Is the English Language Still Fit for Purpose?

We’re reminded today by David Aaronovitch in the Times of why care with English usage and knowing the rules is more than simple pedantry or being ‘cute’. And it echoes what I’ve been saying for years – some might say ad nauseam, that in allowing the governing clerical classes to get away with bad English (just because they’re doing the jobs they do) is reprehensible, as well as intellectually and culturally bankrupt.

On a purely practical level, meanwhile, it further shows a paucity of mental rigour, as well as being simply misleading.

In his reference to George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, Aaronovitch also deftly points to the most egregious abusers in this regard: party political apparatchiks – in this instance the Labour variety and their “vacuous advice” to their party leader (previously published by The Guardian… Where else?). It’s at the root of the problems one has, particularly with the Labour Party’s very raison d’etre, as well as with the decline of language. And in all fairness, it also points to the use by politicians of every hue of the slippery, equivocal and arse-covering language that defines them.

Our columnist refers helpfully to Orwell’s specifc charge that “…bad thinking and bad writing were intimately linked”, and further that distorting habits might include “the use of stale imagery, the replacement of concrete expressions with abstract ones, the deployment of long, technical words instead of simpler ones and the use of phrases that are ‘tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse’”.

But if all I’m saying here still eludes you as too abstract or high-falutin’, I ask you to consider this – as indeed Aaronovitch has done in referring to an era of incomprehension

“I’ve bothered Times readers with this because I think it is significant. Labour stands a reasonable chance of forming a government in an election that will be under way about this time next year, and so it seems prudent to try to imagine what the party will want to do. And here are some of its top thinkers — or people connected with its top thinkers — arguing about exactly that.

When you write this badly, when you are so unclear that even experts in your field cannot decipher your intention, there is a reason for it. It could, of course, simply be that you are an idiot. But two other explanations are more likely: either that you don’t really know what you mean yourself; or that you do know, but you’d rather not spell it out.”

If you cannot see what we’re in danger of losing now, then it might even now be too late, as it’s already gone from us. But it’s really very simple…

Professional writers without publishing deals or established by-lines have noticed a decline in the value of this particular type of tradecraft in a warp comparable to what the advent of digital cameras and Photoshop has done for professional photographers: now everyone’s Bailey, Beaton or Lichfield. In journalism, PR and advertising the trend over a generation has been that anyone with an English GCSE (or indeed a wife who’s got one) is a Gore Vidal, Hunter S Thompson or a Charles Saatchi (the rule-changing advertising copywriter, not the throttler). But even that analogy goes only so far. Because once you render the very mechanics of verbal communication – the English language – unfit for purpose there is likely no way back. And dialogue on every level becomes guesswork, misunderstanding and chaos. This is more important than photography, as it defines our species.

If you don’t believe me, or Mr Aaronovitch, read Orwell’s essay. Labour think-tankers, you’re excused. Obviously.