Short words are the best
OK, forgive me if this puts a few noses out of joint, but I have an axe to grind, Eugene.
There has been a very interesting discussion on Bright Green prompted by Adam’s post about feminism. I’m sure all of it was very interesting but frankly a lot of it was so hidden under layers of hideously put together political verbiage that frankly I couldn’t be sure that I’d properly understood whole swathes of it.
It’s a shame really because one of the points I did get, because the contributor was kind enough to put it in plain English, was that men should as a first step educate themselves about feminism.
Well said. Feminism, women’s rights, call it what you will, is about a real fundamental. There are six billion plus people on this little planet of ours and just over half (I believe) are on what is generally the worse end of a power imbalance between men and women while the other half is (quite often unthinkingly and unintentionally) in the wrong.
It’s a big issue. It affects almost all of us.
What really escapes me is how so many on the left then manage to talk about something that affects pretty much 100% of humanity in terms that can only be understood by about 0.1% of us, possibly not even that. The right has a host of questionable arguments, and some downright unpleasant policies, but it does have the knack of communicating them in words of one syllable.
It’s not often you’ll see Churchill quoted on Bright Green – but here goes: “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.” Damn right.
The political thinker I find myself returning to time and time again, Thomas Paine, published his first great pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ in January 1776. It was radical stuff that persuaded the American colonies that reconciliation with Great Britain was impossible and that independence was their only proper goal. John Adams, explaining to a friend that not only was he not the author but could not match its “clear, concise and Nervous” style, remarked that Paine used language that one might hear in an English gaol. In fairness he mixed the language of the ale house and the pulpit. It sold an estimated 150,000 copies and was read or heard read aloud by many many more; and this in an as yet unborn nation with a population of only around 4 million.
Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, Paine’s ‘trilogy’, are said to be the three most widely read works of the 18th Century. They laid out the fundamentals of liberal democracy in a way that most everyone could understand. They were translated into most of the languages of Europe. They changed the world.
People aren’t stupid. They can grasp sophisticated ideas about our world and the way it works, often against their interests. They just don’t want to turn to the glossary every time a well meaning person of the left writes about it. That’s why most of the discussion of the ideas that matter to us is limited to the pages of the Guardian and is read almost exclusively by the converted.
What I see on today’s left is a lot of intellectual flashing when what is needed is plain speaking. Forgive me if I use some earthy Anglo Saxon. I really don’t give a shit whether people think I’m clever or not. I do care about the stuff I believe in enough to want to persuade others of it. Words are there for the people we are speaking with, not to make us feel smart.
My point was that you’re making rather trivial criticisms rather than engaging with the actual issues.
Can’t remember how good it is, but George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) is entertaining and amusing, and vaguely related to the topic.
Actually Beth I think you deserve a fuller answer than that.
I don’t avoid using long words because I don’t understand them. I avoid them because they shut people out of a discussion. I’ve never found anything worth saying that can’t be said in plain English.
You’re quite right when you say that discussions about economics, for instance, quickly get mired in the use of obscure words. That’s because economics is vulnerable to the accusation that it’s educated guesswork that cloaks itself in the language of science; the language is the emperor’s new intellectual clothes. Take away the grandiose vocabulary and there’s not much left, certainly not much that you could get a majority or even a substantial minority of economists to agree upon. So I feel that I can afford to let excessively self indulgent discussions of that sort pass me by.
Feminism however is very different. As I said quite clearly and quite sincerely it affects us all. It is important to me not just because I think it’s wrong that my fellow human beings are discriminated against and enjoy less power and opportunity than their fellow citizens because of their gender.
It’s important to me because the very notion of human rights is founded on the principle that our rights are indivisible from our essential humanity. If you can be deprived of yours because of your gender I can be deprived of my rights because of mine, or my age, my race, my sexuality, my physical health and ability.
And I am absolutely not arguing that discussion of gender and discrimination should be rolled into a wider discussion about human rights. Far from it. Each form of discrimination merits its own discussion as does the notion of human rights itself.
But as I said it’s on topics like this that the left quickly indulges itself in discussions in terms that mean nothing to the vast majority of people for whom it would otherwise feel relevant. It’s not about the difficulty of the subject. Subjects are difficult because the moral or practical challenges they present are difficult, because human nature or circumstance makes them hard to resolve cleanly, not because it’s difficult to express them plainly.
