Rectify the names

Hello again, dear reader. My previous post proved perspicacious: I have indeed been rather busy of late, mostly with the new day job – about which I will soon write more – but also with occasionally contributing to the Spectator's Culture House blog. Like a preacher who by day rails against every sin under the sun then by night smokes crack with rent boys, so I murder everyone else's darlings in a professional capacity then spawn a surfeit of my own for fun.

Anyway, I forget how the conversation started, but a pal and I the other day were pondering which countries officially prefix their names with the definite article. I Googled this, and the answer is that there are only two: The Gambia and The Bahamas. (Later, at work, I and a couple of our writers agonised over whether 'Maldives' should take an informal 'the'; opinion was divided, but the majority thought it should.)

The BBC article that answered our question also turned up this interesting quote, which I thought I'd share with you. You can consider it an early example of hard nominative determinism.

One day, a disciple asked Confucius: "If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?" 

Confucius replied: "My first task would certainly be to rectify the names." 

The puzzled disciple asked: "Rectify the names? Is this a joke?" 

Confucius replied: "If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible – and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names."

D'you know what I mean?

In a slight departure from the usual fare, here's Noel Gallagher in GQ sharing his thoughts on all those titles of creative works that have nothing to do with their subject matter (a point I've put less persuasively). It made me laugh.

 

But... what f***ing winds me up about books... 

This is already the best sentence I've ever heard. 

...is, like... my missus will come in with a book and it will be titled - and there's a lot of these, you can substitute any word, it's like a Rubik's Cube of shit titles - it'll be entitled The Incontinence Of Elephants. And I'll say "What's that book about?" And she'll say, "Oh it's about a girl and this load of f***ing nutters..." Right... so it's not about elephants, then? Why the f*** is it called The Incontinence Of Elephants? Another one: The Tales Of The Clumsy Beekeeper. What's that about? "Oh it's about the French Revolution." Right, f*** off. If you're writing a book about a child who's locked in a f***ing cupboard during the f***ing Second World War... he's never seen an elephant. Never mind a f***ing giraffe.

Quite.

Dearly departed

The Economist has a good blog on airport names this week, pointing out the trend for naming them and other key bits of infrastructure after famous locals. If Birmingham is seriously considering renaming theirs after Ozzy Osbourne, the genre would seem to have jumped the shark.

In Glasgow, we now have the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome. Clearly, on one level this makes sense, as he is not just Scotland's greatest cyclist but Britain's greatest Olympian (who also has a train named after him already). But there's still something about the trend that bothers me.

It's not just that the man strikes me as modest enough to be embarrassed by it (though we should be thankful for that: imagine if they were naming a stadium after Usain Bolt instead). It's also not just that he hasn't even retired yet (what if he competes there in 2014 and flops?) let alone died, which I think should be a minimum qualification for supplying the name of anything noteworthy. It's not hard to think of examples of famous people who have fallen from public grace towards or soon after the end of their lives or careers — not even hard in the realm of cycling — so the authorities will always be leaving themselves hostage to fortune.

It's not just the aesthetics either: compare JFK with its evocative former name, Idlewild. There may be a case for commemorating a few particularly great individuals — I would grudgingly accept Charles de Gaulle, I suppose — but there's not much poetry to be derived from the names of people. Imagine if every London Underground station were instead named after a well-known local: no more Swiss Cottage, Seven Sisters or Gallions Reach. It would be a sad loss to a small but distinctive part of our culture.

More than that, though, it's the idea that society can't really get along without particular individuals, which seems a depressingly authoritarian view of the world, and one that suggests an ahistorical lack of continuity with past and future generations: with the greatest respect to Sir Chris, soon enough he will mean little more to the latter than he did to the former. Nasty dictators still name not just their buildings but even their days of the week after themselves. Augustus did the same with the calendar in his time.

It seems to me a trend that, if we want to see ourselves as egalitarian and democratic — respectful of our heritage but free-thinking and free-naming — we ought to leave in the departure lounge.

We are all liberals now

With the unsurprising re-election of President Obama, and with voters across the United States endorsing gay marriage and cannabis, we've heard a lot in the last week about the triumph of liberalism. What better time, then, to rid ourselves of an increasingly useless part of the political lexicon?

To a British politics 'n' history graduate like me, the word 'liberal' will always evoke John Stuart Mill's belief that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others". It also brings to mind the classical liberalism of political economy that began with Adam Smith and continued through Hayek and Friedman: the mantle that today would be claimed by libertarians.

