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No bad thing
I’d like to introduce you to Bob Mathers, management skills trainer, lover of languages and also my Dad!
Bob writes regularly for Hospital Doctor online on communication and time management and by special request he’s writing a series of blogs for the Crocstar website on the English language. Take it away Bob…
Did you know the game of football was played at Eton School before 1750? Ten years later they were playing similar games at Westminster, Charterhouse and Harrow. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that most of the rules we understand today came into operation. Crucially, while all this developing and changing was going on, schools couldn’t play each other because they didn’t have a common set of rules. For example, Rugby and Marlborough used hands and feet whereas Winchester and Shrewsbury allowed ‘dribbling’.
So it is with language. We know language develops and changes all the time but, hey, we still need a recognisable structure and a set of rules otherwise some of us will keep putting our feet into our mouths while others will be ‘drivelling’. Let’s agree that grammar rules are not a bad thing dreamed up by teachers to bore us. There is a fashion these days to decry grammar and ‘correct’ usage. It cuts across the grain of our freedom to do anything we want. As we see with the football example, you can do your own thing if you want but it limits you in the end.
The next question is ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ or, to paraphrase who is in charge of protecting the language and its structure, if not our teachers? It’s down to all of us to try to use it in ways that help us understand and be understood. Now there’s a revolutionary idea. That, I think, is its greatest protection. You can change it, maul it to pieces and create all the secret little exclusive languages you like but if fewer and fewer people understand you, you’ll have shot yourself in the foot – to use yet another footballing analogy.
So what linguistic misdemeanors are annoying me this week? How about tautology – the pointless use of words or phrases that say the same thing, e.g, ‘Let’s re-do that again once more’. It’s tiring having to read or listen to it. And it’s not just people who didn’t study grammar who come out with it.
How about this, heard last December from someone described as an expert on the Afghan situation on radio: “…this governing council, the composition of which is made up of different elements…” Uhm, why don’t you try ‘composed of different elements’? It saves six of your ten words and doesn’t make you sound inexpert (or stupid).
And here’s a little gem from a politics lecturer at St. John’s Oxford in a Radio 5 interview earlier this month: “Let’s not overblow that too much.” You don’t have to be a fascist to detest poor language skills. You just need to love language and dislike people pretending to be clever while demonstrating that their thought processes don’t quite match up to their self-publicity. It’s like lying on your CV; good people don’t do it.
Now before I escalate this matter upwards I’m just going to return back to where we were in the first place before this happened…
It’s business jargon that gets me…not just the “blue sky thinking” and “low hanging fruit” type business jargon, but also being overly verbose in an attempt to impress when a simple sentence would do.
Have you read James Cochrane’s “Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English”? John Humphrys wrote the introduction: an introduction that includes, talking about language, the sentence “It is powerful and it is potent…”. Two adjectives meaning the same thing, in the same sentence…?
Yes, I agree Emily. There are two things going on – firstly, the more people use language loosely and lazily, the more likely it is that inaccuracies will creep in. We can only tolerate it while doing what we can to persevere with our own version of perfection.
Secondly, there is the trend to verbosity you identify i.e. more words + bigger words = me sounding clever, but also me trying to hide something. Add to this your ‘business jargon’ (BJ) and we have an unedifying cocktail of exclusion, confusion and sometimes obfuscation. It’s hard not to sound like a ‘comma-spotter’ when I talk about this.
I wonder if BJ is not just a verbal manifestation of fashion with people wanting to be seen (and heard) knowing all the latest ‘buzz’ words and ‘key’ phrases (I’m doing it myself). Or is BJ just another version of BS?
I haven’t read Cochrane’s book but I shall look out for it, thank you. You might like to have a look at a short book by Harry G Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, called ‘On Bullshit’ (2005). He makes fascinating observations on the relationship of language to people’s purpose, which only a philosopher could come up with.
Nice post
My bugbear happens repeatedly on the BBC, when they say: ‘The [organisation] have/are/do’ – it shouldn’t be plural!
[...] in 2001 and has been re-edited for this guest blog post. If you enjoy it, why not read his other guest post in this blog: No Bad Thing on how the English language [...]