Defense of the Indefensible

NOW THAT Watergate has been exhausted in its guises of scourge against malfeasance in high office, extripator of coporate corrucpiton, readjustor of the government's delicate system of checks and balances, symbol of a moral cancer on the nation's breast, reaffirmation of the viability of the Constitution, and harbiger of a new age of honesty in politics, the nation's journalists and academicians are now drafting its services as yet another symbol: polluter of the American language.

As the White House tapes spun in relentless revelation, they emitted a verbal cacophony offending those stalwart upholders of the exigenicies of the nations's grammar and the subtleties of its idiomatic charm. The defenders of lucid prose shuddered at the mangled sentences--the pronouns without antecedents, the flabby modifiers, the split infinitives, the undue use of the passive voice, the malevolent creeping of coarse phraseology. A nation stood appalled that the language of Jefferson, of Webster, of Emerson, Melville, and Mencken could be contorted into such a mockery of America's verbal heritage.

The nexus of language and politics was recognized years ago, of course, when in "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell analyzed the way in which the abstract, leaden prose in England had dulled readers' capacity for independent thought. Writing immediately after World War II, when he saw writers increasingly give themselves over to the dogmas of newly-potent ideologies, Orwell wrote that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. "The use of tired metaphors, excess words, Latinate nouns, meaningless, bombastic phrases--all led to a "reduced state of consciousness," which was "favorable to political conformity." Only by using concrete, original, and simple sentences could the writer let the meaning choose the word--rather than the other way around--and avoid language that "anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain."

By the time he wrote that essay, Orwell had become a man without a country. The physical destruction that had overwhelmed Europe and the verbal destruction that so threatened the medium of his thought induced in him the feeling that he was defending humanity from the onslaughts of a civilized society gone barbarian. "Politics and the English Language" was written by a humble man who wanted to keep language itself humble and accessible. He wanted English redeemed as a tool to aid in the task of rebuilding society on the humanistic foundation the War had undermined.

Now, after the jolts administered to U.S society by Watergate, recent publications in this country have produced something of an American counterpart to Orwell's essay. Like Orwell's response to World War II, these essays--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s"Politics and the American Language,"Henry Fairlie's "Arise, Ye Prisoners of Jargon," and Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking--are responses to the effects of political events on English as written and spoken in this country. But also, like Orwell, these writers realize that changes in the condition of language are due to much more basic causes than political changes, that in the end language is rooted in the nature of society itself. These two articles and a book--the most recent of what is bound to be much discussion of the American language--reveal as much about the places of their authors in American society as Orwell's piece did about his own isolation.

READING Strictly Speaking is like getting back a thoroughly researched term paper from a grader who has made extensive, witty comments about your grammatical errors while ignoring your more substantive points. Edwin Newman, a veteran of the NBC news staff, certainly has a wonderful sense of the use--I should say misuse--of language. No one--politician, journalist, president, businessman, baseball coach, restaurateur, taxi driver--emerges unscathed from a seemingly endless catalogue of embarrassing, boorish, pretentious, dangerous and innocuous lapses and errors Newman records from his over 20 years experience in reporting. There is the actress who told him she hoped she wouldn't be an "escapegoat" if her show failed. There is the political organizer who describes elections as "the quadrennial challenge of giving focus and perspective to the polemics of contending partisans." There is the advertiser's use of such phrases as "B.O."and "unsightly bulge" to induce people to buy deodorants and brassieres.

From the verbal standpoint, Newman writer, Watergate was a lengthly catalogue of the type of flaccid phrase so common in society today: "One of the things the Watergate hearings revealed was a poverty of expression, an inability to say anything in a striking way, an addiction to a language that was almost denatured, and in which what little humor did occur was usually unintentional."

The nation learned that its president talked of "kicking butts," called a problem a "can of worms," and decided not to be in the position of"basically hunkering down." White House aides used such phrases as "at that point in time," "in point of fact," "that time frame," and "labor the point." Watergate men didn't "say," they "indeicated;"nothing was "done," it was "undertaken;"nothing ever occurred "after" an event, it was "subsequent" to it.

