It was the jolt that a balmy languorous bank holiday weekend needed. Jonathan Meades excoriated against jargon and cant. His views were quite familiar, his invective distinct, the satire sharp and aimed at a wide array of targets, and delivered with the kind of unambiguous clarity heard more often in the football terraces.
It was good stuff and gave anyone who cares about the subject, or either writes in a natural language, a sense of indignation, and even, supercilious pride.
When it was finished, however, a question nagged: haven’t we tried this before? These diatribes against the lame, weasel, abstract, fallacious, ugly use of words is a purgative but it hasn’t solved much. Sod all (thanks Jonathan), if truth be admitted.
The virus is wider and multi-platformed. If it was a public service campaign to end littering but the volume of cans and food packaging in the streets, was as bad as it ever was, the organization would accept failure and fold.
Look around and it seems futile. A retired school teacher in Georgia who recently took a moment to correct a letter from the White House – from the desk of the president – provides texture to the degraded state of simple communication. Thomas Jefferson’s White House would never have sent such a letter.
A journalist told me of the occasion when she had asked a senior executive at the opening their company’s new, larger, office whether they were consolidating their position in the region. He replied very briskly, that no, on the contrary, they were growing. In that pause she realized he thought consolidation was a euphemism for decline, restructuring staff, downsizing the corporate footprint. It occurred to her then, that the word shed of its business suit, has an awkward definition.
Typically complaints about speech are thrown at idioms, dialect, patois, which may come from a group and particular activity. The usage might be on the margin, and because it breaches common standards it causes offense. It may invert common use to act in defiance. Like most slang it changes and fades, occasionally staying around long enough for the next generation to mock.
The irony here is that professional jargon and cant comes with academic qualifications and lots of status.
The main reason why it won’t reform, let alone die, even under Meades’s (and others) devastating satire, is that it is initiated in the academy. After graduation it has a career with power and an above average income, and perhaps, even a post graduate degree.
Instead of hoping that media commentators and earnest campaigns could possibly eradicate this type of speech, we ought to restore the virtue of common usage. If Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could proclaim a nation in language anyone can understand, that freedom should be equally possible for everyone else afterwards.
©Copyright Guy Cranswick 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Guy Cranswick 