At first, then, the L-word¹ meant 'being left alone by the government', as economic liberalism still does in Britain, or as neoliberalism now does around the world. Annoyingly, in many other cases it's often unclear whether it still means that or its opposite. We all like to consider ourselves liberal towards oppressive governments, but have very differing opinions on whether a particular government policy helps freedom (by freeing people from poverty, as the liberal left see it) or hinders it (by interfering in people's business, as the liberal right see it).

The waters got muddier after 1906, as Lloyd George's Liberal government introduced pensions and ramped up taxes on the wealth creators/parasites rich. Ever since then, it's been tricky to work out whether British Liberals and their successor parties are really on the left or the right — whether they want fairness or laissez-faireness — a fudge that recently helped get them back into government, but immediately became a problem again once they got there.

In the United States, 'liberal' is today almost entirely synonymous with 'left-wing'; when someone like Norman Mailer describes himself as a 'left conservative', we might take that to mean a Blue Labour-esque position that is conservative on social issues but left-leaning on the economy. I see no contradiction in that, but it strikes us as unusual because 'liberal' is now so often used to mean both left-wing (economically) and tolerant, permissive, etc (socially).

This also leaves us with the problem of why 'conservative' has become synonymous with right-leaning on the economy, particularly when conserving things is often the last thing on radical rightwing minds. I suppose this politico-linguistic problem really took off when the non-left, in Western countries, abandoned the Keynesian economic consensus in the 1970s.

In Australia, meanwhile, the Liberal Party is the equivalent of the US's Republicans (though they generally oppose a republic) or Britain's Conservatives (who are these days pretty liberal). They might be truest to the low church, small state origins of the idea, but we're left with a word that can mean its complete opposite, depending on the country, the context and no doubt the company.

Should we instead use 'progressive' to describe left-liberals, as many of them do? I would suggest not: any political idea to which no-one could reasonably object (in this case, 'progress') is not an idea at all. Similarly, the left in America seem to take offence at being accused (or take offence on Obama's behalf when he is accused) of 'socialism', a term many in Britain and Europe are still happy to use to describe their own set of beliefs. Might 'social democrat' (now a bit out of fashion in Britain) be less offensive, or does that suggest something more Mailer-ish; too much about responsibilities and not enough about rights? Would 'liberaltarian' be the most honest candidate, or is it just too much of a mouthful?

I suggest we seek guidance from the model offered by the excellent Political Compass, refining right and left economically into whether they are socially liberal or conservative (though even they use the rather loaded term 'authoritarian'; illiberalism and authoritarianism aren't quite the same thing, and there are plenty of constitutional conservatives who would pass as civil libertarians). The top left and bottom right of the compass have always seemed to me the most logical positions — either you accept government interference or social norms to constrain your behaviour or you don't — but that's for another post.

The point is that we have to use these terms with care, and should be quick to ditch them once they become interchangeable. Clarity in our political language might then become our best weapon against the lack of clarity in our political thinking.

^{1. [I've capped the L because so many sans serif fonts show a lower case l as indistinguishable from an upper case I: another serious failure of communications if you ask me.]↩}

The cuts

This story illustrates a couple of rules about cutting and pasting — an issue I encounter all the time in my job as an editor.

First, make sure you're clear about:

• what text you're cutting
• where you're cutting it from
• where you're pasting it to (you'd be surprised how often these first three are overlooked)
• whether copyright rules allow you to do so
• whether it might be better to use new text instead

Second, if you fail to take note of any of these points: make sure there's no chance that the people reading the passage in the original and those reading the copy will compare notes. (This happened to me at university once, when our lecturer gave identical feedback to me and two other students even though we'd written completely different proposals for a piece of work. He ended up looking a bit foolish, at least to us.)

This story also illustrates a point in my earlier blog about confusing nomenclature. Why is the company carrying out inspection reports on Ofsted's behalf called Tribal? It may be that they carry out all sorts of other functions, but in what way does that name describe any of them?

Compare this to, say, the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers or (a favourite of mine) the Scottish Association of Master Bakers: you need no information beyond their name to work out what they do for a living. Is Tribal's obfuscation an unfortunate side-effect of trying to sound hip and modern, or part of a deliberate effort to make the important work they do less transparent?

Similarly, compare Ofsted with Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education, which we still had in Scotland until recently, though always shortened to HMIe. The 'Of-' prefix for official bodies (Ofgem, Ofqual, Ofwat) has become almost as much of a cliche as the '-gate' suffix for political scandals. HMIe is now part of Education Scotland, itself part of the trend towards replacing adjectives or verbs with nouns in names of organisations. Compare Scottish Rugby Union (founded in 1873) with Scotland Rugby League (founded in 1997).

The message remains the same: whenever you use a word — whether as part of a written or spoken sentence, or as a proper noun in a name — it's always worth considering whether there's a clearer one you could use instead.