I’ve just uploaded a new version of my little book Just
Words – how language gets in the way – and would invite you all to dip in….
History is assumed to consist of hard events like wars and revolts. But
such events don’t just happen – they are caused by what goes on inside our
minds – not just feelings of ambition, fear, greed and resentment but the stories (theories) we use to make
sense of events.
And their meanings are conveyed
by the words we use.
And words have more power
than we realise.
All too often, words (and
metaphors) can take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One
of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”. Written
in 1947, it exposes the way certain
clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the
notion that it is specific people who take decisions and should be held
accountable for them.
Having spent more than half my
adult life in foreign parts, I’ve become very familiar with the difficulties
in conveying meaning and in developing mutual understanding. And with how
slippery words can be.
And it’s not just a linguistic
issue – it’s cultural. You learn – but
all too slowly - how easily very different meanings can be attributed to words
you assumed were clear. This all-too-brief
Anglo-EU translation guide take some common phrases and shows the very
different meanings which Brits and non-Brits attribute to them.
Less well known is a
marvellous guide to civil service jargon which reveals how corporation man
(and woman) use phrases to “cover their backs” and play power games.
- For Information Don’t even think of commenting on this
but if anything goes wrong I’ll remind everyone you knew what was going on.
- Give me a steer on that I don’t know
how to decide on this one. Please make a decision for me and I’ll nick any good
ideas you have.
- Happy To Discuss There’s a whole lot more here than
meets the eye and that I haven’t told you. Should ring alarm bells.
- Hope This Is Helpful I’m well
aware that it is not helpful at all. Please don’t contact me again.
This is all very innocent
amusement but can often slip into mere entertainment with any deeper lessons removed.
A lot of people in Britain indeed are concerned that satire has gone too far
and may have been a
factor in the corrosion of public trust in government and politics
So today I want to explore whether it is possible for those with
serious messages to present them in a humorous way.
Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose
Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions
of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to
justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame
continues unto this day – with almost 2000 definitions. A dentist, for example,
he defined as “a magician who puts metal
into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism
about both business and politics infused his work.
Not so well known (at least in the anglo-saxon world) is The
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - a short satirical work collected
and published in 1911–13 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the
1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the 2nd
French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of platitudes -
self-contradictory and insipid (at least 500 of them).
It was translated and made available to an American audience by the
famous Jacques Barzun only in the 1950s – with a definitive version appearing
in 1967. I’ve just come across it. The idea of a spoof encyclopaedia had
fascinated Flaubert all his life. As a child, he had amused himself by writing
down the absurd utterances of a friend of his mother's, and over the course of
his career he speculated as to the best format for a compilation of
stupidities.
John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of
aggressive common sense (1994) is, however, in a rather different
class. It’s in what the author called the
“humanist
tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the
dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the
pretensions of power”.
Its entries are not so pithy – many taking an entire page…..and much more
didactic.
This glossary of mine is
written in that same humanist tradition of struggle against power – and the words used to sustain it. It explores
first more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians,
consultants and academics which I’ve personally noticed in the course of government
reform - and offers provocative definitions which will hopefully get us into a
more sceptical frame of mind.
But I’ve included hundreds more picked up by others eg The
Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig published in 2015 but of which I
became aware only recently.
And I’ve included two annexes
– the first a spoof by Anthony Jay (author of Yes, Minister) “Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped”; the second a
much more serious bit of advice about how we might fight the insidious doctrine
of neoliberalism.
Further Reading;
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