So farewell, then, plain English.............

Have you noticed how  we have been acquiring  parallel versions and perversions of the English language?

 

There is ‘Namspeak’ deriving from the US adventures in SE Asia and migrated with American mercenaries to Rhodesia. It gave us ‘floppy’ (a dead body),

‘collateral damage’ (sh*t, I just bombed the school), terr (‘freedom fighter’), ‘casevac’ – removing the wounded, ‘taking the gap’ - scarpering. One of my all-time favourites is a sign on the boundary fence of the Chisholm Ranch in Texas. ‘Trespassers will be terminated with extreme prejudice’!

 

There’s ‘medspeak’, the daily garbage spouted by doctors, scientists, and assorted wowsers out to scare us. This makes us malleable. Everything is a ‘condition’ or a ’disorder’. We have ‘attention deficit disorder’ for very lively and disobedient kids. They are drugged into conformity when all that is needed is a clip around the ear. We have ‘personality disorder’ meaning ’raving bonkers’. The list is endless.

 

Then we have ‘Sir Humphreyspeak’ named after the slippery Permanent Secretary in’ Yes, Minister’ (which, take it from me, was documentary, not comedy) designed to obscure meaning, rather than to reveal it, in common with most of the Nuspeak variants.

 

‘I hear what you say’ – I disagree with you entirely.

 

‘A very bold suggestion’.  You are barking.

 

‘Very interesting’. Totally stupid.

 

‘Safe pair of hands’. Does nothing therefore does no harm.

 

There is journalese, words that are quite at odds with their true meanings. Murray is a ‘sporting hero’. No he’s not. He’s a grumpy tennis player earning loadsamoney. A hero is someone who shows exceptional courage in hazardous circumstances. ‘Facing financial Armageddon’ the DT tells us today.  ‘Armageddon’   is the final battle between good and evil. So who will be the contestants? He really means another nice mess they’ve got us into.

 

And the pages are scattered with ’syndrome’ and ‘traumatic’, but never in their real meaning. You might be ‘traumatised’ by serving in Afghanistan, but not by a theatre performance.

 

The world of politics? Don’t get me started!

 

Time was when plain speaking was the hallmark of a good politician – ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. One of my favourites is from Ernest Bevin. When someone commented that Herbert Morrison, whom he hated, was ‘his own worst enemy’, Ernie replied ‘Not while I alive he ain’t !’

 

Now politicians use the words of the huckster, the sharp-elbowed estate agent. ‘Messages’ must be ’promoted’; ‘selling a positive image’; the slogans of the marketing man.

 

They change or obscure the meaning of words. ‘Developing country’ means one that is getting poorer and the people are eating field-mice. Everything is a ‘priority’, a contradiction. ‘The Third Way’ doesn’t mean anything at all.

 

They always have a ‘passion’ for their policies. No, they don’t. They only have a passion for their expenses and horizontal jogging. They don’t have policies; they have slogans. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’; a meaningless soundbite. ‘I’m a reglar kinda guy’, but morally constipated, your Reverence.

 

And we have a multitude of ‘wars’ and ‘Tsars’. ‘War on crime’. ‘War on drugs’. These lead to ’crackdowns’. Have they ever won any of these wars? And capital letters instead of words; IED – a bomb; WMD – a fictional weapon owned by someone we don’t like.

 

About 30 years ago, my local Council decided that we were no longer ‘ratepayers’; we were ‘customers’, as if we had the choice of taking our custom elsewhere if not satisfied with the bin collection. The NHS started calling patients ‘clients’, as if the GP was the equivalent of you solicitor, charging by the millisecond. That didn’t last long.

 

We now live in a world of euphemism.