So there I was, hoping to get another cheap post out of my referral logs, when I realised the truth. The folk who are directed to unspeak.net from search engines and find, or melancholically fail to find, their informational quarry are not just a congeries of atomised seekers after truth, but make up a hive-mind, coalescing into a Geist, the Spirit of the Internet. And the Spirit of the Internet, I came to believe, is trying to communicate with us – by writing poetry.

As a self-elected amanuensis to the Geist, I have laid out below each search-phrase exactly as it was entered, one per line, and added punctuation merely in order to bring out the inherent sense. The rhythmically compelling result could easily be sung to the tune of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”, or, if you prefer, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I call it emergent literature.

Unspeakable yearnings #1

Soothing sayings websites,
intelligent sounding phrases,
vocabulary words and phrases smart people use say:

david.aaronovitch annoying:
why is it wrong to kick in the groin?
beat someone without leaving bruises
(is violence bad for kids in one paragraph?);
all great neptune’s ocean wash the blood from my hand.

snooker bow tie doctor,
body language pulling up socks:
                                             humble squid.

astronaut wife anywhere in the universe myspace.

britney spears’ genitalia,
britney spears panties limo
(fair fighting females testicles groin) -
ann coulter and melanie phillips,
oliver kamm modus operandi -
britney spears sticking a carrot up her fanny.
(bishop to the barmaid try it another way.)

- so i am a pig and david frum is not?

posing somdomite.

world in which we’re living:
global warming is false scientists trying to scare you
(obscure facts about antarctica?
                                             fuck kyoto!);
bad behaviour in children;
grunge idioms;
     cannabis;
          bush euphemisms;
               axl rose narcotics;
                    italians.

(effects of singing in the military:
                                              hot sexx.)

what happens when the body goes without food for a long time?
is instant coffee bad?
(is this a metaphor; my thoughts are getting tangled in my intestines.)

bath clothed:
head means confusion metaphysically.

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I am always happy to learn of examples of Unspeak in other languages, so Joe Mondello’s recent post on Korean fruit is most welcome:

I scoured the Korean language for examples of unspeak. Korean government agencies and media outlets tend to use a lot of euphemism (for instance, in the current avian influeanza outbreaks). Outright unspeak is a little more difficult to come across. and so far the best one I’ve come up with is ‘chamdarae’ which is a recently created term for kiwifruit grown domestically. Imported kiwifruit are still called kiwi. The unspeakableness comes from the fact that ‘chamdarae’ means ‘real kiwi’ (’cham’ meaning real and ‘darae’ being some kind of disused earlier term for the kiwi tree unknown to most non-experts). So if the domestically grown kiwis are ‘real kiwi’, that contrasts with a imported kiwis which must be ‘gajjadarae’ (fake kiwi).

Real kiwi - nice. Perhaps this is an example of the more general phenomenon in which the term “real” is retrofitted to a thing that we never previously felt the need to insist was real, since it just was; but at some point people begin to fear that it’s under threat from some putatively fake version. At this point the old thing must be explicitly labelled as authentic, the “real deal”. Hence, perhaps, Coca-Cola’s insistence that it is “the real thing”; or the phrase “real ale”, which must be distinguished from the sinister beverages sold in your local chain pub. (I admit that I once assumed, in my blissful ignorance of Spanish, that the football team Real Madrid was defending itself against a team of impostors who also claimed to play for that city.)

A similar thing appears to have happened to give birth to the phrase “real time”, which only became necessary after cinematic editing practices and computer technology had fragmented and expanded or compressed time in new ways. So it was a novelty for a computer to run a data analysis in “real time” (first OED citation: 1953), or for a TV show such as 24 to unfold in an approximation of “real time”.

And what about “real life”? OED’s first example of the phrase has Thomas Jefferson saying, in a 1771 letter, that “real life” is not sufficient for education:

Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life.

Jefferson appears to concede that history is not really life (and so somehow an inauthentic shadow of it), but argues nonetheless that it is a necessary adjunct to the “real”. As SW points out in comments, the context makes clear that Jefferson is not opposing history to “real life” but insisting that “real life”, when written as history, is inadequate as a moral tutor, since so little virtue can be found in it. Later usages did not often preserve Jefferson’s ironical scepticism, more usually implying straightforward denunciations of “real” life’s supposed competitors - fictional, theoretical, or latterly electronic simulations. (Just as appeals to the associated concept of the “real world” often encode a denunciation of theory or analysis - or, indeed, law - in favour of the particular bias or “realism” on which the speaker congratulates himself.) Besieged as it finds itself to be by the multiplicity of simulation, the appeal to “real life” seems increasingly poignant.

