Posts in October, 2006
Science – what is it good for?
October 16, 2006
I have a post up at Comment is Free today, where I hope occasionally to write commenty things that are not strictly Unspeak-related. This one is in reply to Simon Jenkins’s criticism of the “science campaign” in British education. (Not the other sort of science campaign, that involves building nukes.) There is, though, some gratuitous bashing of global-warming denialists and “intelligent design” proponents near the end, so it’s not entirely off-topic.
The BBC on Unspeak in Israel/Palestine
October 14, 2006 13 comments
The BBC has a new style guide advising its journalists on the use of “key terms” when reporting on Israel/Palestine. (Thanks to WIIIAI.) Its intentions, as explained by Middle East bureaux editor Simon Wilson, are honourable – as I would put it, to avoid Unspeak. The guide makes a number of sensible recommendations: for example, to avoid the phrase “cycle of violence”, which “does nothing to explain any of the underlying causes of the conflict and may indeed obscure them”. Quite so: “cycle of violence” is rhetorical handwashing, often underpinned by the racist connotations that inform concepts of “ancient hatreds” and so on. (They’re just a bunch of savages locked in an interminable blood-feud, what are you gonna do?) But of course it’s not all so easy. Here is what the guide says about one of the most contested names, the “barrier”:
The BBC uses the terms “barrier”, “separation barrier” or “West Bank barrier” as acceptable generic descriptions to avoid the political connotations of “security fence” (preferred by the Israeli government) or “apartheid wall” (preferred by the Palestinians).
As per the long discussion of this terminology in Chapter 4 of Unspeak, however, the BBC’s three “acceptable generic descriptions” do not themselves quite avoid “political connotations” either. “Separation barrier” either is a tautology or is using “separation” as Unspeak for “enclosure”. Even the term “barrier”, used on its own or in conjunction with “West Bank”, evokes protection from a threat, as in the Thames flood barrier, or the blood-brain barrier, and thus endorses one official motivation at the expense of others. This is one of those cases (of which there are many) in which the dream of perfectly neutral, transparent terminology appears to be forlorn, but at least they are making an effort. Stranger, though, is what the BBC has to say about “outposts”:
It is generally advisable not to refer to “illegal” outposts (they are all illegal and if you call one illegal some may assume that others are not).
Curious logic. If you refuse to call any “outpost” illegal, surely some may assume that they’re all legal?
13 comments
It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about
October 13, 2006 14 comments
From the Guardian:
Failure to take action to combat climate change will cause environmental catastrophe and cost the global economy $20 trillion (£10.8 trillion) a year by the end of the century, the pressure group Friends of the Earth says today.
I noted in my book that the name “Friends of the Earth” is an amusingly obvious kind of Unspeak (don’t agree with us? You must be an Enemy of the Earth!). But what is the term “pressure group” as a description of FotE doing in this news report? Why use this term rather than the neutral “charity” or “organization” or merely “group”? FotE does invite its members to “act local”, to write to MPs and so forth: in that sense it wishes to exert pressure on the public conversation. But this is of course the raison d’être of any NGO, and not all of them are called “pressure groups” by reporters. The CBI, for example – the British club for what are sometimes called “captains” of industry, which lobbies for lower rates of corporation tax and deregulation – is not called a “pressure group” in recent Guardian reports on its activities, even though it is no less interested in exerting pressure, in a more or less opposite direction, than Friends of the Earth. Indeed the CBI is only (and routinely) called a “pressure group” by those who disagree with its views, as for example here.
So it seems as though “pressure group” is just a way of saying “a group that promotes a point of view of which we are sceptical”. Any group, the implication runs, which is so pushy about its ideas must have some nefarious ulterior motive. To be pressured is to be made uncomfortable, rushed, not given time to think. Introducing an organization as a “pressure group” in a news report is already a way to prejudice the reader against it, to seek to undermine its credibility.
What kinds of groups are more likely to be called “pressure groups” in the authorial voice of a newspaper? A search is illuminating. The term has been applied in the last few months by the Guardian and Observer not only to Friends of the Earth but also to Liberty, Peta, the New Economics Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Animal Aid, Global Witness, Compass, Genewatch, and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. Each of these is what might generally be called, as a tellingly common extended version of the phrase has it, a “left-of-centre pressure group”. By contrast, I could find only one specific recent application of “pressure group” to what would normally be understood as a “right-of-centre” organisation: a mention in an article by a mortgage executive, celebrating an influx of tenants from other countries, of “pressure group” Migration Watch (not a birdspotters’ club). An interesting pattern, no?
14 comments
What Iraqis want
October 12, 2006 22 comments
In response to the new Lancet report [pdf] on post-invasion deaths in Iraq, George W Bush said:
I don’t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.
