English: Taking Sides
Language is not neutral. Everything that is said or written comes with a purpose which may (or may not) be openly declared by the choice of words, the syntax and the style employed by the user. Language can be a weapon, concealed or on display, blunt or delicate. It may be intended to inform, to seduce, to persuade, to deceive, to inspire, to intimidate . . . This section looks at some of the many ways in which English can be put to work.
The plainest and briefest bit of written English is premeditated and carries the stamp of the person or group that composed it. This extends as far as advice which seems utterly impersonal. But even the impersonal is personal. Whether it be the electronic sign which gives a warning on a motorway or the printed notice on a shop counter, the very style of the language sends a message that is extraneous to the actual words. The message is: this is authority speaking, take me seriously. The imperative voice (DRIVE CAREFULLY) and the direct vocabulary (SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED) leave no room for questions.
Slightly more subtle public statements also carry a freight of assumptions, one of which is that there is a direct link between those making the statement and the individual reading it. The popular formulation THANK YOU (FOR DRIVING SAFELY / FOR NOT SMOKING) appeals to the good nature/sense of obligation/potential for guilt and gratitude in the onlooker. The SORRY FOR ANY DELAY notices that routinely accompany roadworks in Britain sound attractively casual and personal, although it would be impossible to pin the apology to any individual.
The message of these short English sentences is plain, although the thinking behind them may be quite complex. How much more is there to unravel when English is not plain but weighted with hidden meanings and purposes which may be hidden, perhaps from the users themselves. A principal method of hiding things is to employ euphemistic language.
Euphemisms
Euphemism is an inescapable part of daily language use. The term defines ways of softening or obscuring facts or ideas which might, if expressed plainly, be considered unattractive or offensive. Euphemisms tend to cluster round those aspects of life that are embarrassing or threatening, areas such as death or sex or bodily functions. Phrases like ‘sleep with’ or ‘go to bed with’ or the question to a visitor ‘Do you want to wash your hands?’ are euphemistic, or at best only part of the story. These daily euphemistic usages, designed to shield people from the embarrassment of plain speaking, are harmless for the most part, since everyone knows what is actually meant.
But there are more contentious areas of politics, religion and social policy involving euphemisms that may be intended to obscure the issue or even to deliberately mislead. The term ‘climate change’ is preferred by many to ‘global warming’ because the first expression sounds less alarming. Similarly ‘regime change’ could describe a gradual non-violent process, although in practice it does not. The debate about abortion, particularly as it is conducted in the United States, arouses deep passions on both sides. From the early 1970s anti-abortion campaigners regularly referred to their campaign as being one for the ‘right to life’, avoiding the negative associations of being perceived as ‘anti-’. Those in favour of making abortion legally available then termed themselves ‘pro-choice’. This prompted the other side to call itself ‘pro-life’. Each act of renaming was intended to cast an unfavourable light on the opposition by turning them into the negative party.
Another very contentious issue concerns what children should be taught in schools about the origins of life. Here, the ‘creationists’ who believe in the literal truth of the divine creation of the Earth, now prefer to talk euphemistically about ‘intelligent design’ or ID. This hints at divine intervention rather than making direct reference to it, and has a respectable, pseudo-scientific air to it.
It is in the field of warfare that euphemisms really thrive. Unintentionally killing someone on one’s own side is an instance of ‘friendly fire’, as opposed to hostile fire, but the result is the same. An unprovoked attack becomes a ‘preemptive strike’, undertaken supposedly to stop the enemy attacking first but giving the aggressor the veneer of self-defence. Bombing raids can be referred to as ‘surgical strikes’, an ingenious phrase since it conjures up ideas of a necessary medical intervention as well as suggesting something precise and almost humane in its effect. When people are killed other than those who were intended to be killed, then that is described as ‘collateral damage’. Genocide can be redefined as ‘ethnic cleansing’, a very necessary change because signatories to the United Nations Charter are required to act on genocide but not on ethnic cleansing. And if that latter expression is too harsh then it can be replaced by the ‘humane transfer of populations’, an expression used in negotiations between Serb and Croatian leaders in the wars following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
This connection between war or state violence and euphemisms is not new. In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, written in 1946, George Orwell noted euphemisms such as ‘pacification’ or ‘rectification of frontiers’ and claimed that the reality of modern warfare could only be defended by ‘arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties’.
