I have always assumed that the main driving force behind the changes in our language from generation to generation has been the shifting needs and demands of each age – basically just a kind of modernisation process. There must indeed be a large element of that of course, given the constant need for new words and phrases to name things and activities that didn’t exist before. But it’s just dawned on me that an even bigger element has nothing very much to do with needs at all; it’s just changing fashions. The great majority of people choose their words for the same reason they choose their clothes; because it’s cool to use the in words just as it’s cool to wear the in clothes. It’s also safer; you don’t risk being considered an outsider, or out of touch, or just plain weird by your peers.
In olden times when only an educated and aesthetically sensitive minority could read and write, these linguistic fashions would have gone down parallel tracks: a single, literary one for that minority who were capable of communicating with each other in writing, and multiple vernacular ones among illiterate communities in different regions. The ‘fashion drive’ within the literary one would have been the need to impress one’s interlocutors with the sheer beauty, power and range of one’s language – a drive which produced the glories of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
Weep, for all that has gone to buggery. Now even the great and the good compete only to see how often they can work into their speech and writing as many as possible of the brain-sappingly fashionable words and phrases on John Rentoul’s magnificent #bannedlists (here and here) avoiding at all costs all possible alternatives that are more individualistic, elegant, imaginative or less tediously repetitive. So, not ‘in future’ but ‘going forwards’; not ‘problem’ but ‘issue’; not ‘and’ ‘of’ ‘as’ ‘for’ ‘by’ ‘in’ ‘to’ ‘with’ ‘through’ or just about any other nominative, prepositional or conjunctive word or phrase you can think of if you can possibly think of a way of constructing your sentence so as to replace them by ‘in terms of’; and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Fashion is driving our language not to new heights of elegant economy but to the turgid, inarticulate depths.
Who or what is driving these ‘fashions’? My guess is that there are four main strands to it. One is the modern disease of political correctness, which intimidates us into calling a spade anything but a spade, so ‘mental disability’ must be ‘learning difficulties’, ‘elderly’ must be ‘older persons’, ‘chairman’ or ‘chairwoman’ must be ‘chair’, 'staff' must be 'colleagues', 'departments' must be 'teams', 'interested parties' must be 'stakeholders', any other organisation we have to deal with must be a 'partner', and grammar and style must be sacrificed at all costs to avoid offending feminist sensibilities by using masculine nouns, pronouns and possessive adjectives.
Another is the daily PR assault on the media by the climate change and environmental fraternity, so that everything now is or is not ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ or good for your ‘carbon-footprint’. A third is to be found in what seem to be two principles of progressive teaching, one that no child is ever wrong and two that everything possible must be done to avoid confusing them with anything complicated. So yes, they must be taught that the letter ‘h’ is pronounced ‘haitch’ because the poor little dears would be baffled if it were pronounced ‘aitch’, and no you mustn’t correct them if they always say ‘myself’ even when it should be ‘me’ because the poor dears would never then understand why sometimes it’s rude to say ‘me’, and so on.
And then there is the fourth strand, the central one underpinning all of them, which is the army of companies making a fortune selling training programmes to organisations and individuals of all kinds - sales, marketing, management, career development and media trainers probably being the biggest culprits - who bash all this crap into the heads of people when they are still young and impressionable and can be persuaded that if they don’t talk like this they’ll never get on.
We have to find a way of stopping them, otherwise our descendants are going to wind up back in their literary caves just grunting at each other.
You reminded me of something I wrote in January of 2010:
ReplyDeleteI was walking into my local supermarket, when I noticed a sign above a side entrance that read “colleague entrance”. In the supermarket there were a number of messages over the PA system that began with the words, “colleague announcement”.
When, and why, did the word “staff” become derogatory?
The more I thought, the more I realized that the problem is widespread: hair dressers became “stylists”, firemen became “firefighters”, stewards and stewardesses became “flight attendants”,… I could go on. But the fact is many of these titles are meaningless or simply wrong. Take the last one. A “flight attendant” does not attend to the flight, that, surely, is the preserve of the pilots? “Flight attendants” do, however, steward the passengers. So why the change of title?
The reality is when people feel worthless, they try to come up with titles that make them feel better. So the staff in Asda or Walmart bask in the warmth of thinking that they are cared about when the management refer to them as colleagues, and hopefully they won’t notice that their terms of employment are not as cosy as when they were called “staff”.
We all do it. When I did work experience for an investment bank in my teens I spent a week stuffing cheques in envelopes. With nothing to occupy my brain I soon set about giving myself a title: Unit Trust Dividend Payments Distribution Specialist – the title was longer than my placement, but I felt better for it.
So, the bit of New Year fun. Given that the Wall Street Journal has advised us that we are in a crap job http://bit.ly/4QUM9K, perhaps we should set about coming up with new job titles so we can feel better about ourselves. To make it more interesting I will send a photography book of my choosing to the person who comes up with the most original, laugh out loud proposal. The winner will be judged soley at my utterly partisan discretion.
I won't put all the posts here: suffice to say that I am now a "Documentalistic Bystander" rather than a photographer.
But to be more serious about your post, I am inclined to say plus ca change, plus ca meme chose - with apologies if my spelling is wrong, French is not my strong suit, unlike my father who is a native speaker.
Back to the point. I agree with everything you say with respect to PC speak - it is doing for language what health and safety is doing for individual risk management: making us morons. But as far as the rest is concerned your argument is predicated on the notion that because the entire population is at least notionally educated there should be a natural movement towards maintaining sophistication and beauty in both written and oral English. But the truth is that while the masses may be functionally literate, the vast majority have no more of an interest in their facility to communicate than did their functionally illiterate forebears. The communications revolution has democratised the ability to spread one's thoughts and ideas. Whether they are worth spreading is another matter. But the explosion of people performing acts of communication professionally should not be confused with the notion that they are all gifted communicators.
There is still a hard core of stunningly gifted writers and speakers, by and large they play to their own audience much as they always have.
Curiously the same problem has arisen in photography in the past few years - the digital revolution has democratised the medium and in doing so we are swamped daily with the visually illiterate outpourings of every Tom, Dick and Harry who suddenly believe that because they don't have to process a film they have become great image makers.
The joy, whether with written or visual language, is to find those rare practioners who continue to raise the bar for what is perceived as truly exceptional skill. The masses? Well, they will continue to enjoy their lives from day to day with scarcely the capacity to recognise that they might be doing anything wrong at all.
Nice post MC. Especially like your bit about 'colleagues'. Sainsbury's non-stop 'colleague' announcements drive me up the wall and away to Tesco who still call them 'staff' announcements, showing that, unlike Sainsbury's, they think it is not worth irritating their customers to stroke their own egos. It's not confined to supermarkets though; I remember personnel managers(sorry - Human Resource Directors) in my own vast public service organisation forever ordering middle management to find more impressive-sounding job titles than 'clerk', 'secretary', 'PA' etc for their staff. 'Advisor', tagged on to some other vague word such as 'Team', became the favourite along with things like 'Deputy Team Leader', 'Assistant Team Leader' 'Assistant Deputy Team Leader' and so on.
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