Arch language

The Olympics haven't officially started, but already we have a report of broken communications. The BBC has the story:

'Outside Lords this morning there are dozens of members of the public trying to get in to watch the archery. They are not being allowed in. This is the "ranking round" where archers attain a score which then leaves them in a certain seeding for the main event. Today's archery is taking place on the nursery ground, not in the main playing area.

But the London 2012 website advertised today's round as "unticketed". Many spectators interpreted that as open to the public and have arrived expecting to get in. One couple told me they had arrived having been told specifically by Locog they could bring their grandchild in.

There is a lot of ill will and bad feeling on the pavement.'

Why did the organisers describe the event as 'unticketed' rather than 'not open to the public'? It seems that even Locog staff, understandably, interpreted 'unticketed' as 'not requiring a ticket'.

This story illustrates perfectly how sloppy language can lead not only to widespread confusion, but also to bad public relations. Let's hope the people running the Games have now learned a lesson about the importance of plain English.

Band words

I enjoyed this recent tale of a communications breakdown (which also features the British jobsworth, a stock character in these situations). The confusion about '4am' is perhaps a forgivable result of the trend for misleading monikers in popular culture. The sturdy [definite article + plural noun] formula for band names — which gave us the Beatles, the Animals, and so on — has long gone out of fashion.

In my youth it was replaced by single short words: Blur, Oasis, Verve, Cast, Muse. As musical tastes have fragmented since then, so have the names performers give their acts, as a glance at any advert for a music festival shows.

One of the common themes now, though, is for bands to advertise themselves as some sort of unrelated organisation: Mull Historical Society, the Victorian English Gentlemens Club, Bombay Bicycle Club. I don't know whether it's a coincidence that these names all share a hint of wistful romance.

It's easy to laugh at the police and council for their reaction in this case, but one can see why 'music from 4am' could be a bit misleading. It also, I think, shows the importance to new acts of choosing a really cool name: would the Rolling Stones, or Motörhead, or Iron Maiden, have ended up playing in stadiums around the world if the most basic part of their brand was less impressive? Or would they still be playing to council officials in village pubs in Surrey?

Good prose is like a windowpane

Welcome to my new blog about language and communications. If you don't know me, I'm Nicholas Mayes and I work as an editor in the education sector in Scotland (teaching those who teach how to teach how to write). My background is in journalism, public relations and parliamentary reporting.

There are already some excellent guides on how to use grammar and plain English online. I hope instead to use this blog as a space for exploring how we communicate: the ways we communicate well and the (often amusing, often annoying, and sometimes dangerous) things that happen when we don't. I plan to share any insights my day job offers, and to give my take on anything that catches my eye in the news. I hope you'll offer some thoughts of your own in the comments.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a quote from my linguistic and political hero (the two overlap a lot), George Orwell:

'One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.'

We need not write with a political purpose to avoid these traps, but we do need to write with some sort of purpose. I would offer three simple rules before putting pen to paper:

• Decide what you want to say.
• Decide who you want to say it to.
• Decide the best way of saying it to them.

Once you've done this, you can go about following the advice Orwell offered in Politics and the English Language:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Follow these rules, and your communications will stand out from the meaningless, decorative, purple humbug that makes up so much of what we read and hear every day.