opinion I remember back in the UK taking my mother for her first appointment at a brand-new surgery. It was all very cuttingedge with smoked glass, an arboretum and magazines only four years old. By the entrance was a touch-screen device inviting patients to confirm their details and tap on a button marked “ARRIVE ME”. I exploded at this linguistic barbarism and stormed out of the building. I was halfway home when I remembered my mother. It never used to be like this. In childhood we clutched our drool-soaked copy of “My First Alphabet”, (“A is for Apple”); we mimicked animal sounds, (“What does the dog say?”); we soaked up bedtime stories and children’s television, learning, always learning. Words would be our companions on the road of life. Hurrah!
Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars
Word Search Y
ou might recall last year a senior member of the UK government was asked if they would apologise for the shortage of Personal Protection Equipment which had left nurses wearing bin bags in the face of a lethal virus. They responded, “I’m sorry if people feel that there have been failings”, before adding, “I will be very, very clear about that.” Cleverly done! The issue instantly became one merely of perception while the subtle use of “if” questioned whether a problem had actually occurred at all. I feel Bob Marley was too confessional, he should have called his song, “I’m Sorry If Some People Feel the Sheriff Has Been Shot”. This kind of vacuous double-speak sucks the oxygen out of a centuries-old language rich in texture and nuance. I never think of English as the language of Chaucer, since few people understood what he was on
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about even as he was on about it. But Shakespeare, I’ll give you. Without doubt, The Bard, (plus whoever else contributed to that implausibly large output; but let’s not go there), significantly expanded his native tongue with many lustrous new words, (including ‘lustrous’). Indeed, it was via the great sonnet-wrangler that I first encountered ‘excruciating’, when my grammar school English teacher marked my essay on “The Merchant of Venice”.
Decades later, my job involved conveying company directors’ ideas to thousands of employees. With a hostility to businessspeak bordering on the psychotic, I would remove from their messages jargon like ‘product agnostic’ and ‘sub-prime paradigm setting’, arguing that, with all due respect, it’s meaningless gibberish. Some executives would reinstate these pet phrases in their approved draft; I would remove them again before publishing. How we would laugh. But the debasing of language continues relentlessly. George Orwell (who else?) was already on the case. Way back in 1946 he warned of politicians “giving the appearance of solidity to pure wind”. He saw it coming: Words without meaning, buzz phrases as policy. Decisions of brainwarping complexity with immense consequences reduced to a slogan that fits on a fridge magnet.
Where are the great orators whose power Able to articulate the most abstract human with language burned into our thoughts, English is replete with consciousness and set light to our sumptuous words like ‘vicissitude’ and imagination? Giants like Bertrand Russell, ‘usurping’, (I sometimes feel I never did philosopher and avowed pacificist, who enough usurping). Accommodating both wrote, “It is the academic and preoccupation with the poet is by no possessions, more than means unique Where are the great orators anything else, which to English; whose power with language prevents us from living however, I am freely and nobly.” burned into our consciousness qualified only to and set light to our imagination? Or Emmeline discuss my native Pankhurst, political tongue, a fluency activist leading the fight in which gives me for equal rights, blazing some eleventyin defiance, “We have to free half of the thousand words what with to writing here human race, the women, so that they can and speaking also. help to free the other half.” These days, English is under constant But perhaps more than anyone, we look to assault, particularly from American Captain Edward Smith, alone on the culture, (insert your own joke). We find bridge of RMS Titanic. As the leviathan ourselves routinely using nouns like slid beneath the freezing Atlantic waves in ‘access’ and ‘party’ as verbs. Worse, an apocalyptic howl of exploding boilers athletes who win medals are said to have and shattering glass, Captain Smith ‘podiumed’, (yes, really). In fact, in summoned all his authority, reached for American English there is no noun which the bullhorn and called out to his terrified cannot be verbed. Which is, like, passengers, “I’m sorry if people feel there have been failings”. soooo annoying.