People quite often use particular terms to send of signals about themselves; their education, their occupation, their politics, their desire to belong to a particular group. It’s not just laziness. It’s not just ineptness. By using an acronym, for instance, I send a clear signal that I’m so familiar with a term that I don’t need to say it in full. I can spew out acronyms by the bucket-load but very few people would understand what I was on about and I would be better off saving my breath unless the point of speaking was to make the listener feel ignorant.
That’s why so much effort goes into making sure political messages are clear and framed in a way that people warm to them. That’s a major reason why the No to AV campaign wiped the floor with their Yes opponents. The No campaign was clever about what it said, how it said it and to whom. They Yes campaign just sounded like a bunch of metropolitan intellectuals and lo and behold they persuaded the people of Oxford and Cambridge and a clutch of London boroughs and not many elsewhere.
I was consciously not singling anyone out. I am not interested in making anyone feel silly. I am interested in getting people with something worth saying to say it in a way that makes people care. Let people marvel at the quality of the argument you marshal not feel browbeaten by your mastery of an obscure vocabulary.
Reading the most inspiring champions of human rights from the American revolution forward one quickly realises that very little of what they say is difficult to understand; indeed it cries out across the centuries with an astonishing clarity because they realised that the truth has a power of its own and needs wear no fancy clothes.
“Look up the word patriarchy if you need to, the Internet is there to help.” Thank you but happily I’m familiar with the term patriarchy. It shares an etymological root with the word patronising.
I completely agree that short words are good. I also agree with Alyson that talking about things that people don’t often talk about sometimes requires a bit of thought about language and that there’s not necessarily an easy or right solution to that (other than talking about it more).
However I think it’s a bit interesting that although there’s quite a lot of hard core economic and political discussion on here, which fairly often contains some technical vocab or specialist ideas… it’s the feminism article that brings in the criticism of elitism. Why not just write your own simple english article on the issues? Look up the word patriarchy if you need to, the Internet is there to help.
I assume you’re referring in part to my comment, since you picked up on it in the thread. My comment was asking for someone who had informed themselves about the issues to put their money where their mouth was and do the long but accessible explanation that you’re asking for, which Adam then did, admirably.
Can’t help feeling a bit cynical about the fact that talking about feminism is so often turned into talking about talking about feminism.
I’m all for using short words and plain language, but the thing about feminism is that it sometimes involves things that we don’t have any good, simple words for. There are some parts of feminism that are relatively easy to explain – for example, why domestic violence is wrong, or why two people doing the same job deserve the same pay, regardless of gender – because we have ordinary, everyday words to describe them.
However, when you start to get to the more subtle things, particularly the issues where you can’t just make rules to say that x is acceptable but y is wrong, that’s where we start to get into difficulty. The people who started talking about these things were philosophers and academic feminists, so they came up with the vocabulary, and it hasn’t quite filtered out to everyday language (yet).
It’s vicious circle – we don’t have simple words for the concepts, so most people don’t discuss the issues, and because most people don’t discuss the issues, we don’t have simple words to describe them. Imagine trying to explain Lord of the Rings in great detail to somebody who’s never heard of it (if you were a geeky teenager before about 2001 you may not have to imagine), who doesn’t know what a Hobbit or Wizard is, let alone any of the backstory. Imagine that you’re trying to re-tell the book rather than the films, because that’s kind of what it’s like – and it’s really difficult.
I’m not saying that just because it isn’t easy, that we should give up trying. And I’m not trying to disprove your point; I’m just trying to give you some explanation of why things are the way they are. This is a major obstacle for feminists to overcome, but the reason that it’s there is because the power imbalance between men and women is so deeply entrenched that we literally don’t have the means to talk about it. Our civilisation is set up in such a way that we aren’t meant to notice that there’s anything to talk about in the first place.
The difficulty of language is surely a reflection of the difficulty of the subject matter. No matter how great the commitment to clarity or intense the desire to communicate, when we are trying to understand something as horrifically complex as gender relations there are bound to be difficulties. I realise you are making a broader point which I largely support; we should not resort to esoteric (that ok?) language lightly. But it takes such a degree of confidence in your own understanding to be certain of an adequate language for an adequate world.
The world is inadequate and very often ‘plain English’ (with its own history, exclusions, bias, etc…) is inadequate too. Difficult writing can be about feeling clever, forsure. But I feel that spoon-feeding “people we are speaking with” is less appreciated than writing that attempts to challenge us to think the world more radically.
O
apologies – I realise I posted that as me. It was in fact by Jonathan – now corrected.