Corrupting language
This week ‘twitter’ was declared the most popular word for 2009. Meanwhile the Public Administration Select Committee published a report called Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language. Naturally, working for a government agency and being no stranger to social media networking, I was intrigued. Could there be a connection?
Apparently it took a ‘Texas-based algorithm‘ to work out that ‘twitter’ is the top word of 2009. A good guess would have sufficed and been less carbon intensive – after all, twitter’s mentioned on practically every page of the world wide web, and Stephen Fry has been banging on about it – guaranteeing it a place in the news, at least in the UK.
But perhaps the most astonishing thing about this announcement was when a senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, said:
“Twitter… hasn’t made it into the OED yet.”
But there it is – in my not-so-redundant 2002 edition – with some perfectly adequate definitions:
“v. 2 talk rapidly in a nervous or trivial way… * n. 2 trivial talk.”
Presumably someone has suggested that ‘Twitter’ should go in the dictionary as a brand name like ‘Hoover’. Could this be a case of large corporations trying to control the direction of the language?
Could they, and those that rule us, be conspiring? Or could they be taking very different paths?
Government – at least in the UK – appears to be trying to clean up its act.
Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language reports – in a chattier style than you’d usually expect from things Parliamentary – about Tessa Jowell MP and her ‘little book of bollocks’. It then lays the blame for ‘bad language’ squarely at the door of the legal profession, financial institutions and academics.
The report quotes several examples of bad language in official documents including – bewilderingly enough – the House of Commons ‘business plan’.
Why does the House of Commons need a business plan? No mention of that in the Magna Carta! But here’s the example anyway:
“FY 2008/09: objectives:…To ensure a risk management system is embedded within business processes, allowing for risks to be escalated up and down the organisation as necessary.”
How do you ‘escalate down’? And what sort of risks did they have in mind when they wrote that? Perhaps they’re referring to the risk of ‘public scandal’.
The question is, was the House of Commons ‘risk management system’ was ‘embedded’ by the time Tessa Jowell’s husband was convicted of bribery, corruption and perjury. I bet she filled her ‘little book of bollocks’ with bad language that day.
And if the risk management system was ‘embedded’ by the time the row about MPs’ expenses broke out in 2009/10, then ‘escalated’ may not be such a bad word choice after all.
Finally, I should mention that the report does acknowledge:
“Attempts to use language to disguise or distort meaning can feed [the] growing public mistrust of government.”
Why does that need stating?
