Maybe it’s because it’s the New Yorker
April 13, 2011 12 comments
An irate yet devastatingly accurate text arrives from unspeak.net’s indefatigable New Yorker correspondent:
Worst New Yorkerese sentence I’ve read in a while: the great John Lahr ending his review of a play Daniel Radcliffe is doing on Broadway with these words: “As they say in the part of London where I live, ‘Nice one, mate.’”
Unspeak.net’s INYC did not explain why this sentence was so bad, but if pushed I would guess that it is the cringe-inducing, horrifyingly misfiring claim to expertise, attributing to merely one (coyly unidentified!) area of the metropolis where the writer evinces such pride in residing a phrase that can be heard not only all over London but probably all over England, at the very least?
Thus declares the New Yorker writer: “I do not just live in London; I have listened with brilliant and scholarly attention to the characteristic expressions of congratulation that are peculiar and unique to each traditional subdivision of that great city. Be assured that I know that, in contrast to the part of London where I live, where everyone says ‘Nice one, mate’, in East Fenchurch the local gentlemen will instead say ‘Jolly good show, my dear fellow!’, while in Croydon-on-Thames the salt-of-the-earth chappies will recite a stanza of George Formby while soberly stabbing you in the face. I am thus not only a great theatre reviewer, but a folk linguist of rare and precious discrimination?”
What do they say in the nearest part of the closest metropolis to where you live, readers?
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What to call the counter-revolution
April 8, 2011 7 comments
Once the protesters in Libya had become rebels, or rebel forces (a motley crew of loveable ingénus, royals and rogues — plus the odd Jedi, Wookiee, and Ewok — fighting the dark forces of an evil Empire), or rebel fighters (X-wings), an “intervention” (qv) was rendered more rhetorically palatable. (And the accidental bombing of rebel tanks — as though the tanks themselves had realized that they were on the wrong side — all the more “tragic”.) But then Malcolm Rifkind came on the radio last weekend saying that the rebels were no longer “rebels”: because Gaddafi’s government had lost all legitimacy, or so he argued, the “rebels” ought now to be described as insurgents. (Compare Iraq.) Meanwhile Gaddafi himself, in his delectably strange letter to Obama (or rather “Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama”), makes no mention of rebels but rather “Terror conducted by AlQaueda gangs that have been armed in some cities”. So I ask you, dear readers of unspeak.net: are the rebels still “rebels” or not?
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War is peace
March 25, 2011 8 comments
If a teacher intervenes in a school playground fight, it is not normally so as to punch one of the children in the face.
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Ridding the world of bluebottles
March 24, 2011 7 comments
This is perhaps too obvious to be worth pointing out, but since that has never stopped me before: the use of no-fly zone to mean flying-and-bombing zone evidently Unspeaks the level of violence (and, inevitably, “collateral damage”) that is going to be involved, such that eminent commentators can blithely say that they would “enforce” one without fearing much scorn except for people whose only contribution to society is to sneer.
If those in favour of an “intervention” (which, puh-lease?) were instead required to say something like: “I am in favour of bombing tanks and people, and shooting down aircraft, in all likelihood injuring and killing other people, including noncombatants”, instead of just gibbering about the desirability of a no-fly zone while holding their mental noses about how it gets established, the “debate” might be a little more interesting, mightn’t it, readers?
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The pros and cons of war
March 23, 2011 14 comments
As we bomb some freedom into a foreign country again, it might be worth pointing out a quite subtle and insidious example of Unspeak in news accounts of the military attacks, whose targets are said to be “pro-Gaddafi forces”.
The people and matériel being attacked are those still operating within the chain of command at whose head is Gaddafi. No argument there. But to call them pro-Gaddafi forces introduces an extra implication: that each and every soldier is, you know, really pro-Gaddafi. Rather than being ordinary people who perhaps joined the military because it was a decent job and now find themselves on what the “international community” has deemed the wrong side and quite likely under various forms of duress not to stop fighting, they must be portrayed as rabid loyalists of an unhinged dictator, on Gaddafi’s side not merely by happenstance but by ideological commitment. They must be presented as thoroughly pro-Gaddafi. Why? So that we may kill them without too much discomfort.
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The sense of an ending
February 2, 2011 7 comments
Barack Obama yesterday described his telephone conversation with Hosni Mubarak thus:
[W]hat is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.
