By Ian Mc Donald
The outpouring of gibberish, the daily fracturing of the English language, which goes on all about us makes me return yet again to a favourite theme – the need to rescue language from the barbarians who are taking over the world. Standards of literacy in Guyana continue to decline. This is an especially pernicious aspect of an inferior educational system. Schools are not teaching the basic skills of reading and writing as well as they used to do. At the same time children in their homes are less and less exposed to books and more and more exposed to video games and to television which focuses almost exclusively on adults and entertainment and very little on children and education.
More and more of our children are growing up with little ability and practice in reading or writing. This will be a handicap all their lives. The capacity to learn and understand any subject increases or languishes to the extent that you can or cannot read properly and express yourself clearly. This is fundamental and it is astonishing that our top educators are not doing more to close this gaping breach in the educational system which lets in such floods of ignorance and incomprehension in the society.
However, I do not intend to write yet again about functional illiteracy. God knows, I have written often enough about that desperately important subject and will, I am sure, do so again. But now I want to consider a kind of semi-literacy which is as appalling as illiteracy itself.
The following sentence, taken from a book entitled Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution by Roy Bhaskar, is a prime example of the sort of utter nonsense which passes for English in a multitude of books and articles these days.
“Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal – of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psychosomatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic…”
The sentence, which goes on for a further 55 words, is harder to follow after this point.
Or consider the following written by another quite famous ‘intellectual,’ Felix Guattari:
“We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously.”
But those are examples taken from the ridiculous world of academia at its most hermetically sealed. So consider a superb example of semi-literacy taken from the practical world of running a town council. The following directive issued by a London borough council is a more run-of-the-mill example of the sort of semi-literate jargon beginning to prevail everywhere.
“The Community Affairs Department delivers decentralized services with specific targeting and outreach techniques to achieve manifesto objectives. The front line interface with the public and community groups provide a catalyst input to services across the council supporting initiatives in priority areas.”
This is pure jabber. Of 41 words 11 are inert conjunctions or articles and all except two of the others either mean nothing whatsoever (outreach, interface) or nothing as used here (targeting, community, input, front line, areas) or can mean anything that any reader might take them to mean (techniques, objectives, initiatives, services, groups, priority, supporting) or are largely tautological (affairs, manifesto, provides, delivers, decentralized) or are entirely tautological (specific, public) or have a real meaning which the author cannot be bothered to look up in the dictionary, preferring his own imaginary meaning (catalyst). Which leaves “achieve” and “council” like nuggets in this appalling mishmash.
Such semi-literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon. Language after all reflects the minds of those who use it and it is only lately – the last three or four decades – that people’s minds began to work that way. But now such people and their prose are taking over the world, accompanied by a whole new apparatus of lap-top machines and word processing technology mightily aiding them in the destruction of plain sense.
What has happened is the rise to power of the half-educated. The most obvious thing about this terrible paragraph is that it has never occurred to the author of it to find out what the words mean, not even the ones that do mean something.
The author has seen such words in print and decided they are important ones and therefore thinks that to write a statement largely composed of them is a sign of learning.
This is what happens. The uneducated are content to use their smaller, yet perfectly effective, vocabulary, together with their rudimentary, yet equally satisfactory, grasp of a working grammar. The educated can deploy a wider knowledge of words and a deeper understanding of the use of them. But the half-educated despise those who have never had their own educational advantages and are therefore unwilling to limit themselves to a vocabulary and syntax they can understand. The result is that they try to rise above the level of what they have learned and in doing so write the paragraph quoted earlier and countless others of the same inert indecipherability. This is not a small matter. Semi-literate language is dehumanized and dehumanizing. It poisons not only the beautiful, infinitely various, and unique language we have inherited but it pollutes national life; when words are emptied of meaning, meaning itself fades. And when meaning fades confusion and incomprehension reign. In a very real sense preserving sense and clarity in language involves preserving the character and integrity of a nation. In that great cause we are going to need as much specific targeting and outreach techniques as we can muster, if we are to provide a catalyst input supporting manifesto initiatives in priority areas. The frontline interface is closer than we think.
