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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