Just occasionally, there is the small piece on radio that really grabs the old funny bone and gives it a good tweak.
Yesterday, as I was driving through a fantastically first-rate funday morning (on my way to throwing things at the sky) was just such an instance.
Mediawatch has been running an occasional about reporting standards (as distinct from the direct critique of current event reportage) and language. Yesterday morning was one – concentrating on the use of “going forward”. Now reporters are not the most guilty here. It is without doubt the “mot d’an” if not “mot du decade” in business and politic speak.
The term is totally meaningless. It has nothing whatever to do other than to fill a sentence with two more unnecessary words or to detract from the import of what is being said.
Listen to Mediawatch’s piece and I hope that they have included in the MP3 the Irish writer’s version and interpretation of “going forward”.
Listening to that at 100kph is NOT safe driving.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Monday, September 07, 2009
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
On pedants, pedantry and good language.
I am slowly dragging my way through the thoughts of JS Mill on “Utilitarianism”, a term which I firstly suspected coined by 21st century bloggers with an angle to promote but which to my chagrin I find was used by the good man himself.
I often struggle – as apparently does Obama among a very large number of other people – to find the right words to correctly express an idea that is floating through the probliverse. Sometimes the words are easy to find and are direct. In other instances it can become extremely difficult to put together the right words, in the right order, to properly express a fairly difficult concept.
I recall that when reading the Gita many many moons back, a good part of the Introduction, and many of the footnotes in the first few pages, guided the reader through the translation of the more religious terms and symbology. In many instances the “meaning” came down to there being “no direct equivalent” in the English language.
JS Mill had the same problem in a much more limited fashion. He uses the word “pleasure” as the nominator of a concept central to his argument. (There will be more to come on this later). As far back as Mill’s original publication, that term has been deliberately interpreted (or rather mis-interpreted) in order to oppose and denigrate his argument.
In more everyday situations, there is the same problem occurring between what could be considered different dialects of English – where the same etymology is used for quite different concepts. Most pronounced are the very slight differences between NZ and Australian English, and the differences between Australasian English and English English, or US English.
Another example that comes to mind is the old joke (probably more true than is admitted) about the Inuit, or the Lapps, or whoever, having a large number of terms for “snow”. AS an English word, “snow” has some twelve meanings (listed in dictionary.com). First with the etymology for “frozen water falling from the sky in a specific form”, two of those meanings cover noun and verb. Second with the etymology “to obscure or mislead”, there are a further two meanings as noun and verb. Similar in intent is “to overwhelm with the intent to confuse”. There are further derivative meanings like “snow” on a tv screen, and the literary meanings attributing “snow-like” to other objects and concepts as well as the slang and street usages.
Essentially what this all comes down to is that English – as a language – can be said to have far too many words for a comparatively limited number of concepts. At the same time, there is also the criticism that English does not have the means of expressing alien concepts accurately other than by adopting the alien term (hence in the Gita, those terms not having direct or accurate English equivalents were presented in the original Sanskrit).
It has led, as a personal example, to my use of terms such as “mana” in the sense(s) that derive from the Maori word to express the appropriate emotive and respect responses that I am trying to put forward. I know that for an Australian or American, those responses would be far more limited than they would be from someone from Opononi or Whakatane.
The consequence is even more difficult to deal with. As Mill discovered, it can take a chapter in a book to clarify and express exactly what is meant by the term “pleasure”. That difficulty is increased geometrically when a reader intends that it should be mis-interpreted because the concept is not acceptable to him. My personal approach is to try and find a word where the first meaning in the dictionary is the concept that I wish to convey. That does not (in any way) prevent the intentional mis-interpretation. It does not stop the accusations (particularly from my wife) of my tendency to get quite pedantic about the meanings of words.
____________________________________________________
As for Mill, I thought I had a problem with sentence structure and readability. I take it back. My writing on average would be easy reading for a fifth-grader by comparison. Mill is convoluted, highly nested, and extremely precise writing. The typical sentence might contain as many as three or four levels – of noun and adjectival clauses – and often more than 50 words. Not easy going at all.
I often struggle – as apparently does Obama among a very large number of other people – to find the right words to correctly express an idea that is floating through the probliverse. Sometimes the words are easy to find and are direct. In other instances it can become extremely difficult to put together the right words, in the right order, to properly express a fairly difficult concept.
I recall that when reading the Gita many many moons back, a good part of the Introduction, and many of the footnotes in the first few pages, guided the reader through the translation of the more religious terms and symbology. In many instances the “meaning” came down to there being “no direct equivalent” in the English language.
JS Mill had the same problem in a much more limited fashion. He uses the word “pleasure” as the nominator of a concept central to his argument. (There will be more to come on this later). As far back as Mill’s original publication, that term has been deliberately interpreted (or rather mis-interpreted) in order to oppose and denigrate his argument.
In more everyday situations, there is the same problem occurring between what could be considered different dialects of English – where the same etymology is used for quite different concepts. Most pronounced are the very slight differences between NZ and Australian English, and the differences between Australasian English and English English, or US English.
Another example that comes to mind is the old joke (probably more true than is admitted) about the Inuit, or the Lapps, or whoever, having a large number of terms for “snow”. AS an English word, “snow” has some twelve meanings (listed in dictionary.com). First with the etymology for “frozen water falling from the sky in a specific form”, two of those meanings cover noun and verb. Second with the etymology “to obscure or mislead”, there are a further two meanings as noun and verb. Similar in intent is “to overwhelm with the intent to confuse”. There are further derivative meanings like “snow” on a tv screen, and the literary meanings attributing “snow-like” to other objects and concepts as well as the slang and street usages.
Essentially what this all comes down to is that English – as a language – can be said to have far too many words for a comparatively limited number of concepts. At the same time, there is also the criticism that English does not have the means of expressing alien concepts accurately other than by adopting the alien term (hence in the Gita, those terms not having direct or accurate English equivalents were presented in the original Sanskrit).
It has led, as a personal example, to my use of terms such as “mana” in the sense(s) that derive from the Maori word to express the appropriate emotive and respect responses that I am trying to put forward. I know that for an Australian or American, those responses would be far more limited than they would be from someone from Opononi or Whakatane.
The consequence is even more difficult to deal with. As Mill discovered, it can take a chapter in a book to clarify and express exactly what is meant by the term “pleasure”. That difficulty is increased geometrically when a reader intends that it should be mis-interpreted because the concept is not acceptable to him. My personal approach is to try and find a word where the first meaning in the dictionary is the concept that I wish to convey. That does not (in any way) prevent the intentional mis-interpretation. It does not stop the accusations (particularly from my wife) of my tendency to get quite pedantic about the meanings of words.
____________________________________________________
As for Mill, I thought I had a problem with sentence structure and readability. I take it back. My writing on average would be easy reading for a fifth-grader by comparison. Mill is convoluted, highly nested, and extremely precise writing. The typical sentence might contain as many as three or four levels – of noun and adjectival clauses – and often more than 50 words. Not easy going at all.
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