258. Tribal Loyalty and the English Language

 
-->

Linguistic clarity may be essential to moral clarity, as a subhead on yesterday's (9-6-14) Times' OpEd reminds us, but it's so hard, so hard, to maintain it.  As soon as you leave your neutral academic classroom and join (or admit that you are already a member of) a tribe you feel the muck sticking to your words.

I think I felt it when I recognized my membership in the Israeli tribe, through my attachment to the Judeo-Christian tribe of Western history (Post 225).  As soon as the Egyptian generals overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government I began to fear clarity in describing their deed.  Why?  Because the generals would, in a pinch, help Israel and not her enemies.  (As, when the pinch came in Gaza they did, shutting off tunnels that the elected Brotherhoood president, I feel sure, would not have shut off..)

So, anticipating that, what do I want of the words describing what the generals have done.  Certainly not clarity.  This is the world, where words serve purposes.  Here the purpose, Israel's security, demands obfuscation.  So I, the lord of accuracy in my Composition classroom, wince at the accurate use of the word "coup" for the action that put the generals where they are.  "Couldn't we have a little muck on this one?"

If there were a tribal membership that Chrystia Freeland, author of the OpEd piece, might discover in herself it would be, through her mother, the tribe of liberal Ukrainians, with clan connections to the tribe of her father, the Liberal Party of Canada, through which Freeland has now become a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Freeland's voice in the beginning of her piece could be that of a colleague speaking in the next classroom.  She speaks up strongly for clear language, and exposure of obfuscation.  She reproaches Western leaders and journalists for their reluctance to use plain terms.  Russia's actions clearly constitute "an invasion," the term Ukraine's cyberactivists use, and are not "an incursion," the term favored by President Obama and accepted by journalists.  She appeals, as we all do, to George Orwell's faulting of slovenly language: "that it makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

But what would we hear from that classroom if the rest of her piece were before it?  Here's the central paragraph:

We may decide we lack the will to stop this [invasion] or to more forcefully help Ukrainians to stop it, but in making that decision we need to be clear about what is going on.  The distinction between lies and truth matter here because this conflict started with the Ukrainian people's revolt against authoritarianism and in favor of the liberal rights and responsibilities Ukrainians call European values.  In the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, moral clarity is essential, but to get there we need linguistic clarity, too: Ukrainians decided to build a democracy at home and make a trade deal with Europe; Russia invaded.

Well-instructed students will go to the central statement that "Ukrainians decided to build a democracy" and the implication that Russians interrupted that building.  How does it fit what's being described?  A little research will show the student that Ukraine had a democracy.  Their president was voted into office by a majority of the Ukrainian people in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards."  What else is democracy, neutrally defined?  And that president was removed by action in the streets.  The word "interruption" fits that, and Russia had nothing to do with it.  What Russia is interrupting now is an interruption of democracy.

I don't know what other academics will make of this.  I suspect that, from the hum I hear, over in political philosophy they're retheorizing faith in the common man.  How can you trust the common man when in the Ukraine he overwhelmingly elects a mug like Yanukovich and then so overwhelmingly rejects him that he, the common man, can't hold himself back long enough to vote him out in the next election?  Same challenge in Egypt.  Give the common man a decent election, finally, and the winners are a bunch of fanatics.

I have no doubt that Chrystia Freedland would make a good Composition teacher.  Her heart, like mine, is in the right place.  She wants words to connect accurately with the world as it is.  But she is as much a tribe member as I am, and you can see it in her words about the Ukraine.

124. We Have Listened to George Orwell!

-->

-->

When I compare the writing in my European history textbook of 1946, the year Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" came out, with the writing in a current European history textbook I think we have listened well.

Ferdinand Schevill (A History of Europe, first edition, 1925) wrote, in a marginal gloss, "The reign of Alfonso XIII opens (1902) not inauspiciously." Orwell hated the "not un-" construction, so common in professors' writing. When Professor Harold Laski wrote the following sentence he climbed all over it:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien.

Five negatives in 53 words. Orwell counts them for you. In the sections on Spain in Palmer, Colton, and Kramer (The Making of the Modern World, 10th edition, 2007) I count not a single "not un-" construction.

The negative-to-word ratio is now way down in all scholars' writing. In everybody's writing. The classic "not unlike" double negative, the star of Professor Laski's sentence, was used in the New York Times 621 times in the decade before "Politics and the English Language" appeared. In the next decade it was down to 563 and the ratio has been falling ever since. We're all scared to death of George Orwell.

Orwell saw how scared scholars were of each other.  You think they weren't scared?  Listen to Schevill, on one page: "Our judgment can hardly be other than..." "It cannot be maintained, however, that..." "No one familiar with...will fail to give weight to " "The reflection will not be denied that..." "We are driven to fall back on..." "A satisfactory analysis would have to take account of..." "Nor should...be overlooked." That's scared. Academic scared. Hedge, hedge, hedge.

"Ah, but Schevill had a lot to be afraid of on that page. He was writing about Spain in the twentieth century. His specialties were Italy in the Renaissance, and the Balkans. He's flying over territory where he could get shot down any minute. Remember, in 1946 he's still writing to a lot of people trained, as he was (Freiburg, 1892), in the German tradition. Mortal Teutonic combat."

How I know it. Any Ph. D. student who faced a committee in those days knows it. Prussian accents. You're a wuss among he-men. "Don't hit me, don't hit me." Write articles or books after that and you're damn well going to hedge. You never get over that fright.

"Of course not. It goes with the territory. What business are we all in? The search for truth. Truth is by trial. The tougher the adversaries the better the trial and the closer you get. The aim of universities is to bring tough adversaries together. You don't expect newcomers to walk onto their court without fear do you? No, they're going to be scared, and that's a good thing. It will make them more careful. Care, which shows itself in cautious language, is what the enterprise is all about."

Then Laski's language just showed great care? I shouldn't gag?

"You can gag, but only because he's carrying a good thing too far. His 'not un-' construction comes under an ancient and honorable category of understatement called 'litotes.' It's characteristically used to keep from going overboard, either in praise or in blame. 'He is not unintelligent.' 'He is not overly bright.' If you think you're going to be too harsh, too judgmental, too bald, too impressionable, or not sly enough, if you need a few mannerisms of care to hide your essential lack of it, you go litotic. Go too far and you go wuss."

As Laski did.

"And wouldn't you add Schevill? Isn't he a wuss?"

I wouldn't say so without noticing where he wound up. He ended that section calling Spain "a backward country." That's pretty direct, and it took some guts, even in his time — when you could still call an age "dark." And I, an undergraduate, knew what he was driving at, because I wrote in the margin opposite his description of Spain's leadership, "Mañana types." Lazy. How did Schevill build me up to that? In what looks to me like a wussy way: "As nothing was done [to utilize Spain's resources] we are driven to fall back on the ancient charge of a certain sloth in the national character." He doesn't want to call anybody lazy, or backward, he doesn't want to say they lived in darkness, he's a good, liberal, non-judgmental historian, but sometimes by God logic just forces you, drives you, however desperate you are to find an excuse for your fellow human beings, to make a judgment on them — one that, alas, coincides with established stereotypes. Now tell me: Isn't "wussy" is the right word for that?

"I don't think so, but I don't think 'gutty' is right either. There's too much guts for 'wussy' and not enough for 'gutty.'"

Which side does it lean toward?

"Wussy."

But you can't say it. You're perfectly set up to be clobbered by Orwell. In a minute you're going to say it's "not unwussy." Have you been listening?