Can we rescue language?
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy CAN WE RESCUE LANGUAGE? HOPEFULLY, WE CAN OPTIMIZE THINGS CLARITY-WISE AMITAI ETZIONI has caused a stir with his book whose thesis is that there is no way out...
...They "utilize" rather than "use...
...Teachers, writers, preachers should be the guardians of language and those who transmit it, enriched and strengthened, from one generation to another...
...That these last two errors have been defended as made legitimate by use is only further evidence of the decline in the sense of language by the arbiters themselves - more foxes in yet another coop...
...That is the unnecessary inflation of language...
...Strunk & White's The Elements of Style puts it well, "A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts...
...And do you indulge interests...
...This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or that he or she avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell...
...I have on my desk the review copy of a book by a writer who was affiliated with the department of arts and sciences at one of the most prestigious of the Ivy League universities...
...The academic writer to whom I refer above does seem to be free of two other evils which mark faculty writing in colleges these days - the over-inflation of language and pedantic jargon...
...And "They always managed to make just enough more money than was essential, to indulge their personal interests...
...The book abounds with sentences like the following:' 'The town was heavily Catholic .in numbers but governed and outclassed by a Protestant gentry and the relatively new Yankee industrialists...
...Sadly enough, one has the feeling that the Secretary is waging a losing battle...
...I do know but I had to puzzle it out...
...No doubt this teacher's concern for her students is genuine but, in Barnicle's words, she is a functional illiterate...
...I do...
...Was the town outclassed...
...To borrow from another jargon - that of computers - is it any wonder that "garbage in" means "garbage out...
...HOPEFULLY, WE CAN OPTIMIZE THINGS CLARITY-WISE AMITAI ETZIONI has caused a stir with his book whose thesis is that there is no way out of the world crisis until Americans and the rest of the Western world recover or find the values on which community is based...
...They have been a big increase in public drinking, and much of it is beer and some hard liquor...
...And they are right...
...I have been a teacher for eight years and I try and tell the kids...
...Why the comma...
...They pronounce things "viable," see them as "interfacing...
...Not long ago a Washington paper published a letter from an irate parent whose child had brought home a note from her elementary school principal...
...A lot of it is drunk by teenagers who I teach...
...For example, I also have on my desk a letter from a college graduate who works in the public relations department of a large corpor-tion...
...The secretary did not ask but ordered his writers to avoid redundancies - among others "serious crisis," "new initiatives," "final outcome," "future plans," "endresult," "untimely death" and inquired, one imagines with desperation, "Has there ever been a timely death...
...To recover values, and to articulate them, requires that we be able to think clearly and concisely and to communicate with each other in clear, unambiguous terms...
...It was so full of spelling errors and incomplete sentences that it was incomprehensible...
...Even when teachers are literate to the extent that they can spell and use words correctly they seem not to have the foggiest notion of sentence structure...
...Abigail McCarthy Abigail McCarthy...
...He pointed out that "hopefully" should be "I hope" and that "more importantly" should be "more important...
...Last September Mike Barnicle, columnist for the Boston Globe, printed a letter from a high school English teacher which speaks for itself: ' 'I get sick and tires of the vandalisism (sic) and all the drinking, too much of it," she began...
...He asked not only that they avoid the expressions I have listed, but also they they avoid meaningless phrases like "at the present time," "mutually beneficial," "contingent upon," and "management regime...
...But the use of language is deteriorating so rapidly that real communication is becoming impossible...
...It informs me "A coincidence of circumstances is bringing me to Washington...
...Why not simply ' 'I am coming to Washington on business and will be staying at the Washington Hilton...
...I would like to propose a sub-thesis...
...College teachers and administrators alike use non-words like "prioritize" and "finalize...
...Occasionally a champion of plain English makes an appearance in an unexpected place - like the Reagan cabinet...
...Is it any wonder that high school graduates cannot write resumes or that college freshmen have to be tutored in reading skills...
...There are glaring and horrible examples...
...I can hear the exasperated "Oh, you know what she means...
...I know, too, that such inexact writing would never have escaped the sharp eye of the copy editor in a good publishing house as short a time as fifteen years ago.Copy editors seem to be a disappearing breed and publishers with an eye to the bottom line do not worry about exactness or precision in language...
...The author tells us that the waterworks were aside the reservoir when she means, I think, beside, and tells us that the Irish businessmen of whom she is writing "were known, not unexpectedly, to sell a little 'strong medicine' in the backroom of their drugstore" when she means "not surprisingly...
...They cheerfully confuse "datum" with "data," "criteria" with "criterion...
...Foxes are guarding the henhouses - the evil warned against in the old saying...
...Secretary Malcolm Baldridge was so put off by the letters which came to his desk for signature that he issued a guide for writers in the Department of Commerce...
...If the teachers lead, can the students be far behind...
...And have the illusion that they are speaking the English of educated persons...
...A people who do not and cannot read, whose ear is attuned to the lumpish oral shorthand of television news, and whose vocabulary grows smaller even as technical vocabularies increase is a people losing touch with meaning...
...They talk of "in put" and "output...
...But how can we expect any kind of writing style from liberal arts graduates whose professors are afflicted with the disease we used to call "educationese" - because it was confined to the new departments of education - but is now more readily recognized as "bureau-cratese...
...They "optimize" and "maximize...
...from some readers...
...Today many of them are not prepared or able to do so...
...While there I will be residing at the Washington Hilton...
Vol. 110 • January 1983 • No. 2
