channel vision
Robert Kirby
‘The paradigm of privilege must be communicated exponentially so that, at the end of the day, an interface and the aforementioned synergy can be utilised, hopefully to set up empowerment, albeit in terms of the previously disadvantaged and underprivileged, but of which fortuitous input can be maintained and feedback perused at this moment in time.”
You might be forgiven thinking the above was yet more wisdom to tumble from the lips of Mr Thabo Mbeki. In fact the paragraph is something I made up, using most of a list of “20 words that fail pretentious modern Britons”, an article last week in a supplement called Learning English, regularly published by the Guardian Weekly. I added a couple of local specialities like “hopefully” and “at the end of the day”.
The author of the article, Larry Trask, is a linguistics professor at Sussex University (Mbeki’s old haunt) and is a harsh critic of what he terms “modern grandiloquence”. His survey of the 20 keywords claims to unmask the 21st century’s heirs to Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop, with her portentous talk of allegories sunning themselves on the banks of the Nile.
Reading Trask’s article I couldn’t help but recognise the symptoms of exactly the same jargon virus, which infects not only political and business talk these days, but is heard in everyday conversations.
Why raise this in a television column? The answer is obvious. There is scarcely a local radio or television news programme or documentary that does not brim over with bad and misused language. And there is no doubt that these linguistic failings set an example to the listeners.
An obvious instance is the quite dreadful phrase “in terms of”, which has become a sort of suppurating boil on the surface of spoken English. It is used with a sort of malicious frequency by newswriters, reporters, interviewers and contributors. “How do you see the accident in terms of its victims?” or “in terms of its downward plummeting the rand was noticeable in terms of its steepness” we hear the phrase dozens of times a day. It is becoming as essential a strip of connective tissue in spoken and written English as the definite article (newspapers are among the worst offenders) and surely reflects on a media that no longer holds grammar and usage as being of much importance.
The poet Dylan Thomas once said, “I speak three languages. English, Saloon and BBC.” His dig was at the stylised loftiness of the established BBC announcing discipline of perfectly enunciated and essentially accentless English. In the Sixties when I worked at the BBC, the first breaks with this tradition were being made. So-called “regional” accents were becoming permissible, not only in plays and features but, heaven help us, in the news bulletins themselves Auntie’s last frontiers of “proper” English.
It was, of course, an overdue and necessary move. The trouble was that big chunks of the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. Inevitably, with the “regional” accents came interesting flavours in grammar, turns of phrase and emphasis as delightful and fearlessly democratic as they were which made a bit of a porridge of the whole thing. Gone was the exemplar against which anything could be judged. It was a bit like having the strings, the brass and the woodwinds in an orchestra each tuned to a different scale.
Whether they care to acknowledge it or not, radio and television set a linguistic example and always have. If national newsreaders and announcers continually mispronounce everyday words and distort a language with misused vocabulary, eventually their listeners having little other outside reference will do so, too.
In the BBC of yore this responsibility was taken very seriously. But then the BBC of yore was under the direction of men of the quality and sensitivity of Lord Reith not the New Labour cronies of today. The English Service of the SABC of yore set its linguistic standards by the BBC they used to send their English announcers on attachment to the BBC General Overseas Service in London. No such standards any more, it is sad to see.
To end, a morsel of sheer delight. The same BBC had an expert in, commenting last Sunday on the opening salvos in the Afghanistan bombing. He was one of those curiously English characters, bespectacled, very intense and likeable, usually found describing some esoteric hobby like indoor miniature paper-dart aerodynamics.
He was asked about the effect on the night-time raids of a bright moon. “The moon is a double-edged sword,” came the immediate answer. Sheridan would have loved that.