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.
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Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary is a remarkable character (love him, hate him or love/hate him). He’s remarkable both in what he’s achieved (love or hate his methods) and in the way he talks to the world. Here are some examples:
Plane English a la Michael O’Leary
“We need a recession. We’ve had 10 years of growth. A recession gets rid of crappy loss-making airlines and it means we can buy aircraft more cheaply.” (3 November 2008)
In economy no frills; in business class it’ll all be free – including the blowjobs. (Talking of plans for a transatlantic service: 2008)
You don’t see the government confiscating lipsticks and gel-filled bras on the London Underground. Most of them couldn’t identify a gel-filled bra if it jumped up and bit them. (Complaining about increased airport security checks: 2006)
At the moment the ice is free, but if we could find a way of targeting a price on it, we would. (October 2005)
Every idiot who gets fired in the industry shows up as a consultant somewhere. Shoot consultants and advertising agency specialists. (October 2005)
I’m probably just an obnoxious little bollocks. Who cares? (2006)
Some people are so ideologically opposed to O’Leary that nothing he says could amuse them. Perhaps, though, they might admit that he always achieves rapid lift-off.
Official spokespersonese, Ryanair-style
In contrast, some of his spokespeople indulge in the kind of officialese that is so loaded with heavy baggage the verbal machine remains firmly stuck on the ground.
Recently, a 52-year-old ex-Viking from Norway had a little problem about a “chicken premium sandwich” he was presented with on a flight from Berlin to Rygge. Since the meat was made out of rubber, he refused to pay for it. The flight attendant threatened to call the police. He assumed she was joking and fell asleep.
At Rygge airport, three men in orange police jackets came on board and took him off for questioning. The Rygge police confirmed later, reportedly with chuckles (yes, Norwegians are capable of chuckling), that they’d never been called out for a passenger complaining about a sandwich. No charges.
A Ryanair spokesperson explained: “The captain on flight FR8904 requested police assistance on arrival after a passenger became disruptive in flight. This matter was addressed with the passenger by police on arrival. Ryanair crew only request such assistance when deemed absolutely necessary based on their assessment of the disruptive passenger behaviour and their reading of the situation.”
No, it’s not the worst example of officialese, but it’s surprising (and inconsistent) that bossman O’Leary doesn’t charge his spokespeople for each wasted word, and also for each long word that is not “deemed absolutely necessary”.
How would O’Leary himself have put it?
“We had to call the police to deal with this Norwegian bollocks who’d refused to pay for his *x!king sandwich. Yeah, maybe we flew off the handle a bit, but what do these gobshites expect on a Ryanair plane – a Michelin five-star?”
The French and the Dutch voted down the EU constitution in 2005.
A prominent American judge, Mark P Painter, in an interesting article titled ‘Did Bad Writing Doom the EU Constitution?’, suggested that one reason for this rejection was that the voters had “actually tried to read” the constitution.
He quotes a typical paragraph:
“Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level. The institutions of the Union shall apply the principle of subsidiarity as laid down in the Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. National Parliaments shall ensure compliance with that principle in accordance with the procedure set out in that Protocol.”
He quotes, for comparison, the Tenth Amendment in the American Bill of Rights:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
He then cites William DuBay of Impact Information (a plain-language crusader), who drew attention to some stark differences between the US and the EU constitutions:
US Constitution
11 pages, 4,000 words, seven articles, all written at a “democratic 9th-grade level”.
EU Constitution
855 pages, 156,447 words, “written at the 16th-grade level”; “badly organized … The first and most important part is missing a title. Some of the 465 articles ended up in the wrong sections.”
His final comment: “Of course, we cannot lord it over the Europeans too much, because our lawyers usually write too many words. And most of our statutes are awful. But considering the drafters of the two constitutions, we had the better group.”
Unreadable
If ‘bad writing’ and unreadable legalese did contribute to the French and Dutch rejection, the EU, it seems, did not learn the lesson. After all, when the Lisbon Treaty was rejected initially by Irish voters, one of the reasons given was that it was “unreadable”.
However, it appears that this unreadability was not a matter of incompetence; that, in fact, the treaty was deliberately rendered unreadable.
The Lisbon Treaty was almost a carbon copy of the Constitutional Treaty voted down by France and the Netherlands. The author of the text, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, said the Lisbon Treaty was “purely a legal rewriting – incidentally unreadable – of the draft Constitutional Treaty”.
The treaty was not “incidentally” unreadable, though, according to Guliano Amato, the former vice-president of the convention that drafted the EU Constitution. He said that EU leaders had deliberately made the treaty unreadable so that the changes would be less noticeable.
We tend to assume that politicians, lawyers and the drafters of constitutions seek to communicate clearly. But it ain’t necessarily so.
Judge Painter is one of the seven judges on the United Nations Appeals Tribunal. His book The Legal Writer – 40 Rules for the Art of Legal Writing is available at http://store.cincybooks.com/
He is a powerful advocate for plain legal language. Unlike the drafters of the EU treaties, he believes that “The law affects everyone — we all should be able to understand it.”
Website: http://www.judgepainter.org/
