Good words, bad words

John McIntyre at You Don't Say offers a valuable post on 200 words you can well do without. The post talks about a list of "200 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively with local people" produced by the British Local Government Association. McIntyre's comment:

Two points of interest here: dishonesty and pretense.

Jargon and euphemism can simply serve the purpose of gulling the unwary. In such cases, the writer knows full well that he or she is being duplicitous. Imagine the vendor of a product who assures you of your good fortune at being able to buy a smaller quantity for a higher price.

But I think that pretense is the more common cause of the kind of bloating that the LGA’s little list represents. That is what makes it difficult to tell whether the language contains an obscure meaning or conceals a lack of meaning. Jargon, of course, signifies that one is a member of the club. For some years past, people who pretended to scholarly study of literature had to master the opacities of deconstructionism, which the uncharitable insisted was an assertion that texts have no meaning, demonstrated by example. To be accepted as a proper member of the bureaucracy, one must write like a bureaucrat, and anyone who marinates in that stuff long enough winds up unable to distinguish any other flavor.

There's nothing here with which I can disagree, certainly, especially when I actually take a look at the 200 words. The Association has offered these terms with alternatives that are better for clear communication. No one who has worked in a company or dealt with government will fail to recognize most of these, words such as:

Actioned (alternative: do)
Autonomous (independent)
Commissioning (buy)
Engagement (working with people)
Exemplar (example)
Promulgate (spread)
and on and on...

One could take issue with a few of these; "outsourced" isn't quite the same thing as "privatised," and there are times the distinction is important. More importantly, as McIntyre points out, a list like this is unlikely to have much effect. Quite appropriately, he urges us to use the list not as a weapon, but as a personal reminder to avoid falling into bad language habits.

However...

Much as I agree with the excision of these words of pretense, I would argue that we sometimes need the so-called five dollar words. English is a marvelous language, with influences from around the world, and has so many words that we can often find a word that is exactly right. And sometimes that word is long or unfamiliar. Being either doesn't necessarily imply dishonesty or pretension (not that I believe McIntyre is implying that, but it's an attitude I've run into a few times).

For an example of what I mean, see this post by programmer Jeff Atwood. Atwood exposes us to the words "idempotent," "orthogonality," and "immutability," and explains why they are vital to the software developer.

Perhaps these words, and others mentioned by commenters on the post, are jargon, but they're useful jargon, limited only by the reality that too few developers are aware of their meaning. But understanding them can save a lot of time, as each expresses in one word a concept of depth and complexity.

The danger, of course, is that they will creep imperfectly into the vocabularies of the obfuscators, and we'll have politicians and business leaders talking about "immutable orthogonal idempotence," and no one should want that.

It's it's, unless it's its

If you're one of the many who have trouble distinguishing between "it's" and "its," which I'll grant is confusing in that two rules are confused ([contractions with is take an 's] [possessives take an 's]), I have a helpful suggestion for you.

Rather than trying to figure it out, just use the same one all the time. This is the principle of the old brain-teaser, which is more correct, the clock that loses a minute every day, or the clock that doesn't work at all? (The second, of course, as it is right twice a day.)

Many writers seem to get "it's" and "its" wrong; apparently they completely misunderstand the right rule. So pick one, and you'll only be wrong 50% of the time. You're welcome (or is that your welcome?).

Adjectives

I've studied a few languages with varying degrees of success, I've taken courses in linguistics, so I've had the opportunity to think about how languages do things. At that, I am continually surprised by the complexities of English. When you really think about all the things we just naturally say and understand, and, more importantly, the things we recognize as "wrong," it's a marvel we learn the language at all.

John McIntyre has had a couple of posts up lately about rules, and, in one he wrote just a short time ago ("This is not a rule"), he points out something I hadn't really thought about before:

One example is the pattern or sequence of adjectives. When a string of adjectives precedes a noun, they follow this pattern:

article, opinion, size, age, shape, color, nationality or ethnicity, religion, material, purpose or qualifier.

You can talk or write about the old gray Presbyterian stone church without giving trouble to your audience, but a reference to the Presbyterian gray stone old church will be a problem. I suppose that you could call the sequence of adjectives a rule rather than a pattern or structure, but it is not anything that has to be taught to a native speaker.

Pretty interesting, and perhaps this is one reason I never quite got this down in French (except to replicate what we do in English, which I'm guessing, Mrs. Wright, was wrong some of the time).

