JUST WORDS

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
TS Eliot “East Coker”

Words are indeed slippery.

We hear what we want to hear

We look at the world in so many different ways

It’s a wonder that we are able to communicate at all

That seems to take me clearly into the postmodernity camp about whom I do, however, have ambivalent feelings – reflected in a series of posts I did last year viz Postmodernity Anyone?

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 out minds – not just feelings of ambition; fear; greed; resentment; but the stories (theories) we use to make sense of events. And they are legitimised by the words we use. Words are very powerful - indeed have a life of their own – some more so than others. Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) 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 people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

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 2^nd 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. The idea of a spoof encyclopedia 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.

This glossary of mine - called Just Words - has a slightly more serious intent. It identifies more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform and offers provocative definitions which will hopefully get us into a more sceptical frame of mind.

Only in the latter stages of its drafting did I come across John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense¹ issued in 1994 which talks of 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 more didactic….in the style of Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords (Oxfam 2010 and The Development Dictionary; Wolfgang Sachs (2015. Saul contrasts his approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”.

The glossary is written in that same humanist tradition of struggle against power – and the words they use to sustain it. My glossary therefore forms part of a wider commentary on the effort various writers have made over the ages to challenge the pretensions of the powerful (and of the ”thought police” who have operated on their behalf). And , of course, the role of satire², caricature and cartoons³, poetry⁴ and painting⁵ should not be forgotten! Nor the role of films and TV series these days⁶.

1 Some examples can be found here – and an interview with him at http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html

2 not just the literary sort - see section 9

3 from Daumier to Feiffer and Steadman

4 Brecht

5 Goya, Kollwitz and Grosz are the most powerful example

6 From the “Yes, Minister” series in the UK in the 1970s to “The Thick of it” of the 2000s