According to the most recent polls of actual Iraqis, however, including one conducted by the State Department, strong majorities of them do not actually tolerate the current “level of violence”. In fact, they state clearly that they want US-led forces to leave, because this would “make them feel safer and decrease violence”.
The ascription of toleration or even voluntariness is not new, of course. It is often claimed, as it was in May by Paul Keetch MP in Parliament, that the US-led forces are in Iraq “at the invitation of the democratically elected government”, which is a good trick, since that government did not exist in 2003 when the armies, or so we are to understand, gratefully accepted a non-existent invitation from a non-existent body of people.
It is even possible to claim, in flat denial of what Iraqis are actually saying to interviewers, that they do not merely tolerate violence but gladly give up their lives and those of others for the cause. Notice how George W Bush above began to say “they’re willing to –” and then stopped himself, toning down his half-made claim of willing to one of mere toleration. But what was he going to say? What are Iraqis willing to do?
A clue might reside in a recent statement by Condoleezza Rice, as reported by the author of a State Department news release, “Rice Defines ‘Successful Outcome’ in Iraq”, of August 31:
Many Iraqis striving for a unified government have lost family members to terrorists; nonetheless, she noted, “they’re willing to sacrifice for it.”
Right: they’re willing to sacrifice. Indeed in many ways, Iraq is a triumph of the will: no one there lacks for it, whether the “coalition of the willing” or the heroic Iraqis “willing to sacrifice”. Most Iraqis do not regret the passing of Saddam Hussein, having said in previous polls that overall his “ousting” was “worth it”. (Those killed during the course of his “ousting” were not available for comment.) But that kind of hindsight evaluation does not, as the newer polls show, translate into a continuing “toleration” of violence, or a “willing[ness] to sacrifice”. The concept of sacrifice here invoked is one of a noble gesture, but only as long as someone else is doing it.
22 comments
Surgical strikes
October 11, 2006 8 comments
Idiot spammers, may their fingers drop off, have recently been making repeated forlorn attempts to post comments here under the rubric of “Breast Enhancement”. I sincerely hope this is unrelated to the fact that the Demographics Prediction feature at Microsoft’s adCenter Labs considered a few weeks ago that this blog was most likely to appeal to teenage girls. (It has now changed its mind, saying that slightly more teenage boys will prefer it. I look forward to writing more posts about heavy metal and videogames, which those who know me will understand I do not find an onerous prospect.) But it did remind me of a passing comment I made in a review some months ago of Dorothy Ko’s excellent Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding: that an attitude of smug superiority towards such practices by the Other, considered opaquely barbaric and woman-deforming, seems problematic in a western culture that itself calls the surgical insertion of foreign objects to satisfy a fetish for breasts that look like cannonballs enhancement. It is at least faintly possible that there is a deliberate reference to the root sense of enhancement as literally making higher, raising; but this is of course not the only effect of what Dr Christian Troy of Nip/Tuck bluntly calls “tit jobs”. On the other hand, why is it that spammers promise merely penis enlargement and not enhancement as well? Perhaps penis enhancement, literally, is the job of the Viagra their colleagues sell.
In a pleasing example of google speculation as self-fulfilling prophecy, meanwhile, I am happy to report that, subsequent to sw’s ludic phantasy here, unspeak.net is now the top result for the search terms hot sexxx christopher hitchens.
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Anna Politkovskaya
October 9, 2006 3 comments
I had the honour of meeting Anna Politkovskaya briefly earlier this year. She was murdered on Saturday. Chechnya’s prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov, a target of Politkovskaya’s criticism, said:
I want to underline that although Politkovskaya’s material about Chechnya was not always objective, as a human being I am sincerely sorry for the journalist.
3 comments
Wherein I am advised to ‘get some’
October 6, 2006 27 comments
Unspeak is reviewed (registration required) in this week’s Times Higher Educational Supplement. The writer, Raphael Salkie, says that the book “scythes nicely through some conceptual weeds, and the style is lively and engaging”, but: “Despite this, lots of it annoyed me.” Why so?
Poole tells us explicitly that he is not a linguist and that he has no expertise in analysing language. Well, why not get some? Many superb books about the language of politics have appeared in recent years, notably Normal Fairclough’s New Labour, New Language. Poole refers briefly to a tiny bit of this work, but he does not get the main point: mystification in language goes way beyond the vocabulary shenanigans that he unpacks in this book. It is also about grammatical choices, information packaging and text design. Amateurs regularly ignore these whole areas.