Decades of Communist rule across a great swathe of the world produced a rich crop of euphemisms, not least the attachment of the word ‘democratic’ (as in the German Democratic Republic) to describe a society in which the people had little or no say in how they were governed. The Berlin Wall, built to keep the GDR’s citizens in, was officially called the AntiFascist Protection Rampart. Other terms used in Joseph Stalin’s time, such as ‘collectivization’ (the forced amalgamation of parcels of land previously in individual hands) and ‘purging’ (killing off one’s opponents), may originally have had a clinical, euphemistic sound but arguably became more sinister than plain talking would have been.
Political Correctness
If the effect of euphemisms is to draw a veil over some aspect of life which might be uncomfortable or shocking when referred to in plain English, then the debate about political correctness really starts from the opposite point. It’s about stripping the veil away.
In 2006, a British newspaper ran a banner headline: ‘Now It’s Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep.’ The story concerned a group of children at a nursery school who were apparently being taught new words to the traditional rhyme, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. The black sheep was to be replaced by a multicoloured one, for fear of offending an ethnic minority. The story, which featured in half a dozen papers, is closer to urban legend than reality. Similar tales surfaced 20 years earlier. In fact, if the children were being encouraged to apply different colours to the sheep (blue, pink), it seems to have been for the sake of expanding their vocabulary.
No matter. To some columnists and commentators, examples of political correctness are like truffles to pigs. When a particularly aromatic example is unearthed, the discovery is almost always accompanied by the cliché about ‘political correctness gone mad’. The origins of the phrase itself are obscure, with some claiming that it was once a non-ironic Communist expression which the left then applied ironically to a dogmatic outlook. The term is now found almost exclusively and non-ironically on the right.
At its most benign, political correctness could be described as the display of verbal sensitivity towards members of particular groups, one that aims to avoid the in-built tendency in some language to stigmatize. A very careful user of PC language might avoid expressions like ‘turn a deaf ear to’, ‘seeing things in black and white’ since they make careless reference to disability or colour. Even a less than sensitive speaker would probably think twice before employing terms like ‘looney bin’ or ‘deformed’, unless he or she was very sure of the audience.
To be called ‘politically correct’ is never a compliment and usually an outright term of abuse. Those who choose their words carefully to avoid giving offence or raising the spectres of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are attacked for their misplaced sensitivity, or their liberal softness, or mocked for their willingness to use expressions which sound contorted or absurd. Much fun is had with descriptions like ‘horizontally challenged’ (for fat) or ‘differently abled’ (for disabled). But the protesters themselves often protest too much, and use the notion of ‘political correctness’ as a stick to beat any and all social changes of which they disapprove. To be sure, there are absurdities in political correctness. To change history to herstory or to float the idea that menstruation become femstruation betrays a complete ignorance of language, while suggestions such as converting manhole to personhole (or personnel access structure) seem to spring more from mischief or the desire to discredit the whole PC business.
But the impulses behind political correctness – to avoid giving offence, to show an awareness of the power of words – are decent enough. They are worth a more considered response than the reflex jeer or the PC-gone-mad jibe.
Political Speeches
Nothing much is hidden about political speeches, although they will probably be full of examples of euphemism and ‘political correctness’. The aim of a political speech is generally obvious, however garbled the words or inept the speaker. That aim is to win friends and influence people, to gain votes and approval, both for the speaker and for his or her cause. Political oratory is therefore an unabashed example of the deployment of language for persuasion and propaganda.
Britain can claim the most effective speech-maker of the 20th century in Winston Churchill, wartime leader and inspirer through words. American journalist Edward R. Murrow, no mean wordsmith himself, said of Churchill that he ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’. Churchill apart, in the English-speaking world the United States has a long and continuing tradition of political oratory and is arguably preeminent in this field today, while politicians in Britain and other Anglophone countries struggle to make much of a mark. Philip Collins, who was a speechwriter for Tony Blair, asserts that Britain is ‘too nice a country to live in’. There is no great cause to prompt great speaking, he says, as there was with Churchill or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King. For Collins, the essentials of a historic speech are ‘vivid phrasing, acute analysis, a core question and a sonorous voice’. Above all, though, is the need for a ‘moment’, a great occasion or crisis evoking the best from the orator.