Real life, real time, real kiwis - what other things should we be keeping real, readers?

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Glenn Greenwald has an excellent discussion about references to George W Bush, by himself and others, as the, or “our”, “Commander-in-Chief”. The phrase as used in that fashion is already Unspeak, since it conveniently leaves out the fact that, according to the Constitution, Bush is “Commander-in-Chief” only of the armed forces, while generating an alternative picture of him commanding the country as a whole, irrespective of the whims of the other branches of government - rather in the manner, you might say, of a military dictator. (On Friday, to the prospect of Congress challenging his plan to send “reinforcements” to Iraq, he retorted: “I’m the decision-maker”.) Of course, regular appeals in Bush’s legislative signing statements to his status as “Commander-in-Chief” and to the “unitary executive doctrine” notwithstanding, he does not, at least according to the Constitution that still obtains, command the country as a whole. Every American who is not a soldier may reply: You are not the Commander-in-Chief of me.

A propos of which, via hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, this article claims that Bush was already fantasizing about starting a war and glorying in the role of “Commander-in-Chief” back in 1999:

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

If I have a chance to invade… So the point of the long-dreamed-of war in Iraq was primarily for Bush to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and acquire the “political capital” he needed to do anything he wanted domestically. On that score, the war may after all be accounted a great success.

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The USAF yesterday showed off to the media its new raygun, the “Active Denial System”, which I had previously blogged about here. Don’t be confused by the name: rather than consisting of men shouting “NO!” through megaphones, the system is a weapon that irradiates human skin to create an intolerable burning sensation.

“This is one of the key technologies for the future,” said Marine Col. Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons program at Quantico, Va., which helped develop the new weapon. “Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in.”

Sci-fi dreamers who thought that “key technologies for the future” might include new ways to fight disease, maglev trains or interplanetary exploration obviously have a rose-tinted idea of the world to come. And what about this idea that the ADS and its ilk “are important for the escalation of force”? (Col Hymes clearly didn’t get the memo about avoiding the word “escalation”.) I suppose it means that currently, on the low end of the spectrum of “denial”, you can either shout at people or shoot them, if you are not physically close enough to them to take them indoors and start beating them up. The lack of any option between shouting at and shooting funny-looking distant people is perhaps a frustrating gap in an otherwise smooth continuum of “escalation of force” - shoot them with sidearms, shoot them with rifles, shoot them with missiles, et cetera. So the ADS fills that gap nicely.

Jack Shafer, editor at large of Slate, who this week wrote a very kind review of Unspeak and a follow-up article, wrote to make an excellent point:

“Active denial system” sounds like unspeak and a definition of unspeak.

A very nice observation. Unspeak is a system of denial, but not a passive system: it denies one thing while actively promulgating another view. It is indeed an “active denial system”.

In reponse to Shafer’s articles, Slate readers have also been offering examples of their own. One of the most well-reasoned came from antsi in the forum, who wrote about the term “assault weapon”:

“Assault rifle” describes a lightweight, fully automatic, medium-power carbine. This is a real term with an actual meaning.

“Assault weapon” was invented by gun control legislators to mean “any kind of firearm we want to ban this week.” The term also picks up additional loading from its intentional confounding with fully automatic assault rifles such as are used by the military. “Assault weapon” certainly does not refer to fully automatic weapons, since these were restricted under a 1934 federal law and any additional ban would have no effect. In many TV news stories about “assault weapons,” footage of fully automatic weapons is shown, adding to the public confusion about what kind of guns they are trying to ban.

The term “assault weapon” does carry an unspoken argument because it implies that there is no legitimate use for these firearms - no use at all other than “assaulting” someone. In fact, many of the firearms included on in the “banned lists” are designed for hunting or target competition. Others, particularly multi-shot shotguns, are particularly well suited to lawful home defense - but of course “defense weapon” doesn’t sound like something that needs to be banned right away.

You might want to interrogate the arguments bound up in antsi’s appeal to “lawful home defense”, which seeks to pre-empt any questions of legality and justification for “escalation of force”. On the other hand, the term “gun control” itself is Unspeak - it is not guns themselves that are out of control, gleefully marauding across America; and “control” is a more soothing way to say “regulation”, which is anathema to many. In any case, antsi’s unpacking of “assault weapon” seems cogent. Any kind of weapon may be used to “assault” someone: that potential is already analytically present in the very idea of a weapon. So “assault weapon” actively denies the possibility that a weapon might have legitimate non-assault uses; while “defense weapon” actively denies the possibility that people do in fact regularly attack other people with their guns. Perhaps the term “weapon” alone is the victim of verbal inflation, so that it no longer sounds scary enough on its own, and must be argumentatively enhanced.

