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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Scepticism and Satire - Glossaries to help the fight against the power elites

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;
-      The Development Dictionary; Wolfgang Sachs (2015)

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