This was certainly true of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, which commemorated those who had fallen in the battle of that name (see pages 156–9). There is a story that Lincoln wrote it on the back of an envelope while on the way to the ceremony by train. Not true, although such picturesque details might have been designed to underscore Lincoln’s brilliance and faith in his own rhetorical powers. Like almost every political speech of note, the Gettysburg Address was the result of forethought and revision on the part of the orator himself. One of the differences between the 19th and the 20th or 21st centuries is that politicians now are much less likely to compose their own material. They might do the final shaping but will rely on others to assemble the pieces in the first place.
But the good speechwriter will be more familiar with his master’s or mistress’s voice than his own. He will be intimately involved with fashioning the image which, in early days, is so important for the ambitious politician. One of Margaret Thatcher’s most memorable remarks came within her first two years as prime minister as she announced her determination not to change policies when circumstances got tough:
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the ‘U’ turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.
The defiant declaration was greeted with rapturous applause at the 1980 Conservative Party Conference. Quite a few in the audience would have recalled the title of the 1948 play by Christopher Fry which Mrs Thatcher was deliberately echoing (The Lady’s Not for Burning). All of them would have appreciated the play on words – ‘U’-turn/You turn – which lightened a speech sometimes verging on the sombre. The delivery might have been unique but the words were not her own.
Successful political speech-making seems to depend, linguistically, on a mixture of the familiar and the elevated. Sometimes the familiar is realized through domestic detail. In the Margaret Thatcher speech already mentioned, she refers to having no junior ministers in 10 Downing Street but ‘just Denis [her husband] and me’, giving a homely if misleading picture of a middle-aged couple pottering uncomplainingly about a large mansion. At his victory speech in Chicago in November 2008, President-Elect Barack Obama could play on his audience’s heartstrings by telling his daughters Sasha and Malia – note how accomplished politicians always introduce family members by their first names, so making the audience part of the wider ‘family’ – that they had ‘earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House’.
When it comes to the more serious part of the oration, key words and phrases are struck again and again. High-sounding abstract nouns are deployed to suggest that better times are around the corner even while almost unimaginable threats can and will be surmounted. It is important to stir the audience, not so much to action as to fine feeling – or perhaps simply to feeling fine about themselves. As already indicated, American politicians are, by and large, much better at this than leaders of other English-speaking countries. The Inauguration Speech of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 is still remembered for utterances like:
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what, together, we can do for the freedom of man.
Kennedy employed familiar rhetorical devices like the inversion of normal word order (ask not), repetition with variations, and what is technically known as chiasmus, where the order of words is paralleled and reversed (your country . . . do for you; you . . . do for your country). Nearly half a century later the tradition of uplifting rhetoric was still flourishing in the hands of Barack Obama who, in the same 2008 Chicago victory speech cited above, said:
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
Notice the assumptions behind this single sentence. First, that the election was of overwhelming interest around the world – which it was – from the highest levels of royalty and government (parliaments and palaces) to those who have no access to television but must huddle ‘around radios in the forgotten corners of our world’. They may be forgotten by everyone else but the president-elect is thinking of them, while the word huddled surely recalls the famous lines engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty (Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free). Obama’s words make the shift from the individual to the communal (singular . . . shared), all of it under the banner of new American leadership. The second and more explicit assumption is that this is a new dawn, a new leader, not just for America but for the world.
The only British leader who has approached this level of eloquence in recent years is Tony Blair who, at the moment of his election as prime minister in May 1997, also told his cheering supporters: ‘A new day has dawned, has it not?’ But, just as George W. Bush was something of an anomaly among American presidents in being linguistically clumsy, so Blair was unusual for his fluency, and often distrusted because of it.
Pork Barrels and Doughnutting
The leaders of English-speaking countries may very occasionally rise to the heights of oratory, deploying the English language in ways that are striking and inspiring. At a lower level, politics has thrown up many examples of original and quirky phraseology that give a more accurate picture of reality. The origins of the metaphorical US ‘pork barrel’ are obscure, but ever since the later 19th century the expression has conveyed, cynically, the process by which federal or state money is allocated to local projects in order to encourage voters in the area to back their legislators. To qualify as ‘pork-barrel schemes’, such projects have to be unnecessary, even useless.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there was for many years considerable opposition to the televising of the British parliament. When the cameras were eventually allowed into the House of Commons in 1989, strict rules were imposed. Only the speaker of the moment should be shown and without cutaway shots of members dozing, reading or sniggering behind their hands. To give the impression that the debates were well attended – and that voters were getting their money’s worth from their elected representatives – the practice of ‘doughnutting’ arose, whereby other members would surround the speaker to give the impression of a full chamber.