The description of the “Active Denial System” as a “non-lethal weapon”, meanwhile, actively denies the possibility that the weapon in question might kill someone, which “non-lethal weapons” often do. You might not be completely reassured by the probabilistic statement of one airman to the AP about the new raygun:

There should be no collateral damage to this.

Actively denying what needs further to be cloaked in another term of Unspeak - “collateral damage” - this statement seems rather lonely and forlorn in the celebratory atmosphere of USAF’s media day. An event of “active denial” in many senses.

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From an excellent new Natural History Museum book, Troubled Waters: The Changing Fortunes of Whales and Dolphins by Sarah Lazarus, a description of Japan’s “scientific whaling operation”, JARPA II in 2005:

Of an intended haul of 935 minke whales, 853 were harvested along with ten fin whales.

“Harvested”? Since the harvest is originally the collection in autumn of the ripe corn and other crops, you might think that it still carries a sense of reaping what you sow, ie getting out what you put in. Is it then accurate to apply it to the hunting of wild animals? The OED tells us that it has been so applied since at least 1947, citing uses of “harvest” to mean the killing of animals as various as fish, deer, seals and hippos.

But this is clearly a long-standing example of Unspeak. To call the messy and often drawn-out killing of whales with explosive harpoons a “harvesting” is to Unspeak that reality by evoking a placid agricultural idyll, and in the process downgrading the suffering of intelligent mammals to the status of the feelings of a stalk of wheat. At its base we can spy, too, the persistence of an idea of “dominion” of humans over all the planet’s life. (If it’s already ours, then to say we “harvest” it might make more sense in at least this way.) It’s so subtly persuasive, indeed, that we can imagine the usage gaining wider currency. Surely President Bush could recast the situation in Iraq as a “harvest” of troublemakers?

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President Bush’s State of the Union address last night contained much crucial information, particularly the climactic assurance that:

The State of our Union is strong.

- which will have reassured the millions worrying that California was planning to secede. Perhaps the high point was the new term for the troop increase in Iraq, which in retrospect is so perfect it’s a wonder the government didn’t settle on it months ago:

So we’re deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq.

“Reinforcements” - of course! It’s brilliant. Emotionally, “reinforcements” easily trumps the now-obsolete controversy over “escalation” vs “surge” (and wasn’t one big problem with the word “surge”, by the way, the fact that it is already contained in the word “insurgents”?). “Reinforcements” focuses on the alleged needs of the soldiers, both US and Iraqi, already in Iraq: they are, so we suppose, radioing for backup in the face of an enemy onslaught, so who could deny them the help they need? “Reinforcements” is the cavalry coming over the hill, the thrilling turning point in a battle scene from a western or a second-world-war epic. It is Gandalf arriving with the dawn at Helm’s Deep. Frank Luntz, with your “reassessments” and “realignments”, eat your heart out. “Reinforcements” is where it’s at.

Mr Bush also announced:

We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin.

Other “large endeavours” that are “ours to begin”? Does that sound like a threat to you? Does its insistence on the choice being “ours” to start when “we” decide remind you of Bush’s threat to attack “at a time of our choosing” just before the invasion of Iraq? By coincidence, Bush also called for a doubling in size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and made five mentions of the iniquity of Iran.

Bush closed with an oddly attenuated version of the usual benediction:

God bless.

Perhaps that stands as a recognition that it’s not only America that God needs to bless. In a way, it is generous. God help everyone.

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In an interview with Salon, notorious Republican Unspeak consultant Frank Luntz sets out his new linguistic philosophy:

The most important rule of language in 2007: It must be believable.

Believable is an interesting choice of word, isn’t it? Compared to alternatives such as, say, “accurate” or “fair” or “true”, believable carefully takes no position on whether it is desirable that a speaker should be honest. The only thing that counts is whether language functions to persuade the hearer: mere plausibility is the prime virtue.

Commenting on the word-fight around “surge” vs “escalation” to describe Bush’s commitment of more troops to Iraq (announcing which, as Luntz seems to be unaware, Bush did not actually use the word “surge”), Luntz suggests:

The president would have been better off focusing on “reassessment” and “realignment” - a reassessment of where we are and where we need to go, and a realignment of troops and resources.