But Watergate is just the tip of the iceberg of America's language, according to Newman. In addition to all of its other implications, Watergate also "revealed the sad state of language,"from the president on down, through Ehrlichman and Haldeman,through Ron Ziegler, through the press with its acceptance of euphemistic explanations from government officials, through the political candidates with their sterile, ingratiating speeches, through the social scientists with their unwieldy terminology,through the ad men with their ready, mindless sales pitches, right down to the proffessional athletes with their trugid comments, to the small restaurants using foreign names to spice up prosaic dishes, to the man on the street whose conversation is studded with "Y'know" and "right on."

JEREMIADS SUCH AS these Newman makes against the state-of-the-union's language are as old as the day Babylonian scholars compiled a text on "Style and Form of Hieroglyphics." Any nabob with alert ears and open eyes can natter negativism about decadence in American, verbal or otherwise. More important than the fact of degeneracy are the reasons behind it. Newman does make a stab at why the American language has become so cheapened. While Watergate was making its contribution, he writes, "a different process has been under way in another sector, where respect for rules has been breaking down and correct expression is considered almost a badge of dishonor." Deterioration thus stems from large changes the country underwent in the '60s: the rise of the environment issue; the new assertion of demands by minority groups; the generation gap; the rise of television.

Unfortunately, after this promising start in the introduction at ripping the veil off the underlying structural causes of language's decay, Strictly Speaking falls prey to the very deficiency it is describing: it is written in such a comical, anything-for-a-laugh-at-all-those-illiterate-people tone that all analysis is obscured. Instead of learning the realtionship between social transformations and the way people talk, we are told reporters are too self-important, politicians too aftaid of being spontaneous, social scientists too attached to impressive-sounding jargon. As for the common, non-proffessional man, well, he comes across as just plain stupid.

Newman has actually travelled little distance from the times of Matthew Arnold, the English social critic who a century ago wrote with disdain of the uncultured"Populace" and the anarchy they produced. The anarchy in this case is not political but literary; Newman is unable to tolerate the untidiness caused by the social changes of the last decade. For Newman, like Arnold, there are two real classes: those who know, and those who don't. For all his insight into the relationship of Watergate and America's literary decay, Newman remains oblivious to the fact that the distinction between the educated elite and the uneducated masses is an arbitrary one which the social movements of the '60s that affected language sought to eradicate. Social change will invariably take its toll on language; judgement on the way people speak is hollow without reference to the society in which they live.

Arthur Schlesinger,honored historian that he is, has flown even further back on the wings of time, to a dark age when a small group of monks safeguarded the legacy of classical scholarship from the threatening onslaughts of vernacular literature. "In our own time the purity of language is under unrelenting attack from every side," he writes. The rise of mass communications, the growth of large organizations, the invention of advertising, and especially, the growth of democracy all contributed to the "linguistic pollution" characteristic of our times. Watergate's value lies in its forcing the American people to look back at our past, when the Founding Fathers had a "profound conviction of historical responsibility" and wrote with a "lucid, measured and felicitous prose, marked by Augustan Virtues of harmony, balance and elegance."

UNFORTUNATELY, as society grew more diversified, new interests had to be courted, and the desire for success at the polls thus "sentimentalized and cheapened the language of politics." Watergate revealed that language of politics." Watergate revealed that language was now being used for manipulation. The politicized speech and writing when compared with the lofty prose writers of The Federalist Papers, showed how far our literary standards have deteriorated. "The degradation of political discourse in America is bound to raise a disturbing question," we are told. "May it be...that such deterioration is inherent in democracy?" The answer: while meaning is most ruthlessly manipulated in Russia and China, in democracies where "the assault on language is piecemeal," intellectual freedom enables society to "redeem"language. To do so, in the political sphere at least, entails reasserting the relationship between words and "reality." The obligation for doing so rests with those who live by the "true word"--writers and teachers. They are the ones who must expose the "attack on reason in discourse" that characterizes modern politics.

