John
Rentoul (Hardie Grant Books).
Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan
Why is it so many people get so worked up by
what they regard as aberrant language when they must know they are fulminating
in vain? Usage will out.
Once I
accessed John Rentoul’s list of banned jargon and cliché, I realised we were as
two (as Woody Allen has put it) in our attitude towards language. He is a
prescriptivist (language cop) and I am a descriptivist (language observer), two
schools of opinion which arm wrestle over matters concerning grammar and usage.
Prescriptivists
tend to be reactionaries disorientated by change or newness. Yet Rentoul is a
contemporary journalist, chief political commentator for London’s The Independent. No doubt he is galled
by the language of abstraction and obfuscation which is the traffic of
politicians and bureaucrats, but that is no excuse for berating everyone for
using words and phrases he doesn’t like.
The
second word on his proscribed list is “access, as a verb”, which inspired me to
use it as the third word of paragraph two above and commit what he would
consider a solecism. I think that, used carefully, access is useful as a verb
and so do millions of others. Before I go any further, I would remind Mr
Language Cop that verbs are action words and one of English’s most energetic
converters of nouns into verbs was William Shakespeare who, presumably, would
have had a hard time with The Independent
subeditors.
Some
people were taken aback by the use of a new verb, “medalled” in the sense of
“he/she was medalled”, during the recent Olympic Games. I must say I reeled a
bit when I first heard it but, whereas Rentoul would have reached sternly for
his list, I wondered if it would stick or was it too vague. By the end of the
next Olympics we will know whether it has found a place in the language and
Rentoul is, thus, whistling into the wind, or whether it has slipped away
because not enough people used it.
There
is an interesting discussion in some chapters which are a preamble to the List,
and one passage on “The allure of the easy cliché” discusses the difficulty of
speaking in organised sentences without using the short-cuts of hand-me-down
words and phrases. The point is it doesn’t matter much in general conversation,
only in written expository speeches – when it matters like hell if they come
from politicians or bureaucrats, as William Cobbett noted more than two
centuries ago.
A
man of many parts, Cobbett wrote A Grammar of the English Language most
of it in the form of letters to his
14-year-old son. While he does complain a bit he mainly gives useful advice,
including: “He who writes badly thinks badly. Confusedness in words can proceed
from nothing but confusedness in the thoughts which give rise to them These
things might be of trifling importance
when the actors move in private life; but when the happiness of millions
of men is at stake, they are of importance not easily to be described.”
Cobbett’s book is instructive, more about what
good writing is or should be, although he does make too much of grammatical
rules; whereas Rentoul is just another knuckle-rapper, prone in this book to a
brusque arrogance.
Another
book I read recently is Cliches, Avoid
Them Like the Plague, by Nigel Fountain, another UK journalist, who has
collected well known clichés, explains their origins and growth, and with good
humour sends them up. Much more effective than angrily banning them.
Footnote:
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland-based writer & commentator and a regular reviewer on this blog.
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