I'm a man of many words. That's not just because I preach and teach, read and write, all as part of a vocation and also in fulfilment of whatever it is that gives each of us that inner urge and urgency to communicate. In conversation with a good friend recently he compared us, acknowledging his own reserve and diffidence sometimes, whereas "Jim, you are voluble." It was a compliment, and I took it as such, cos it's true!
I'm also a lexophile. I love words. Collect them, file them, look them up, pronounce them, read them, write them, speak them, am moved by them, educated by them, and therefore value them as one of humanity's greatest gifts. The semantic and cultural origins of words, the creative precision and craft of weaving words into sentences, the rhythm and persuasiveness of words well chosen and composed into spoken music, and the capacity of words to convey something of thought, emotion and description, all are sources of delight. I have a hoodie, given by the students at the Scottish Baptist College, which has on the back "I am a sesquipidalian". It's a great conversation starter in a queue - "what does it mean, is it a dinosaur", being the best so far. It means someone given to using long words, sometimes unnecessarily! Guilty, your Honour.
But something has happened to words, especially the way they are used in public and political language. The past two years of campaigning about Brexit, and the November US election and its campaign, saw an unprecedented elevation of heat, anger, bitterness, exaggeration, claim and counter-claim. The rhetorical brutality on both sides included downright lies told with such barefaced seriousness and reiteration that no amount of evidence and proof to the contrary was able to erase, correct or counter the falsehood. When public language deteriorates to slanging matches, and these include the exchange of lies, half-truths, deceit and at times sheer ad hoc invention, then truth becomes a frayed rope in a tug of war between people for whom truth is secondary to impact, and point-scoring and wounding are more important than argument, reason and evidence.
In terms of ancient rhetoric, Aristotle's insights are still pertinent. To use his distinction, public language about politics in our time, has moved from being about logos-argument, and is about ethos-feeling. Language in these two campaigns was less about meaning and more about persuasion, less about informing and more about motivating, less about fairness and more about winning, even at the cost of truth, community health and social stability.
Trying to understand how this has come about, and how to deal with the legacies of fractured community, emboldened hate speech, truth held hostage to power interests, and the continuing juggernaut of political fractiousness and populist anger, on both sides, I started reading Mark Thompson's Enough Said. What's Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics? (London: Bodley Head, 2017) It's important to know what qualifies Thompson to write such a book. Since 2004 he has served as CEO of Channel 4, then 2004-2012 Director General of the BBC, and is currently CEO of the New York Times. His background prior to 2002 was as editor of such programmes as Newsnight, with input to other programmes of investigative journalism, including Panorama. When it comes to public language he understands at first hand the tensions and moral balances of telling the news, providing informed analysis, avoiding political bias, yet holding power to account whether politics, business, judiciary and criminal justice, major institutions of culture, media and religion. The list is long and the responsibility heavy. In other words, he knows what he is talking about. Does that make him an expert? I hesitate to say so, as one case in point of what has changed in our use of language is the spectacle of Michael Gove, a Government Minister, telling the electorate they cannot trust experts!
This is the first of a number of essays on Thompson's book. Not a review as such, but several soundings into the deeper and darker recesses of public discourse as it is practised increasingly in Western Democracies. These democracies would seem to have reached a critical junction, with several options, and no reliable road map, or even a chart that might at least warn us, "Here be dragons."
It isn't often the back of a dustcover so helpfully illustrates the content, and the impetus for the writing of the book,. This one does. It is adorned with very short phrases, sound bites that have been barbed to hook into the memory, armed with a payload of emotion, repeated until they become slogans, catchwords, sounds which smuggle in emotional stimulus along with, sometimes instead of, reason and meaning.
Have a read at them, and hear echoes of past debates, and the recent history of anger and rancour between politicians, between media and politicians, and the growing disconnect between such rhetorical slanging matches, and mature communication of what needs to be known by those who have to make informed choices and decisions. Several of them encapsulate entire narratives, while also creating flashbacks to the stories that created them - dodgy dossier; Je suis Charlie; walls work. Have a look, and a think....
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