SO MANY WORDS SO LITTLE PROPERLY SAID
The loons that grace the lake where I am now ensconced, can say everything they need others of their species to know, simply by mixing the syllables of four clear calls. English-speaking humans seem compelled to do the opposite.
It has been calculated that native English speakers have an average vocabulary of 40,000 words, equally divided between active, meaning words we use, and passive, ones we know, but rarely if ever use.
The use of lazy and useless words is like an irritating itch that no amount of scratching will ease, let alone end.
Everything from single sentences to idle chit-chat and conversations, learned elucidations and worst of all, news reporting, is littered with poineless mis-used verbiage, and in many cases deliberately ignored rules of grammar.
Even the best-educated now litter their speech with repetitive word sand phrases that confuse, diminish and disguise whatever point they are trying to make.
The transgressions don’t require a streak of pedantry for the listener to be offended or confused by them.
Two nights ago I turned off CBC Radio’s highly rated national documentary and discussion program “Ideas”, because the interviewee, an otherwise fascinating professor, consistently used “like” as punctuation. An adult using teen-speak, whether on purpose or to foster the impression of being in tune with the times, is on a regrettable par with news reporters attaching versions of “very” to “unique” in the cause of supposed dramatic effect.
Worse still is the broadcast news affectation of deliberately fracturing grammar in an apparent effort to create the illusion of immediacy.
To make sense and tell the truth, sentences require verbs.
Phrases such as “the President saying…” is borderline gibberish. He said. Verb. Past tense. Truthful, Not hype.
However, the U.S. network whose anchor and star correspondents specialise in such travesties has the highest ratings. The practice has migrated to the CBC and infected the venerable BBC World Service, which touts itself as “the world’s radio station”. The sobriquet is based on a listenership that includes an audience for whom English is a second and often third or fourth language, who deserve to be informed in correct, not deliberately mangled English.
Presenters and correspondents who certainly know better, routinely say “thee” and “ay”, instead of “the” and “a” before words that begin with a consonant.
THE BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY
Reporters charged with helping viewers and listeners make sense of utterances from President Donald Trump, which, regrettably, affect the lives of everyone on Earth to some degree, bear an even greater responsibility to meet the standards-and-credibility of Edward Murrow, Walter Cronkite and other great pioneers of their craft.
The rambling, habitually inchoate wreck in the office formerly occupied by what even non-Americans once accepted as a pre-eminent world leader, only believes and is interested in whatever he’s about to say. Since he also shows no sign of understanding what he says, or its import, and the next simplistic, bombastic or vulgar emission may well contradict what he just spouted, it’s crucial that it be reported in a clear, crisp way, so everyone else has a decent chance to guess what it meant, while we wait, hopeful and helpless, for a modicum of sanity and coherence to return to U.S. politics.
POOR GRADES ARE IN ORDER
Shakespeare’s combined written works totaled 25,000 unique words.
The way students at American universities and their counterparts in other parts of the world seem to consider top marks a right to be bestowed, not earned, the Bard’s usage seems unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future.
The tendency to hand out A grades like street flyer advertising recently prompted faculty members at Harvard University to vote for a limit of 20 percent on the number of A’s in a given course, with an allowance of four additional A’s for merit. Progress of a sort, I suppose.
The Washington Post (which I’d guess employs a number of Harvard alumni) has slipped into the easy way out headline-wise.
The on-line edition uses “Four (and sometimes five) takeaways from…” so regularly, readers could be forgiven for wondering if the Opinions section operates a Chinese restaurant on the side.
The only ubiquitous redundancy that makes me smile rather than grind my teeth, is any version of “plans going forward”.
If anyone who uses it can find a way to plan backwards, please let me know. I’ve got a list of choices, from investments to roads not taken I’d like to revisit.
In the meantime, I’ll do the best version of re-living the past I know, and paddle off to listen to the loons.
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3 thoughts on “SO MANY WORDS SO LITTLE PROPERLY SAID”
Keep on paddling Pizzey, we’re with you!
Sir,
I’m a new reader and I enjoyed your “So many words, so little properly said.” And I also enjoy the call of the loon from my lake. It’s a grace we share.
I suspect you will not be offended if I call you a curmudgeon. That is, in fact, what you’re aiming for, is it not?
I join you in curmudgitude on the question of thee and ay, the regrettable ubiquity of “very unique,” the laziness of punctuating sentences with, like, verbal tics, and the redundant idiocy of “plans going forward.”
Elsewhere I must take exception.
The formal “the president said”, past tense, comes from a print paradigm. More than half a century ago, when I was in journalism school, the more active, conversation style, “the president saying,” was already being encouraged in broadcast journalism (Is that a verbal? Participle? Gerund? I’ve never got that part straight). It’s a phrase designed to accompany moving images of, well, the president saying, whatever it is the president says, in real time.
You note Shakespeare’s 25,000 unique (no modifier) words. Shakespeare is often credited with creating or inventing about 1700 English words. More modern scholarship suggests he invented a much smaller number (which we would describe as fewer, rather than less than) and otherwise merely wrote down for the first time words that were already in common use.
Were Shakespeare writing today, he might well have been the first to use “takeaway,” a vivid and economical way of referring to a summary of key points.
Reporting Donald Trump is a special challenge, one which our profession generally has not yet grasped. I disagree that he should be reported in “a clear, crisp way.” Rather, he should be quoted, verbatim, at length, which is the only way that readers can judge for themselves the full measure of his incoherence. Heather Cox Richardson does it admirably. She is not a journalist, but she may well be the only writer today covering the president correctly.
Now back to our regularly scheduled loon.
Welcome to my perch, Douglas, and thank you for the thoughtful and extensive comment.
I am a curmudgeon, but not all the time.
If the perpetrators in question used the “ing” ending over moving images, I accept your point. My gripe is that it’s used by anchors sitting at desks, reporters as talking heads flapping arms like their auditioning for a hand jive contest, and don’t appear to understand the necessity or even role of verbs.
I bow to your more extensive knowledge of Shakespeare, but I doubt he would have used “takeaways” on the daily basis the WP does.
As for Trump, he would be a challenge best political reporters in the history of journalism.
My point is that print pieces quoting him at length and TV airtime need to turn his verbal fire hose off when it becomes excessively inane or repetitive, and succinctly counter nonsense and lies with facts counter the nonsense with facts, not let him go by the Bannon playbook and “flood the zone with shit”..