This is an interesting use of belief, which works both as a rhetorical softener (what is “clear” is not that Mubarak must go; what is clear is Obama’s “belief”), at the same time as it introduces a note of personal insistence into the demand of power. It also invokes an idea of clarity (clear belief), of implacable accuracy and truth.
More mysteriously, what about this requirement that “an orderly transition must be meaningful”? What exactly would count as a meaningless transition? And who is judging the meaning? The Egyptian anti-Mubarak demonstrators? The Egyptian arseholes pro-Mubarak demonstrators? Excited members, perhaps, of an aspirant military junta (to whose rule a transition would certainly be meaningful from their point of view)?
The demand for a “meaningful transition” resembles structurally (though you might consider it less purely vicious) the previous US régime’s call for a “sustainable ceasefire” in Lebanon. In both cases the adjective is simply code for “acceptable to me and my friends”. It is clear, after all, that the final arbiter of whether a transition in Egypt is going to be meaningful is, um, Barack Obama. I hereby call on members of the Unspeak™ Community™ to join me in a vigorous rearguard action against such metahermeneutic imperialism.
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Can you break a twenty?
February 1, 2011 2 comments
Oh, hello again, Tony Blair! How’s that Middle East Peace Envoy gig going? Never mind. Tell us about why we had to invade Iraq again, I know you love it:
So that was the two sides of the argument, and then which side you came down on really depended on whether you thought Post-September 11th we had to be change makers or whether we could still be managers. Up to September 11th we had been managing this issue. After September 11th we decided we had to confront and change, and that’s, you know — even today that is the issue, because, as I say, we face exactly the same challenge over Iran. What do you do? Do you say we have to change this or not?
It is reassuring to learn from Mr Blair that, even in this day and age, it is still the job of the British prime minister to “change” other parts of the world he doesn’t like, rather than being a “manager”. (The implicit contempt for which role expressed here seems to be inconsistent with most of his domestic policy while in power, but never mind.) Even before he was allegedly faced with the luridly cartoonish or reality-TVish choice of being either a change-maker or a manager, you see, Blair must have been basically in charge on a global level, at the top of the world, along with his chum the US president, gazing down with fond bellicosity at all those troublesome foreigners that need to be “managed” or have things “changed” for them. Long live the British Empire, I say.
I must admit to feeling slightly uncomfortable with this modern usage of change to Unspeak the killing of lots of people — “I had to be a change-maker in Iraq… by bombing Iraq!” and so forth — but perhaps I am just being squeamish. Let me try to get on message. Sure, we have to bomb “change” Iran as well! Hmmm. It does feel kind of exciting, doesn’t it, readers?
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Enhancing the credibility deficit
January 31, 2011 10 comments
“Happy” new year, readers! In these straitened times, it is nice to gaze upon the glistering hoard of Unspeak that surrounds the financial crisis and its aftermath, isn’t it?
Take austerity measures, of the sort that “must” be imposed on countries by their own or other governments. Austerity implies a severe self-discipline of the kind that is laudable, virtuous in its serious asceticism. But who exactly is being austere in this picture? The Financial Times lexicon entry for “austerity measure” is, perhaps pointedly, ambivalent:
An official action taken by a government in order to reduce the amount of money that it spends or the amount that people spend.
Of course, these things are not unrelated, but a government that increases tax rates as part of its “austerity” programme is in the first instance asking people to spend more money – on it. I could be considerably more austere, in the sense of saving money, by refusing to pay my tax bill as well as not buying quite so many crisps. Naturally, though, we can see why a government proposing austerity measures would not want to call them “Give Us More Of Your Money And We’ll Spend It On Fewer Of The Things That You Want Measures”, or, I don’t know, wallet-fucking measures.
Conceivably, too, the connotations of admirably severe virtue in austerity measures might be cunningly employed to cloak or euphemize or Unspeak a pre-existing ideological commitment to cutting spending on public welfare, education, and all those other prissy little things that the “austere” can very well live without (or perhaps just the rich can; or perhaps the austere are the rich, which is how come they got so rich?).
What is perhaps worse, even so, is the implicit demand in austerity measures that citizens not only acquiesce to the policies in question, but actually agree that they are good for them, and meekly thank their masters for the condign punishment. That might remain a little hard to swallow, even for those people who still have jobs.
What other crisis Unspeak irritates you, readers?
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