In my last post, I quoted some examples of linguistic lunacy – commingled containers, access controller, disposable mucus recovery unit, etc – and wondered what Orwell would think.
In his ‘Politics and the English Language‘ essay,he offered “five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written”. Apart from their “avoidable ugliness”, he wrote, two qualities were common to all five examples.
“The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.” What was most characteristic of modern English prose, he added, was a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” – abstractions, hackneyed turns of phrase, phrases “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.
He uses three categories to define the problem: dying metaphors (eg, stand shoulder to shoulder with), operators or false verbal limbs (eg, serve the purpose of), and pretentious diction (eg, phenomenon, constitute, expedite, ameliorate).
Innocent days! Is that really the worst he could come up with, back in 1946? No commingled containers and suboptimal outcomes?
Our speciality – pretentious diction
What is striking, though, is that our current linguistic disease fits mainly into his third category, pretentious diction. Yes, we have our plethora of hackneyed words and phrases (touch base, take a rain check, push the envelope) and love our false verbal limbs, but above all we specialise in pretentious diction.
Often, it’s because we’re using words to (as Orwell puts it) “dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements”. Leo gives an example of this: the terms ‘intellectual harassment’ or ‘semantic violence’, used to describe simple criticism.
There’s no biased judgement, though, behind ‘disposable mucus recovery units’ and ‘ground-mounted confirmatory route markers’. There’s just an insane compulsion to load ordinary things with a huge weight of scientific and technological credibility.
In the Leo examples quoted in my last post, that is the common trend. Orwell’s “pretentious diction”, in its virulent modern form, is ‘pretentious scientifico-technological diction’. We might expect it in one of the more insecure disciplines such as sociology, but some of the worst sinners are people writing about English literature.
To explain it all, I expect we’d have to examine our worship of science and technology, and of course our analysis would have to be rigorously evidence-based. But that will have to be for another day, because I’ve got to go and do some domestic engineering.
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The English language today – or why George Orwell would need his mucus recovery unit if he had not experienced a suboptimal outcome
George Orwell’s essay, ‘Politics and the English Language‘, begins: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way …”
He wrote that in 1946. If language was “in a bad way” then, what way is it now in? According to John Leo, a writer and contributing editor at The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, it’s in a “much worse” way.
In a recent article, ‘On Good Writing‘, adapted from a speech he gave at Ursino College in Pennsylvania, he refers to Orwell’s essay and comments: “Orwell offered five examples of sub-literate prose by known writers. But these examples don’t look as ghastly to us as they did to Orwell, because language is so much worse today.”
To back up his claim, he offers some examples and his translations:
commingled containers – (the label on a bin at Leo’s local recycling centre) otherwise known as ‘cans and bottles’
suboptimal outcome – if ‘achieved’ by students, it means that they failed, Leo writes; in a hospital, it means that the patient died.
hull loss – sometimes used by the airline industry, meaning ‘a plane crashed’.
access controller – a doorman
director of first impressions – a receptionist
thermal therapy unit – a hospital term meaning an ice bag
disposable mucus recovery unit – also a hospital term, which, as you’d expect, refers to a miracle of modern technology: a box of paper hankies.
ground-mounted confirmatory route markers – (found in a US government document) yes, you got it: road signs
non-traditional students – older students
Leo also tells of city officials in Oxford, England who decided to “examine the feasibility of creating a structure in Hinksey Park from indigenous vegetation”. They were, he says, “talking about planting a tree to get some shade”. He offers his own version: “a solar-shielding park structure from low-rise indigenous vegetative material”.
All this reminds me of what an English woman, who had just moved to Calgary in Canada, told me years ago: when she was asked for her occupation at a bank, she said “Housewife”, and the bank official wrote down “Domestic engineer”.
In comparison with these horrors, the examples that Orwell gave are mild. If the state of English in 1946 distressed him, he’d have a fit if he could see how pathologically it has declined.
What’s the reason for all this linguistic lunacy? See my next post.
If Professor Michael O’Keeffe, Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon in Temple Street Children’s Hospital, Dublin, is as good a doctor as he is a man, then he’s one of the best.
On 9 July, he was interviewed by Pat Kenny on RTE Radio 1 (‘Today with Pat Kenny’).
What provoked the interview was the cancellation of operations at Temple Street on children with cataracts, glaucoma, etc. Mr O’Keeffe pointed out that such children risk going blind if the operation is not carried out in good time.
One of the children was, in fact, a six-week-old baby with cataracts – and a baby of six weeks, he said, is at a “critical period in visual development”.
Mr O’Keeffe went on to contrast the PR spin – “the statistics” and “the lies” – of those who manage the Irish health system with the “reality on the ground”, which is “a disaster”. The “system is breaking down”, he said: inefficiencies, cutbacks, phones not answered, lists cancelled, outpatients not starting on time or cancelled.
“I think patients have become a nuisance in hospitals,” he said sardonically. “We could run them so well without them.”
Meaningless jargon
He added: “We talk about grandiose schemes … a ‘world-class health system’ and all this sort of thing, this jargon, which is meaningless, because none of the basics are happening.
“I recently got an email from one of the hospitals saying they now wanted to discuss biological management of patient care. Now you tell me what that means, it’s meaningless stuff, this is the sort of garbage we’re into …”
Looking after patients was “really quite simple, but we’re into management speak”, complicating things, and “we’re forgetting the basics”.
Pointing out the current jargon for closing down – reconfiguration – Mr O’Keeffe said: “World-class means nothing down at my level.”
He spoke passionately and with a savage indignation that it’s not possible to convey in print.
‘Transformation and reconfiguration’
After listening to the interview, I went to the Health Service Executive website and had a look at its 2009 annual report: “implementing our transformation and [here we are!] reconfiguration agenda”, “have achieved 70% of our 2011 targets in 23 of the 35 representative areas … we maximised every possible measure to protect frontline services”, and so on.
Then I googled world class state of the art best practice and got three million results. One of the sites listed was a “world-class data center” which uses various “mission-critical systems”, including a “state-of-the-art fire suppression system”.
Another of the sites was that of a “leading” American health-care provider, which asserted: “Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management.”
This health-care provider may actually be quite good but, if you’re fussy about hyphens (or the lack of them), you’ll notice that the phrase “chronic disease management”, strictly speaking, means “chronic management of disease”.
Indeed. After all, what Mr O’Keeffe was surgically cutting into was all the grandiose, high-flying management speak that masks chronic management and ”disaster” at the ground level.
A new rule
With the shakespearean perception “Methinks she doth protest too much” in mind, I now suggest a new rule:
The quantity and grandiosity of management speak is in inverse proportion to the quality of the service provided.