Literal references to food give an idea of just how tough is the politician’s life as he or she scrabbles up the ‘greasy pole’ (Disraeli’s phrase for political advancement). From America comes the ‘rubber-chicken circuit’, the round of mediocre dinners that must be endured while voters and donors are being courted. Even less enticing is the ‘mashed-potato circuit’. In mid-1990s Britain, when ‘New Labour’ was campaigning to wrest power from the Conservative Party, up-and-coming figures like Tony Blair embarked on a ‘prawn cocktail offensive’, a series of receptions designed to win over the traditionally hostile business and City circles. The prawns must have done their stuff since Labour was returned to power in 1997.
Taboo Words
The most contentious area of English, the one that raises the most doubt, discomfort and debate is the use of taboo words and expressions. The assumption is that these must relate principally to sex and body parts but forbidden terms shift through the ages, and current verbal taboos are much more likely to relate to racial questions, not sexual ones.
This is not a fresh subject. We can go back to the Middle Ages in the quest for taboo or dangerous expressions. Take, for example, the Wife of Bath. Here is Geoffrey Chaucer’s free-living, free-spoken character from The Canterbury Tales, lecturing the other pilgrims on the battle of the sexes. She is something of an expert on the subject, having got through five husbands and learned how to manage them all. As if still speaking to one of them, she gives the company of pilgrims a flavour of her browbeating style:
For certeyn, old dotard, by your leve,
Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve.
He is too great a nygard that wolde werne
A man to lighte a candle at his lanterne;
He shall have never the lasse light, pardee.
Which lines could be roughly rendered into modern English as: ‘For sure, old fool, if you allow it, you’ll get enough sex in the evening. That person who refuses to let another man light a candle from his lantern is a real skinflint – after all, he’s not going to receive any the less light, is he?’
The reader may notice that ‘sex’ is a slightly euphemistic translation of the Wife’s – or Chaucer’s – own term, queynte. Was the poet or his creation being particularly provocative or outrageous by using what is now referred to as the ‘c-word’? No, because while queynte was a frank term in the medieval period, it was just within the bounds of acceptable usage, even if the Wife of Bath takes care to vary it with other descriptions for the genitals, ranging from the scientific-sounding (membres, instrument) to the coy or bizarre (bele chose = beautiful thing [French]; quoniam = since [Latin]). Queynte or its modern equivalent did not become an obscene expression until the 18th century.
Indecent or taboo expressions are as capable of changing as any other area of language. What is constant is that something has to be taboo. Human societies seem to require a few risky terms, the deliberate employment of which will cause horror or shock or guilty amusement to the listeners or readers and (most likely) some pleasure to the user.
But these terms vary across the centuries. Expressions related to shit or piss, which are frequently spoken but beyond the edge of respectable written use even today, seem to have been part of standard English for hundreds of years. (‘I do smell all horse-piss’, says Trinculo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.) The familiar but still faintly impolite fart, which a dictionary may ring-fence with the description ‘coarse slang’, was sufficiently usual in the Elizabethan period to receive the royal pedigree. According to a story from the diarist John Aubrey, the Earl of Oxford broke wind while he was making a low obeisance to Queen Eizabeth: ‘at which he was so ashamed that he left the country for 7 years. At his return the Queen welcomed him and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart”.’
When it comes to farts and pissing and other terms that occupy a no-man’s-land between the standard and the obscene, we may actually be more prudish than our ancestors. On the other hand, though, it is difficult to credit now that playwright George Bernard Shaw caused a real sensation for theatre audiences in 1913 by having Eliza Doolittle in his play Pygmalion utter the notorious line, ‘Walk! Not bloody likely . . .‘, with the bloody intended as a give-away of Eliza’s ‘common’ background. Even the word ‘damn’ caused problems in the 1939 film version of Gone With the Wind. The emphasis in Rhett Butler’s famous departing line, which Clark Gable delivers to Vivien Leigh, was changed so that the stress fell not, as it would naturally, on the final damn but on the earlier give: ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
It took the Lady Chatterley case to make fuck acceptable – or at least non-prosecutable – on the printed page in the United Kingdom, although some years after that key 1960 court case the theatre critic Ken Tynan caused banner headlines and protests by deliberately saying the f-word out loud on a late-night BBC satire show. Now, on mainstream British television, it would take a fast finger on the remote-control to avoid hearing swear-words and obscenities across all the mainstream channels after the watershed hour of 9 p.m. American network television is, by British standards, rather prudish or restrained, with films edited to remove objectionable material (visual and verbal) and fines imposed for any infringement. Only US cable drama escapes the same restrictions.
