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To speak plainly…

4 August 2003

Language is democratic because only the listener or reader decides what it means. When a writer or speaker attempts to impose their message, they only succeed in deluding themselves.

News that the French administration is to adopt the coinage "courriel" as a defence against the ubiquitous but frowned-upon Anglicism "email", provides an echo of the infamous "loi Toubon" of a decade ago that sought to outlaw such linguistic imports from institutional and commercial communication in France. That law cast its net too wide for the judges of the constitutional court, who struck it down as an infringement of free expression, but the principle lived on in the administration itself, an entity incorporating every branch and level of the vast French government machine.

The word itself is a pleasing confection of courrier, meaning letter, mail or post, and the el of electronique. Like the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, it is satisfyingly modern but rooted in traditional ground, and as such it characterises much that is admirable in the French cultural agenda. Also characteristically French, however, is its origin in officialdom, handed down by a committee for the use of the state's many fonctionnaires.

We are used, in English, to new words and usages. They pop up the whole time, and people either use them or they don't, Their adoption in the language is thus a consequence of the democracy of usage rather than of diktat. It is this usage, rather than origin, that is significant. Had borrowings from foreign languages been officially proscribed, English would be severely impoverished both in words and constructions.

Britain may have no history comparable to that of France of attempting to police its language, but this has not prevented governments from seeking to introduce specific formulations for political ends. Margaret Thatcher went to her political grave peddling the phrase "community charge" for something that almost everybody else was calling the poll tax. More recently, phrases such as "regime change" and "weapons of mass destruction" have been adopted enthusiastically in Whitehall from American political lexicography. These are terms having the appearance of meaning, and their use is convenient because what that meaning is does not have to be spelled out.

Such phrases are designed to obscure the true meaning and complexity of their underlying concepts by replacing them with simple terms. It was Thatcher’s misfortune that the rival (negatively-connoted) "poll tax" was shorter and punchier that her own. The new coinages of the American right are difficult to subvert because they are, themselves, subversions. They simplify so much that the only corrective to them is to re-expand them, which in political discourse is laborious to do. One consequence has been the many attempts to subvert the phrases ironically, as in "weapons of mass distraction" and multiple variations on that theme. With the failure (in the context of Iraq) to find the famous WMD, the phrase itself can now be used ironically without alteration as in "so-called weapons of mass destruction", in which the word "so-called" is so strongly implied that it scarcely needs to be said.

What this reminds us is that the meaning and significance of language lies with the listener, not the speaker. If the listener hears the "so-called" even when the speaker does not intend it, the speaker has lost control of their discourse. It is up to the speaker or writer to establish their credibility through the language they use. This task is more challenging in speech that in the more structured written form, where the attainment of a standard of correctness can alone convey a certain measure of authority.

This notion of correctness in writing is largely a consequence of the development of printing, in which typesetting brings an editorial intervention between the pen of the writer and the printed page. Type-setting demands, as a minimum, regularised spelling and forms of punctuation. This has expanded inexorably to produce a standardised set of grammatical conventions and a "correct" form of written English.

A reader (particularly an educated one) is more likely to be convinced by an argument written in correct English, and this is presumably why examiners give marks for spelling and grammar when assessing written papers. Thus both Gowers and his reviser Fraser in The Complete Plain Words (written for the benefit of British fonctionnaires) oppose split infinitives at least partly on the grounds that a writer who employs them may be belittled in the eyes of their reader. But they endorse the use of "but" (much favoured in this column) as the opening word of a sentence or paragraph, a usage often frowned upon these days even though the alternative "however" (as in "They endorse, however, ...) is convoluted and inelegant.

The avoidance of an opening "but" is probably an example of "invented tradition" — whereby, because people know that there are conventions of correctness, they are liable to invent them as a way of reassuring themselves about the quality of their own written work. But, since all developments in language are invented, what people think in these cases is much more important than what the textbooks tell them to think. So if people really think that opening a sentence — or, worse still, a paragraph - with "but" is a solecism, the writer of this column is in danger of undermining the credibility of his opinions through the use of grammar that does not conform to his readers’ standards. To protest that those standards are in error when considered against the literary conventions of the 1950s will not assist his case.

In the case of speech a similar principle undoubtedly applies, although here the applicable standard is one of meaning and nuance. Speech-writers draft specifically for the spoken word, so phrase fragments and incomplete sentences rise out of the text to establish mood or context for the ideas that they accompany. These are the raw material of sound bites, designed to create rapport between speaker and audience and to convey a simplicity of meaning that subsequent textual analysis may reveal as more subtle.

That is how Tony Blair got 19 or so standing ovations from The US Congress while delivering a relatively balanced message, not all of which they wanted to hear. Politically it seems attractive to speak thus to two audiences (in this case the American and the European) allowing each to take from it a reassuring message. The danger is that both audiences spot or subsequently become aware of both messages, which undermines the credibility of the whole.

The difficulty for the speechmaker as for the writer is the unfettered (and unfetterable) capacity of the listener and reader to analyse and discriminate. This can lead to a dangerous assumption that people only hear what they want to hear, which, in turn, is where the idea of a speech that says all things to all people comes in. A more likely analysis is that people want to hear something that is plausible and consistent, something, in fact, that does not seek to discredit their critical faculties but engages them as equal partners in an open discourse.

Language is the ultimate tool of democracy and attempts to abuse it will inevitably fail, eventually. If either speech or writing is to be effective it has to have a consistent meaning that, so far from being tailored to its audience, is open to their judgement. It must say what it means, not what it thinks they want to hear. Otherwise presentation becomes the policy; it ends up being discounted and no progress is made. Just as courriel will only prosper if French people choose to use it; political discourse will have positive consequences only if it acknowledges the discrimination of the listener rather than attempting to manage the discussion to a predetermined end.

Copyright Martin Whitlock 2003