Opinion

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

Word Search

You 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 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”. Able to articulate the most abstract human thoughts, English is replete with sumptuous words like ‘vicissitude’ and ‘usurping’, (I sometimes feel I never did enough usurping). Accommodating both the academic and the poet is by no means unique to English; however, I am qualified only to discuss my native tongue, a fluency in which gives me some eleventythousand words what with to writing here and speaking also. These days, English is under constant assault, particularly from American culture, (insert your own joke). We find ourselves routinely using nouns like ‘access’ and ‘party’ as verbs. Worse, athletes who win medals are said to have ‘podiumed’, (yes, really). In fact, in American English there is no noun which cannot be verbed. Which is, like, soooo annoying. 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! 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 with language burned into our consciousness and set light to our imagination? Giants like Bertrand Russell, philosopher and avowed pacificist, who wrote, “It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, which prevents us from living freely and nobly.” Or Emmeline Pankhurst, political activist leading the fight for equal rights, blazing in defiance, “We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.” But perhaps more than anyone, we look to Captain Edward Smith, alone on the bridge of RMS Titanic. As the leviathan slid beneath the freezing Atlantic waves in an apocalyptic howl of exploding boilers and shattering glass, Captain Smith summoned all his authority, reached for the bullhorn and called out to his terrified passengers, “I’m sorry if people feel there have been failings”.

Where are the great orators whose power with language burned into our consciousness and set light to our imagination?