Media
Miller, William Lee
Media TALK ENGLISH GOOD HOW NEWSPEAK IMPACTS US When YOU read George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," you believe that he is writing about something important. When you read...
...If you should meet one, treat it gentle...
...After my standards had been softened by a decade's living in media-marinated middle America, I presided over a gathering on "Plain English in a Complex Society" that was sponsored by the Indianapolis Public Library and a group of Indiana English teachers - the kind of meeting in which a man would arise in the back of the room and say, "I think you have been unfair to the passive voice in English...
...The first is enjoyable, within limits, although eventually it palls...
...What is the current status quo...
...as we all do...
...WILLIAM LEE MILLER (This article is adapted from the introduction to the Poynter pamphlet, "Plain English in a Complex Society...
...hopefully at this point in time he impacted the public in terms of the ongoing process of an improvement situation, word wise...
...Later he told me - he was a man who had lived most of his life in France and didn't believe the march of Civilization had reached Indiana - that you really could never get it straight unless you had been born in a particular section of England...
...Newman collected some amusing errors of a peculiarly English stamp...
...Even E. B. White reports the glee of readers who found him writing "the fact that," a phrase that Will Strunk detested, in White's own first revision of Strunk's little book, The Elements of Style...
...Euphemisms and jargon and gummed-together catch phrases keep the citizenry from understanding well what is happening in the world: that's what bothered him...
...And Caspar Weinberger and the defense people have some purpose when they transform the neutron bomb into the "enhanced radiation device...
...Absolutely everybody writing about Newman's books, including many of the people who blurb it (I learned the verb "to blurb" from a highly regarded critic of English literature) makes some little joking use of one of his bad examples...
...I decided that catching each other in mistakes was not the most important aspect of this big subject...
...That's the acid bottom line test...
...Schlitz beer goes down smooth...
...At the end of the day I felt the strain of a whole day of trying to be sure my verbs and subjects agreed as to number...
...And the people he criticized were professionals - editorial writers, professors, reporters - people who do know better and ought to do better, for serious reasons...
...A great many of these collected horrors come from the modern media, and especially from the medium upon which Ed Newman's stocky figure sometimes appears - not often enough in my view...
...The discussion of this subject always turns into a recitation of comic examples...
...I tried reading Fowler and it gave a set of rules so complicated as to set me back rather than to carry me forward...
...I moved some years ago from New England to the middle west, and thereupon watched television, as I had not done, in Connecticut...
...English is spoken better in Greenwich (mispronounced Gren-Witch by some radio announcer overheard by Mr Urdang, to his distress) than it is in Indianapolis or in Winnebago, Nebraska...
...in a Complex Society...
...You absorb from the people you talk to a set of standards and habits and tastes that it is hard to shed or change...
...Now let me distinguish three kinds of criticism: having fun (which is what Ed Newman mostly does...
...So do everybody else...
...And they certainly are right about themselves...
...All across a great stretch of the nation commercial television and advertising has killed the adverb...
...This geography illustrates an inescapable social element, class element, which is bound in with the use of language, as everybody in England has always known...
...Let me distinguish two kinds of errors: those of the folk, springing from geography, class, ignorance, poor education, and laziness, and those of communications people, which spring as much from manipulative purpose as from these other causes...
...But what he is doing in that book and its successor, A Civil Tongue (Warner Books, $2.75), is mocking mistakes, like the ones in the previous sentence...
...One day, watching an advertisement that urged me to think smart, buy smart, live smart, I figured it out...
...But some other comments about language are less fundamental, and give off an aristocratic aroma...
...Everybody now has trouble with their speaking (variants of this ubiquitous error have the advantage, at least, of avoiding the his/her problem...
...I don't think that quite covers it on the snobbery side...
...Some of the audience were verbally self-conscious to the point of being tongue-tied...
...the second is to be avoided...
...I picture somebody introducing (let us say) Newman, out on the circuit, so overcome by fear of some comic mistake as to give up speech altogether and simply to point to the strict speaker of the evening...
...In the presence of John Ciardi, the lexicographer Laurence Urdang, and a passel of English teachers deploring the deterioration, rot, and decay of language, one preferred not to be an instant exhibit of mat deterioration, rot, and decay...
...And, among critics of language, Orwell is more equal than the others...
...When you set out to criticize language in this mistake-catching way you make yourself both overly self-conscious about words by themselves, and vulnerable to sharpshooters in the same line of work...
...The second book, Newman told me, almost wrote itself from examples people sent him, and that is easy to believe...
...He turns the use of language into something a machine could do...
...When you read the amusing book by NBC's Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking (which advertises itself, in its paperback version [Warner Books, $2.75],as "America's #1 word classic"), you are not quite so sure...
...The third is important, and peeps through the jokes sometimes in Newman's books...
...Orwell wrote about this subject not only in the famous essay butalsoin 1984, with his invention of Newspeak...
...Curses...
...Does the language reflect the mind and taste and variety and sensibility and wit of living human beings...
...John Ciardi answers the charge that he is "elitist" by saying that he believes in a "Snob Club everyone can join...
...The destruction of human freedom by the destruction of a human language is one of the central ideas of that fierce and gloomy book...
...I do not know which one to use or what the reason is that one uses which rather than that...
...Newman is funny and readable...
...successfully foiled again...
...The gathering, held in a region in which the sentence "we defensed them pretty good'' is not a mistake, unless of course we didn't defense them pretty good, produced an acute verbal self-consciousness...
...In Orwell's essay there's none of this catching of errors and scoring of points, because he has a larger purpose...
...Orwell feared the day of that machine...
...It was the adverb...
...One of Newman's favorites is successfully foiled...
...An editor on a magazine for which I wrote told me the simplest way was just to use "that" except when you had to use "which," unless it was the other way round...
...There is an idea put forward in popular books, magazines, and especially television shows that the modern media - that is, popular books, magazines, and expecially television shows - have damaged the English language...
...I have a contribution of my own, recently acquired...
...What was it...
...You get extra points if you catch them...
...English is spoken better in Oxford, I suppose, than it is in Greenwich, although Mr...
...The companion to this self-consciousness about one's own mistakes is an alert attention to other people's, to the pendulums rowing canoes and watersheds turning corners - just in the mixed metaphor field - in someone else's remarks...
...The prime minister of Jamaica, visiting President Reagan, said on the McNeil/ Lehrer report that something or other was the "acid bottom line test" of modern government - thus managing to meld two extremely tired current cliches into one beautifully mixed metaphor...
...Newman wrote in his second book "there are risks in writing a book in which you find fault with the language of others'' and proceeded to fill four pages with mistakes spotted by readers in his first book...
...Perhaps, with shaking hand, he could hold up a sign with the speaker's name on it, but then he would need to be extremely careful about the spelling...
...I found it a little comic that in Indianapolis one of the policemen on the language beat said of the others - including Newman and Safire - that "they make the mistakes they criticize...
...examining the effect on politics and society (as Orwell did...
...demonstrating one's superiority (as most of the critics do...
...I felt dimly that something I had known in the middle west of my youth had vanished...
...Big brother deliberately strips language of its connotations, its human variety, its ability to make subtle distinctions of value...
...The man was fatally killed...
...Presumably the Winston cigarette advertising people do know how to use the words "as" and "like...
...There is no element of aristocratic condescension in his point of view...
...Most Eliza Doolittles do not meet a Henry Higgins, and without that they can't "join...
...He links his interest in language to political understanding and to moral and political thinking...
...They have done the same to distinctions of number, as football color men keep making these kind of mistakes...
...In my youth I tried to get straight when to use "that" and when to use "which...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 5
