The loons have been talk­ing more fre­quent­ly of late, the haunt­ing call known as the “wail”. One of four sounds loons use to com­mu­ni­cate, ornithol­o­gists believe its few notes speak vol­umes. Human com­mu­ni­ca­tion, by com­par­i­son increas­ing­ly brings to mind the first lines of Har­ry Nilsson’s sig­na­ture song: “Every­body’s talk­ing at me/I don’t hear a word they’re saying/Only the echoes of my mind”.

The gap between loon calls and answers can be sev­er­al min­utes, and even if they sound repet­i­tive, the tim­bre and notes are evoca­tive­ly beau­ti­ful. Human com­mu­ni­ca­tion speech is any­thing but that, and increas­ing­ly same-sound­ing. The most grat­ing and repet­i­tive ‘note’ is “awe­some”.
The usu­al def­i­n­i­tion is: “extreme­ly impres­sive or daunt­ing; inspir­ing great admi­ra­tion, appre­hen­sion, or fear”, as in, for exam­ple “the awe­some pow­er of the atom­ic bomb”.
Instead, it’s applied to any­thing and every­thing, no mat­ter how mun­dane. In cas­es where the word is applic­a­ble, there are up to two dozen syn­onyms avail­able. But then, how many of those who reflex­ive­ly use the adjec­tive know what a The­saurus is? Cer­tain­ly not the ones who con­sis­tent­ly use he equal­ly annoy­ing “game-chang­er” and “wake-up call”.

                             A LITTLE LESS TALK PLEASE

Exces­sive ver­biage is reach­ing the lev­el of absurd. BBC World Ser­vice radio online, whose busi­ness is talk­ing, reg­u­lar­ly sub­sti­tutes a screen full of pro­mos for a notice that reads: “Sor­ry, we are expe­ri­enc­ing some issues now. You can still lis­ten to BBC World Ser­vice.”  How odd, I thought that’s what I was already doing…
The most famous line from the movie “Apol­lo 13” is: “Hous­ton, we have a prob­lem”. The actu­al line, spo­ken by Apol­lo 13 com­mand mod­ule pilot John Swigert was: “Okay, Hous­ton, we’ve had a prob­lem here.”
The movie ver­sion, which has become a cliché, was artis­tic licence for dra­mat­ic effect, which it’s worth not­ing took few­er, not more, words. Would any­one remem­ber if the astro­naut or the actor had said: “Hous­ton, we are expe­ri­enc­ing some issues at the moment”?
The temp­ta­tion is to say “obvi­ous­ly not”. But “obvi­ous­ly” is anoth­er of those ubiq­ui­tous, point­less words used on air. If some­thing is obvi­ous, it doesn’t need to be flagged as such. Doing so sig­ni­fies one of sev­er­al pos­si­bil­i­ties: the speak­er is of the opin­ion that his audi­ence are too dumb to see the obvi­ous, or has a secret infe­ri­or­i­ty com­plex and wants lis­ten­ers to know that he knows. The third, and more like­ly pos­si­bil­i­ty, is that the reporter has lit­tle of con­se­quence to say and is mere­ly fill­ing air time.
Add that to the appalling “style” of sen­tences with­out verbs, or present instead of past tens­es, obvi­ous igno­rance of the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion of “the” and “a” before con­so­nants and vow­els, and lis­ten­ing to the news becomes inju­ri­ous to the dis­po­si­tion of a nor­mal­ly lit­er­ate per­son, nev­er mind that of we pedants.

                                      BLAME IT ON THE MEDIA 

Maybe every­day speech is dete­ri­o­rat­ing in part because what’s on air is so bloat­ed, self-right­eous and point­less. Is there any dumb­er ques­tion an anchor can ask a cor­re­spon­dent than “What do we know about…?”
“We” being a col­lec­tive noun, the anchor is ask­ing to be told what he/she and the rest of us already know. Which does not fit the def­i­n­i­tion of “news”.
And yes, there is some­thing dumb­er. A CBC radio pre­sen­ter recent­ly enjoined a reporter to “tell us what we know about…”. The mind boggles.

                                       THANKS, BUT NO THANKS

And why do anchors and pre­sen­ters feel it’s nec­es­sary to thank reporters for doing their job? I was an on-air reporter for near­ly four decades. I assure you that peo­ple like me want, crave, cov­et air time. We’ll glad­ly for­go the forced jol­li­ty in favour of more of it. Let­ting us do our jobs prop­er­ly (and the pay of course) is all the thanks we need or want.
Insin­cere civil­i­ty is arguably even worse. Who’s impressed by or grate­ful for a record­ed “Your call is impor­tant to us”, fol­lowed by “Please lis­ten care­ful­ly as some of our menu options may have changed.” A record­ed mes­sage based on the assump­tion that I may have actu­al­ly clogged my mind with menu options from a pre­vi­ous call, is even more annoy­ing than hav­ing to lis­ten to the damned list in the often vain hope of find­ing a human when I punch one of the menu buttons.
Hav­ing had my rant and vent­ed my spleen, it’s time to move on to Nilsson’s third verse:
“I’m going where the sun keeps shining/Through the pour­ing rain/Going where the weath­er suits my clothes…”

 

That’s anoth­er way of say­ing I’m going pad­dling. With luck, a loon will offer a few well-cho­sen words, to which I’ll be more than hap­py to listen.

 

P.S. If you’ve read this far and did not click on the first link, give your­self a treat and go back and do it.
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