How's that squirty inky stuff workin' out for ya?

I've written a lot in favour of the principles of plain English and Orwellian language generally, so I enjoyed Ed Smith's piece in the New Statesman challenging the ideas the great man laid out in Politics and the English Language. The penultimate paragraph was especially well put:

Orwell argues that the sins of obfuscation and euphemism followed inevitably from the brutalities of his political era. In the age of the atom bomb and the Gulag, politicians reached for words that hid unpalatable truths. By contrast, our era of vague political muddle and unclear dividing lines has inspired a snappy, gritty style of political language: the no-nonsense, evidence-backed, bullet-pointed road to nowhere.

 

It's very hard to disagree with that, particularly with the point about evidence-based policymaking, a phrase often used as a figleaf for policy-based evidencemaking. But I think the wider argument rests on something of a misreading of plain English; of when it needn't be used and when it must.

Any clear and honest communication of a political message is obviously a challenge both to bureaucratic or academic jargon that overcomplicates issues, but less obviously a challenge to the dumbing down that oversimplifies them (which seems often to be confused for plain English). Owen Jones is quite perceptive in noting that the left are particularly guilty on the former score, and the right on the latter: though we could hardly accuse Obama, say, of subxaggerating his backstory.

It's perfectly possible to be insincere with simple, straightforward language. Speaking honestly ought to be just as important as speaking plainly. Finally, it seems to be stating the obvious that plain English is necessary when the writer's primary purpose is to communicate clearly, but might not be when it isn't. A commentor on Stephen Poole's Guardian piece puts it perfectly:

I think you misunderstand the point of plain English a bit (but then in fairness, perhaps some of its adherents do as well). Most people wouldn't expect poetry to be written in plain English. But most people wouldn't expect poetry in a letter from the council, or a bank. Those are the kinds of communication plain English needs to be used in, so that everybody is able to easily understand information that directly affects their lives.

 

Frustrated narcissists in damp garrets are welcome to shovel as much allusion, amphibology and aureation into their fevered, ne'er-to-be-read ramblings and rants as they can manage: but please keep them away from writing letters for HMRC.

Neoliberal neologisms

This blog post on the Telegraph's site the other day caught my eye. It nicely explains some of the baffling terms financial experts and political economists use, and their self-serving reasons for doing so. We are left, as so often with political and bureaucratic language, with "a form of gibberish in which words are divorced from meaning".

We're already familar with the euphemisms 'quantitative easing' (printing money) and 'negative growth' (recession), but the central bankers create jargon almost as fast as they create money. Many of these new terms are of course abbreviations that demand prior knowledge of their full phrases: QE, ESFS, ZIRP, M1, etc. Orwell once wrote that he was "smothered under journalism"; perhaps today he'd instead feel smothered under acronyms (SUA).

Both sides of the political debate — which, at least in Britain, is increasingly little more than an economic debate — use these rhetorical tricks. 'Social justice' seems to be a clever rebranding of 'redistribution of wealth', and has replaced it in the leftist lexicon as 'tax and spend' has gone out of fashion (which is why it's even cleverer that they don't call it 'economic justice').

On the right, meanwhile, we often hear 'wealth creators' used to imply aspirational entrepreneurs but really to mean the already rich, many of whom collect rather more wealth than they create. Many commentators and even politicians also fail to show much understanding of the difference between deficit and debt, or between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Perhaps we should always bear in mind HL Mencken's quote: "when somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money".