Perhaps more surprising is the slowness of some dictionaries to include four-letter words. According to Bill Bryson, in his language book Mother Tongue (1990), the editors of the Random House Dictionary decided against their inclusion in the 1966 edition and it took more than 20 years for the contentious terms to make their dictionary debut under the watchful eye of this particular publisher. The Oxford English Dictionary was a little earlier, choosing to include obscenities from the early 1970s, but by then there had been more than a decade of freedom in fiction and elsewhere.
This caution is shared by the print media both in Britain and the US. Outlets with a relatively youthful and largely liberal audience, such as Time Out, New York or the on-line Salon.com, will sparingly employ the f-word and others, as will British newspapers like the Guardian or the Independent. But in general obscene and indecent terms are avoided altogether or, if they have to be reproduced, are partly blotted out with asterisks. Decorum is preserved, although some object to the mealy-mouthed nature of the practice.
But the English-speaking peoples do not live in an ‘anything-goes’ linguistic community. If traditional swear-words and obscenities are acceptable in print, then the racial slurs which would once have been commonplace now cause the same sort of shock and outrage. Casual anti-semitism was rife in the early part of the 20th century. Writers as different and respected as the poet T.S. Eliot and John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), make disparaging anti-Jewish references, and the context makes plain that these are neither exceptional nor anything to take exception to.
Mark Twain’s great novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn immediately ran into difficulties on its publication in 1884 on account of its perceived ‘coarseness’. But it was the attitude towards black people, and in particular the ubiquitous use of the word ‘nigger’ in the text, that caused problems for US schools and libraries in the second half of the last century, and probably some discomfort in many readers as well.
Sensitivity to racially charged language is now acute. The principal character in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), a university professor, loses his job because of a careless use of the term spooks, referring to a couple of persistent absentees to class. (‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’) He forgets that spooks is an old disparaging term for blacks, which these students happen to be. In the mass media, even a casual racial reference will be inspected and the speaker will find him or herself criticized and run the risk of a dismissal.
English words that have long been regarded as obscene or taboo were at the centre of what was, arguably, the most important literary trial of the 20th century. In 1960 Penguin Books were prosecuted for their publication of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The failure of the prosecution was a watershed.
Lawrence (1885–1930) knew that Lady Chatterley was unpublishable in his lifetime. The book was originally printed privately in Italy in 1928 and sent to subscribers in Britain. When it was confiscated by customs and postal officials, its cachet as a ‘dirty book’ inevitably rose. Lady Chatterley led an underground existence for many years until in 1959 the New York Court of Appeals upheld a federal judge’s decision that the book had literary merit and that Lawrence’s sexual explicitness and frequent use of four-letter words were relevant to plot or character development. This encouraged Penguin to publish the book in the UK, even though they knew they would be prosecuted. It was what was called a ‘test case by arrangement’, intended to clarify the obscenity laws.
The book describes a passionate affair between an upper-class woman and her social inferior, a gamekeeper on her husband’s estate. This sexual crossing of class boundaries was part of the book’s shock value but the greater part lay in Lawrence’s description of ‘thirteen episodes of sexual intercourse’ and the taboo-breaking use of four-letter terms. The defence lined up a star-studded array of witnesses, including a bishop and many distinguished writers and academics, but most of them weren’t required. The prosecution called only one witness: a detective inspector who testified that the book had actually been published.
The most famous quotation from the case is not an example of Lawrence’s four-lettered prose but some words from the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones. He asked the jury – who included a furniture-maker, a dock worker and a teacher – ‘Is it a book that you would wish to have lying around the house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’ The questions showed how remote the authorities were from everyday life and how traditional views on language were changing. Within a year of its official publication in Britain, Lady Chatterley’s Lover had sold more than 2 million copies.