Ignoring the incredible flabbiness and indefiniteness of Schlesinger's language--the relationship of "word" and "reality," the "attack on reason," the "conviction of historical responsibility"--we get a whiff of the type of democracy he endorses:the cult of the intellectual, a noblesse not of the robe or the sword but of the word protecting the nation from the dragon of unreason that threatens political discourse. "Let intellectuals never forget that all they that take the word shall perish with the word," Schlesigner eloquently tells us, and as for the rest of society, well, let them eat paragraphs.

Thankfully, Henry Fairlie, the British journalist who gave us the word "Establishment" as used in its modern capitalized sense, expanis the manipulation of language by politics without resorting to platitudes. Instead he concretely traces the changes in meaning words undergo as they are drafted into service by politicians and journalists. "Ghetto," for instance, in retaining its original sense of the legal restriction of a group to a quarter of a city, reinforces a group's sense of isolation when attached to a minority like blacks, even though they are not subject to any legal restrictions. The word "ethnics," as another example, from "ethnic groups;" to say that one belongs to an ethnic group is to define only one of his characteristics, whereas to say one is an ethnic is to imply that this is his most important quality.

Such usage, Fairlie asserts, simplifies social phenomena in such a way as to isolate and segregate: thus, for example, " 'ethnics' are separated from nonethnics...the words themselves put people in 'ghettos,' and freeze them at opposite poles. It is in this way that we are manipulated by the words we tolerate and use." Fairlie echoes Orwell's warning against allowing abstract words to choose our thought and disguise from us the real meaning of what we want to say. But Fairlie is quick to differ with the author of "Politics and the English Language,""I have never been impressed with that essay," he writes, explaining that the politician is entitled to a language distinct from that employed by the man of letters, by Schlesinger's men of the "true word." The language of politics must be flexible enough to enable the politician to perform his essential role, which is obtaining a consensus from the disparate groups in society. "It is the task of the politician to persuade people to do things...and he must therefore be allowed to use his language to this end." As an example, Fairlie cites Lyndon Johnson's politicking to get the civil rights bill passed; to a group of southerners he would talk in conciliatory terms, to liberals he would sound forth on the landmark nature of the bill, to old New Dealers he would invoke the progressive measures of a past president.

WHAT,THEN,distinguished such benevolent maneuvering from the nefarious language employed by Nixon, who also could claim that he was attempting to build a consensus of social groups? Johnson was sincere, Fairlie responds; Nixon lacked conviction in his own values. And with this we see that at bottom Fairlie differs little from Newman, with his evil grin on his face as he turns to a page in the O.E.D., or from Schlesinger, aloft on a white horse and extending his lance-like pen. The precise-writing journalist, the university sage, the charismatic politician: in each case power is wielded by the few versus the many, and what each tries to pass off as a democracy is nothing but a literocracy, where the pure word, defined by those who KNOW, rules. That explains Newman's complaints about the deleterious effect of the '60s; that explains Schlesinger's admiration for the reason and clarity that abounded in the predemocratic era of the Founding Fathers; that explains Fairlie's protest against words like "ghetto" and "minority," which he claims isolate groups in society. Purity of speech and word is possible only when all groups in society share equally in the national wealth. Where some groups receive an unjust share, the oppressed will naturally raise their fists angrilly and shout words--jumbled, incoherent, even ungrammatical, but words nonetheless--that express their needs and thoughts.

Ghettoes will not disappear if he words is abolished. Not will minorities. If language is,in the end, a reflection of the society in which it is used--and all three of these writers agree at some point in their essays that such is the case--then no amount of manicuring on the level of words will rectify injustices in social reality.

Democracy will require more than literary appeals to consensus and true words. It will require another concept that is conspicuously missing from these discussions of writing: communication. Until groups in power stop dictating rules and regulations and take fuller account of grievances from those groups out of power, democracy will continue to be as elusive as it was during the verbicidal days of Watergate.

Otherwise, as Orwell said of war-torn England,"Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."