’ (US State Department annual report 1984). Civilian casualties are collateral damage; an escalation in fighting is a surge; state kidnapping for the purposes of torture becomes rendition; a terrorist furthering state interests is a freedom fighter; genocide is changed to ethnic cleansing. Weapons are assets; nuclear weapons are nuclear deterrents. Torture is enhanced coercion interrogation technique.

  Political doublespeak isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s most infamous use is the terminology of the Nazis to describe the systematic extermination of Jews – the Final Solution. Hitler used euphemisms to dehumanize and make the unacceptable acceptable. He spoke about the need to purify and cleanse, to rid the Reich of the Jewish vermin and to decontaminate or disinfect the Reich of the Jewish bacillus. Instead of kill or murder, expressions like special treatment, evacuation, resettlement or conveyed to special measure were used. The planned killing of handicapped people was euthanasia or mercy death. Poland, with its death camps, was called the Jewish resettlement region; gas chambers were bathhouses, and mobile gas chambers were auxiliary equipment or delousing vans.

  Victor Klamperer, a German Jewish Professor of Literature, documented in his book LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) the daily mental corruption of the German people through language. Klamperer escaped the gas chambers because his wife was Aryan.

  Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

  The city of Leipzig lies in what we used to call East Germany. This part of Germany suffered two extreme regimes in the last century – the fascist Nazis and then the communists, who controlled what was then called the GDR (German Democratic Republic) from the end of the Second World War until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the Nazis, the communists were expert at using language to control and subdue, changing words and changing the meaning of words to suit their political purposes. In the former headquarters of the notorious Staatssicherheit – the Stasi, probably the most famous secret police after the KGB – political satirist Gunter Böhnke recalls that party officials called the secret police ‘die Sicherheit’ – the security. Ordinary people nicknamed it ‘die Stasi’, making it sound feminine – a bit like us calling the police ‘the She Police’, he says. It was the public’s small way of showing defiance, making the Stasi seem less frightening.

  The Berlin Wall was officially called the ‘Anti-Fascist Barrier’ by the GDR authorities, but, as Gunter recalls, ‘the barbed wire was not facing the West but to the East. Everybody could see that the enemies could come in. But you were not allowed to go out.’

  The GDR was nothing like the Nazi regime in terms of terror and murder. This was a much more insidious tyranny in which all conversations were monitored by an army of citizen spies – some estimates say as many as one for every six and a half members of the population. Gunter describes it as a sort of mind control where even telling a joke was dangerous.

  ‘My mother lost her purse with a number of Ulbricht [Walter Ulbricht, GDR leader] jokes in it, and for months on end with every ringing of the bell, we thought the Stasi will come and take our mother because of these jokes. It was enough just to tell a joke. There was a teacher of Russian who told a joke to his colleagues about Krushchev. Somebody reported him to the Stasi, and he was sacked from school and had to work in a chemical factory. Very hard, very dirty work. This was in 1962.’

  Gunter himself was allowed to perform comedy cabaret shows as a ‘steam valve’ as long as the jokes didn’t attack senior party officials. George Orwell wrote: ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution,’ and despite the danger from informants, political jokes thrived. Some of the more critical ones were known as ‘five-year jokes’ – three years in prison for the person telling it and two years for everyone else who listened and laughed.

  In the 1970s and 80s the GDR leader, Erich Honecker, was the target of a number of jokes. This one features in the 2006 Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others:

  Erich Honecker arrives at his office early one morning. Opening his window he sees the sun and says, ‘Good morning, dear sun.’

  The sun replies, ‘Good morning, dear Erich!’

  Honecker gets on with his work and at noon he opens the window and says ‘Good day, dear sun.’

  And the sun replies, ‘Good day, dear Erich.’

  In the evening, as he heads out of his office, Erich goes again to the window and says, ‘Good evening, dear sun.’ The sun is silent. Honecker says again, ‘Good evening, dear sun! What’s the matter?’

  The sun replies, ‘Kiss my arse! I’m in the West now.’

  Modern Taboos

  Given the atrocities in our history perpetrated by one group against another, it’s not surprising that many governments and institutions have tried to legislate against so-called hate speech – disparaging remarks about religions, ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities and genders. But who defines hate speech? Can we prevent hate speech without encroaching on freedom of speech? And does making something taboo merely give it more power?

  This chapter began with the Seven Words You Cannot Say – swear words which our forefathers would physically recoil at but whose power to offend this generation is waning. Today, old taboos have been replaced by new ones, which language and humour have to negotiate. These are the taboos of homosexuality and disability and – the issue whi
ch probably makes us most uncomfortable and which hardly bothered previous generations – race. When we joke about race we tread on eggshells. There are words we just don’t use. And the most offensive one is probably the word nigger. F-words and c-words cause only mild ripples these days, but the n-word is extremely loaded.

  It wasn’t always like this. Older readers may remember merrily reciting a children’s counting rhyme:

  Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,

  Catch a nigger by the toe;

  If he squeals let him go,

  Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.

  It was acceptable right into the 1970s, just as collecting the Golliwog stickers off the back of jars of Robertson’s jam and sending them off for a Golliwog badge seemed an innocent hobby. There was little fuss when Agatha Christie published her bestselling detective thriller Ten Little Niggers in 1939 – although the Americans brought it out as And Then There Were None the following year. British publishers didn’t change the title until 1985.

  A proposed remake of the 1955 film The Dam Busters has stepped into a quagmire of political correctness. One of the film’s main characters was Guy Gibson, the RAF commander of the British mission that destroyed German dams with ‘bouncing’ bombs in the Second World War Two. Gibson had a black Labrador called Nigger – a common enough name for a black dog in those days; it was also the radio codeword used to report the success of Gibson’s squadron on one of the targets. ITV broadcast a censored version of the original film in 1999 with all ‘Nigger’ utterances deleted; the Americans dubbed over ‘Nigger’ to make it ‘Trigger’. So should the film-makers stick to the facts or alter history, changing a name that was perfectly acceptable in the 1940s and 50s so as not to offend people today? As the director of the remake, Peter Jackson, notes, ‘We’re in a no-win, damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario.’