If words fall into disrepair

[aster_dw]

The Guardian published Tony Jund's essay on language and articulacy today, which I thought deserved at least a cursory reading. It hardly needs to be accepted as gospel truth - in fact, in some places it reads like a verbose, self-indulgent rant - but it invites reflection on a number of issues which I have long seen as important on both personal

Comments

[arda_unmarred]

Thanks for that, it's a favourite topic of mine as well.

There is an absolute ocean of writing on academic jargon in the humanities and the campaigns against it, but that's not what you're talking about of course. There's also lots on managerial-speak and its invasion of various spheres of life, its tendency to suck all meaning out of language, replacing it with a set of vacuous and incoherent cliches ('optimising centres of excellence' and that kind of thing). But again, it seems that you're talking about something else: a basic dumbing-down, an intentional narrowing of the vocabulary range. What in the world is the Plain Language Commission? Your example is horrifying!

When I moved to Oxford from Denver it felt like emerging from a desert into a tropical rainforest - everyone here spoke so much better, the expected level of articulacy was so much higher. I spent my teenage years among people whose (native) English consisted of about a hundred words, and every second word was a 'like' or 'you know'. But their limitation was not a choice, they simply did not know there was anything better. Whereas what you're describing is a willful, utterly Orwellian destruction of words. I would die in such an environment.

[aster_dw]

The Plain Language Commission is a generally useful organisation, which campaigns for the use of clear, plain English in official communications. To some extent they are fighting against the meaningless managerial jargon that you mentioned in your comment. Funnily enough, Orwell's Six Rules for Writers seem to be a part of the inspiration for the campaign.

In general, PLC does a lot of useful and reasonable things, but their principles become a parody of themselves when taken too far (as they often are). In those cases you get the horrifying destruction of the words that I had described. Although the main problem in many workplaces isn't even the PLC's sermons, but just the plain fact that you spend most of your waking hours talking and writing about a very narrow range of issues and concepts, which slowly erases most of one's wider vocabulary.