Oh, Mr Luntz, this is thin gruel. Have you lost your celebrated mojo? It is true that “reassessment” and “realignment” are Unspeak, in that they deliberately conceal the fact of an increase of troops in Iraq. A “realignment” could simply involve ordering all troops to turn to face Mecca, or Las Vegas; or telling them to leave Iraq, perhaps via the border with Iran. And maybe the deadeningly abstract language of “reassessment” and “realignment” would have succeeded in putting a great number of Americans to sleep so that they wouldn’t notice what was going on. Nonetheless, “reassessment” and “realignment” do lack the zip and vim for which Luntz’s Unspeak is normally renowned.

Maybe Mr Luntz is having a crisis of confidence, since elsewhere in the interview he rewrites history in order to disown one of his noblest successes:

The issue to me is not whether there is global warming or climate change; the issue is the best policy to addressing it. That’s where the debate should have been.

But Mr Luntz! You undersell your own contribution! The reason why that’s not where the debate was is partly because you yourself so brilliantly advised the Republicans to confuse the issue about whether there was global warming at all! As you so cleverly warned them [pdf]:

It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming [...] climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge. [...] Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.

Now that’s believability. From this to his present flaccid mumblings about “realignment”? What a falling-off was there. Let us hope Mr Luntz soon recovers from his imaginative slump, for the sake of America.

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On Sunday, the Observer ran extracts from Nick Cohen’s new book:

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery [...] On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent’s first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.

[INT. EVENING: AN ISLINGTON KITCHEN. BRUSHED-STEEL APPLIANCES HUM SMOOTHLY. MRS C SITS AT A TABLE, SIPPING HERBAL TEA, READING A COPY OF 'UNSPEAK'. SUDDENLY THE CALM IS BROKEN BY THE SOUND OF A KEY RATTLING IN A LOCK, AND THE FRONT DOOR OPENING. ENTER, DISHEVELLED, WITH STARING EYES, MR C.]

Mr C: Hi honey, I’m home! Shall we overthrow a fascist regime?

Mrs C: [TO HERSELF] Oh no, not again…

Mr C: Answer me! Shall we overthrow a fascist regime or not?

Mrs C: Which one is it this time?

Mr C: It doesn’t matter! Answer the question!

Mrs C: [DECIDES TO HUMOUR HIM] All right, how do you plan to do it?

Mr C: What do you mean?

Mrs C: Well, “overthrow” a “fascist regime”. “Overthrow” sounds quite vague, like “remove” or something. What is the actual plan?

Mr C: Well… obviously, we need to have a war!

Mrs C: A war?

Mr C: Yes, a short, sharp, clean war! With flowers and laptops raining down afterwards!

Mrs C: [SIPS TEA] Ah, so by “overthrow a fascist regime” you mean kill some people.

Mr C: We regret all collateral damage! And anyway the point is to save people!

Mrs C: By killing them?

Mr C: [SHOUTING] Do you hate justice? Do you spit on the idea of democracy? You can’t overthrow a fascist regime without breaking eggs!

Mrs C: I suppose you’re pretty sure you’re going to save more people than you kill?

Mr C: [SPLUTTERING] Th-th-that’s just . . . consequentialist sophistry! [WITH TRIUMPH] Islamo-utilitarianism! I can’t believe I’m hearing this!

Mrs C: Look, is war really the only option right now or -

Mr C: [WITH SUDDEN QUIET MENACE] What, are you a pussy?

Mrs C: Excuse me?

Mr C: I said, are you a snivelling pussy?

Mrs C: I’m your wife.

Mr C: You’re secretly a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, aren’t you? All so-called ‘liberals’ are the same!

Mrs C: This is getting absurd -

Mr C: [GESTICULATING WILDLY] Shut up! Do you want to overthrow a fascist regime or not? Yes or no?

Mrs C: Well, darling, I’m really not convinced that a war right now is the best -

Mr C: [CLUTCHES HEAD AND SCREAMS] Oh my god! I can’t believe that you support a fascist regime! My wife is in love with totalitarianism! You fascist! That’s it! I’m leaving!

[EXIT MR C WITH SLAMMING DOOR. MRS C SIGHS, SIPS TEA, HUMS NOSTALGICALLY A SNATCH OF 'BOSS DRUM'. GOES BACK TO READING 'UNSPEAK'. FADEOUT.]

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