Category Archives: language

Yes, Plain Language Is Awesome

(This post entirely Gabriel Duquette‘s fault. I totally made a resolution not to argue with idiots on my blog unless I have a point other than “idiot over there is an idiot,” but he asked nicely and I am incapable of not doing favors for friends.)

The New Statesman has no idea what Politics and the English Language was about.

First of all, if they believe that what Orwell was complaining about does not happen today, they clearly haven’t spent much time watching the news. “Democracy” is used to justify atrocities; “fascist” has no meaning other than “generic bad thing”; self-interested foreign policy is given the weight of myth through use of words like “destiny” and “freedom.” He wrote about how leftists use long strings of jargon that don’t actually mean anything– without having ever met a radical queer! (I have spent many an amusing evening trying to figure out how the hell you, oh, “center love and respect for women and femmes.” Does it involve putting a I <3 Femmes sign in the middle of the room?)

In addition, “I am a plain-speaking bluff honest man calling it as I see it” was not an unknown rhetorical device in Orwell’s time. See Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant It Can’t Happen Here, which satirizes that sort of rhetoric, as well as “traditional American family values” and the rest of that rot. My point, other than “people should read more novels by pissy cynical thirties socialists,” is that maybe Orwell didn’t talk about the problems of plain speech because he’s actually making a completely different point.

Orwell’s claim is that unclear, vague, ugly, cliche writing is all too often used to make a shitty idea look better. If no one can tell what you’re talking about, then they can’t debunk your shitty ideas. If your writing is bad enough, even you might not be able to tell how bad your ideas are. Whether plain writing can also be used to make a shitty idea look better is completely irrelevant to the topic of the essay.

Not to mention that writing can be superficially “plain” and still be unclear, vague, ugly, and cliche. Bullshit peddlers are clever and can use a patina of plain-speaking bluffness to hide that they’re obfuscating the issue, but they’re still fucking obfuscating the issue. “Looking clear” is not the same thing as “being clear.”

The New Statesman criticizes Orwell for lacking evidence. This is unfortunate, because the New Statesman’s primary evidence is sheer Bardolatry. Iago was made up. Iago’s rhetorical techniques being persuasive in the play says nothing about whether the rhetorical techniques are persuasive in real life, because it’s fiction and the characters are persuaded if the author says they are. (I guess you could argue for Shakespeare’s closely observed psychological realism, but… Iago.)

Furthermore, The New Statesman does everyone’s favorite technique: quote a random sentence a Shakespeare character says out of context and then attribute it to “the Bard’s eternal wisdom.” I kind of wonder if five hundred years from now everyone will be talking about how Ron said not to trust Snape and that means that J. K. Rowling is teaching us not to trust people who have done evil things in the past. Well, at least the author isn’t quoting Polonius.

I am not saying that Politics and the English Language is perfect. For one thing, Orwell has a curmudgeonly dislike for the perfectly respectable rhetorical device litotes. But if you are writing nonfiction intended for a general audience, your writing needs to be understandable to that audience. If people cannot tell what you’re talking about, you’ve failed. If you’re not actually saying anything, you’ve failed. The fact that you can make a point that other people can understand and it’s also wrong is as relevant as saying that because cars can have wheels and a broken engine wheels are overrated. 

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Grammar!

I really, really love grammar. Seriously. I grew up in a family that had more copies of Strunk and White than people. When I went off to college I was accompanied by a treasured copy of the AP Stylebook. I have gotten into shouting arguments about the Oxford comma. I take grammar seriously.

Which is why some people may consider it odd that I think grammar Puritans should shut up and fuck off.

Not everyone had the benefit of a house full of books and parents that encouraged the love of language and their very own copy of Strunk and White. Some people had to try to learn grammar from (gasp) English class. A lot of those people went to schools that were underfunded, overcrowded, and full of not-very-good teachers. Furthermore, there are lots of people with disabilities that make speaking with “proper grammar”– or speaking at all– extremely difficult, as well as people who don’t speak English as a first language. Nitpicking other people’s grammar is silencing.

And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. Textspeak is bad because it’s associated with teen girls! Appalachian English is bad because poor Southern people use it! African American Vernacular English is bad because poor black people use it! I cannot imagine how people who call themselves grammar nerds think that AAVE is bad, given its absolutely amazing tense/aspect system. Seriously, if you can read about tenses and aspects in AAVE and not die of joy, I question your commitment to grammar geekery.

Nevertheless, I think there are times that grammar really matters. For one thing, it is impolite to make your readers do a lot of work trying to work out what you’re saying*. (It also makes them less likely to bother to read your message.) Therefore, you should probably refrain from, randomly, putting commas in, where commas do not, belong because it slows down and confuses the reader. However, two people who both understand AAVE speaking to each other does not violate this rule, while Judith Butler does constantly, so I expect that people should be equally annoyed at Ms. Butler and at people, who put commas, everywhere.

Furthermore, I’m actually still more of a prescriptivist than a descriptivist by bent. I would prefer that people speak forms of English that have the most possible nuance, shades of meaning, expressiveness, logic, and beauty. For that reason, I’m overjoyed about the use of “he went” to mean “this is a paraphrase of what he said,” but displeased about the use of “disinterested” to mean “bored.” (It means unbiased! Bleh.) I also reserve the right to be upset about the abomination that is “irregardless” (irregardless and regardless mean the same thing! Christ, people, we just got the flammable/inflammable thing sorted out, don’t go adding more words that look like opposites and mean the same thing).

That rule is part of the reason I, as a grammar nerd, am endlessly in support of non-”proper”-grammar English: sometimes it has a beauty and emotional expressiveness than “properly” grammatical English does not. (I point skeptics to the Twitter of the incomparable quailitree.) To ignore that because of some bullshit rules that people made up in the nineteenth century is shitty as fuck.

*Unless for some reason trying to work out what you’re saying is part of the point. This is the James Joyce Exemption.