It would be tedious for me to recount every occasion on which Unspeak does in fact talk about “grammatical choices”, as well as the rhetorical shape of speeches or the structure of media interviews or the use of text graphics on television or typefaces on posters, which may for all I know count as “information packaging” and even “text design”. But then I have “no expertise in analysing language”, although this slightly misrepresents what I say in the book. I say that I am not a linguist, which is easy to check, and that I have no special expertise beyond whatever might inform my regular work as a literary critic. But evidently the only way to gain the appropriate “expertise” is the way Salkie himself gained it: the article reveals that he is “professor of language studies, Brighton university”. No doubt he is irritated by the constant intrusion of “amateurs” upon his field.
It may be ironic that a professor of “language studies” uses the term “amateur” as an insult, since he no doubt knows that for most of its life it meant someone who did something for love (Latin amo) rather than for money, and only acquired its dismissive sneer during the bureaucratic twentieth century. George Orwell, of course, was an “amateur” in the field of analysing political language, and even recommended that more of his regular work, book-reviewing, be done by “amateurs”:
Incidentally, it would be a good thing if more novel reviewing were done by amateurs. A man who is not a practised writer but has just read a book which has deeply impressed him is more likely to tell you what it is about than a competent but bored professional. That is why American reviews, for all their stupidity, are better than English ones; they are more amateurish, that is to say, more serious.
Of course, “amateurs” are not everywhere to be celebrated. I would not like to have root-canal surgery performed on me by an amateur dentist. Not everyone has a valid opinion on medicine. On the other hand, we are all language-users. Very many of the “amateurs” who have attended my talks on Unspeak think in careful and sophisticated ways about language, and their opinions are not to be dismissed simply because they haven’t had the right sort of academic training. My view, indeed, is that the analysis of language in politics is too important to be left to “professionals” who murmur among themselves in the diagrammatic glades of “discourse analysis” and other subdisciplines. Professor Salkie surely knows, to be blunt, that nowadays, “amateur” is most often the kneejerk insult of the salaryman who desires to protect his own turf.
But enough quibbling. I am willing to watch and learn from the expertise of a real professional:
Elsewhere, Poole astonishingly approves of the term “insurgents” to label Iraqis who combat violently the Anglo-American occupation of their country. This word obviously dehumanises people, especially when it is routinely contrasted with “the Iraqi armed forces” (while the insurgents are never “Iraqi”).
Salkie neglects to tell us whether he would prefer to call the insurgents “the terrorists” or “the resistance”, but he does make a factual claim: “the insurgents are never ‘Iraqi’.” Interesting. In fact, the exact phrase “Iraqi insurgents” appears regularly in reports from the Times, the New York Times, the Washington Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and so on. If a professor of “language studies” can’t be bothered to check a patently false empirical claim that he makes in a journal of higher education, then perhaps there is room for “amateurs” after all.
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Who is ‘Melanie Phillips’?
October 5, 2006 28 comments
I have belatedly discovered a site, I presume satirical, that purports to be the blog of a certain “Melanie Phillips”, apparently an invented personage who writes for the Daily Mail. Bravely for that newspaper, “her” writing enacts a shattering reductio ad absurdum of certain prejudices. Take this entry comparing Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, to Churchill, after Howard made a speech attacking the Australian “left”:
Howard is the only western leader who has grasped that the greatest danger to the west lies in the way it has been attacked and undermined from within, a process that is continuing and which threatens to hand liberal democracy over to its Islamic enemies who are laying siege to it from without. He is the only one who puts these two things together, and is using his office as a bully pulpit from which to fight for the values of western civilisation in the culture war. Can you imagine President Bush, or Tony Blair or David Cameron, denouncing the universities as breeding grounds for left-wing enemies of civilisation? Of course not. Howard is Australia’s Churchill, and is the true leader of the west at this perilous time.
Maybe the satire is slightly too broad-brush to be really convincing as the considered thoughts of a journalist who, according to the biography on the site, is supposed to have won the George Orwell Prize in 1996. But it does bring out one irony of such arguments. Those who sell themselves as the stoutest defenders of “liberal democracy” are also the happiest to adopt a Stalinist vocabulary of denunciation. The idea that academics of some stripe are the true “enemies of civilisation” has of course been a favoured theme of totalitarian dictators since at least the early Soviet “purges”, through Mao, Pol Pot (who creatively extended the paranoia to anyone who wore spectacles), and so on. Recently, too, an attack on “liberal professors” was made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, thus implying that those who really talk like “Melanie Phillips” have more in common with theocratic Iran, though it be one of our “Islamic enemies”, than they do with educated members of their own society. Which raises an alternative possibility. Maybe “Melanie Phillips” is not, as I first assumed, a satire, but the creation of a brilliant Islamist psyops initiative.
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