Palin and Paglia

I've been amused to watch the debate between Camille Paglia and, well, the rest of the world about Sarah Palin. Paglia is the social critic who seems to enjoy stirring things up, who revels in her contradictions and her sometimes-odd fascinations. I've read rather more of Paglia than I probably should, but I find her a fascinating example of "Hey, look at me" coupled with an academic veneer that often makes her oddities appear more profound than they are.

At any rate, she believes that Sarah Palin, rather than being incoherent, is actually painting brilliant, jazz-like word pictures:

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into
the more traditional Third World.

She also has gone toe to toe with Dick Cavett, outraged that he would have a problem with her mangling of the language. She still stands behind her friend from Alaska:

Sarah Palin's rehabilitation has been well launched. Step by step over the past five weeks since the election, headlines about Palin in the mainstream media and some Web news sites have become more neutral and even laudatory, signifying that a shift toward reality is already at hand. My confidence about Palin's political future continues, as does my disgust at the provincial snobbery and amoral trashing of her reputation by the media and liberal elite, along with some conservative insiders.

Daniel Larison takes this apart (via Patrick Appel guesting at Andrew Sullivan's place):

Cavett’s criticisms of Palin’s use of language were entirely accurate, but are supposedly too fusty and outmoded for the hip blogspeaking kids…and Camille Paglia. Does she think that it is a tribute to Palin to say that her “exuberant” way of speaking is “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class”? To hear Paglia tell it, Amy Poehler did not need to perform a Palin rap song on SNL–we need only listen to Palin’s interview excerpts to hear the sounds of the street…or are they the sounds of Wasilla’s Super Wal-Mart parking lot?

Reading Paglia’s descriptions of Palin’s language, I am reminded of newspaper articles that describe crime-ridden neighborhoods as “vibrant.” This is the hyper-condescension of the anti-bien pensant person, who in this case makes a grand show of her sympathy for a target of conventional ridicule to show how even more enlightened and thoughtful she is than the merely “provincial” bourgeoisie. Paglia is worldly-wise, and she appreciates the wonderful “exuberance” of Palin, in much the same way that outsiders might praise the “warmth” of “charming” and “colorful” ethnic neighborhoods as a way of subtly reasserting their superiority while pretending to praise the people who live there. Let us hope that Palin does not make a comeback, if only to spare us more of Paglia’s Palinophilia.

I can't add much to that, but I am enjoying it.

Zhingle all the way

[Note: I wrote the following before I did my research. I'll put another note at the end with some links.]

It is a source of enduring irritation to me that the large majority of commentators, whether NBC's or on local news, persist in calling the Olympic host city, Bei-zhing. Because that's not how it's pronounced at all; just as it's spelled in the pinyin system, it's Bei-jing. Jing, as in "jingle," not zhing, with the sound of the second 'g' in "garage."

I know that older systems like Wade-Giles confused Westerners, as the notation was often not reflective of the actual Chinese sounds. But pinyin is far superior, and can be taken in most cases (not all - the name "Mo" is pronounced more like "maw" than like the Stooge) as accurate, leaving aside the unpleasantness of the tonal system.

So it's Bei-jing, with a 'j.' And what is really odd to me is that 'j' is far more common in English than "zh," which tends to show up in words that came from French like "garage" or "measure." We should greatly prefer Bei-jing, but we don't. Is it a desire for faux foreignness? A tendency to assume that nothing in Chinese is pronounced precisely as it's written? I just don't know.

[End note: It turns out I wasn't the first to notice this. Language Hat has an item here, with interesting comments. There are comments on MSNBC about this. If you want to see several more, Google "beijing beizhing."]

Error-correcting language

How large would our language have to be to be self-correcting, or at least error-flagging? If you're at all familiar with error detection schemes, you know that the goal is to present the receiver of a message with: 1) the information needed to correct a faulty message, or 2) minimally, the information to know that the message is faulty, allowing a request to retransmit.

What I want is to be able to type a passage in which I would have all typing errors flagged. For example, I often type "tome" instead of "time"; since "tome" is a legal word, it isn't flagged by spell check. So I guess what my real question is, how could we create a language in a specific keyboard context for which we couldn't have those errors?

But then, I also wouldn't want the kind of errors where I forget one keystroke ("wan" is a word, so leaving the final 't' off "want," as I just did, should be flagged). That makes creating the language even more difficult ("an" could be a word, but we couldn't then have "any," "ant," etc.).

This strikes me as a worthwhile problem for someone to work on, if it hasn't been done already (not that I'm volunteering). I suppose any such language would feature too many long words, would probably not be utterable, would be unworkable. It is kind of an interesting problem, though....