As a journalist I have been watching two seemingly unrelated but alarming trends.
The first is that cars have been getting far more reliable these past 20 years. A 10-or 15-year-old car now is far more reliable than its counterpart a decade or so ago.
The second is a growing realisation that the young women who go into prostitution are most likely to be the victims of drug abuse, nasty pimps and immigration spivs.
So why is this so alarming?
Because journalists are now in danger of slipping below used car salesmen and prostitutes in the order of professions on the list of trustworthiness and respectability. That will put us very near the bottom.
Mercifully, nothing will drag us below real-estate agents, who will always describe as “a stone’s throw to the shops” a distance that Robert de Castella would find hard to cover in a hour, or who will describe a house crying for the bulldozer as a “handyman’s dream” or where “rustic” means Telstra will charge $6000 to put the phone on.
None the less, journalists will remain below professions like taxi drivers and bus drivers, even though I understand there is a now new mathematical theorem which suggests that the longest possible distance between any two given points is the ACTION bus route.
We are even below politicians.
Teachers are in the middle.
Lawyers, can you believe, are in the top third. And at the very top are the medical professions – nurses, doctors, pharmacists and so on.
But the position on the scale has little to do with competence and honesty. Rather it has more to do with two more important things: how much the public sees of a profession and the way the profession uses language.
All of a journalists’ work goes out to mass public scrutiny and it is mostly written in plain language. Our mistakes are open for everyone to see and confirm.
But take the medical profession, for example. It can quietly bury its mistakes and cover the error with obtuse language.
Lawyers charge for their mistakes in even more opaque language.
Lawyers, doctors and to a large extent public servants do not want you to understand their language. Their jargon gives them power.
For example, the medical specialists’ report comes back with words like; “haematoma of the left patella” or “lesions to the upper cranium”.
You exclaim: “Oh God, Doc, how long have I got to live?”
The doctor replies: “Never mind, son, you have only got a bruised knee and a cut on your head.”
Or your lawyer writes to you saying, “We are endeavouring to secure the equity of redemption following the discharge of your security obligations to the above-mentioned mortgagee.”
You cry: “Ouch, how much is that going to cost?”
If fact the lawyer is merely going to ask the bank for the title deeds to your house back now you have paid your debt.
Or the administrator writes a job specification saying:
“Are you an outward-looking, achievement-oriented professional with excellent representational skills? Can you provide strategic advice on complex issues? Have you a proven track record in management and leadership?”
You ask: “What on earth does that mean?”
It means: “We’ll pick our mate for the job and there is nothing you can do about it.”
Or the administrator writes: “A thorough examination of all the issues has been undertaken with respect to your application and the review determined in the negative.”
We know what it means, but it is deliberately written in the passive voice. We are not to know who did the review. No-one is responsible. The decision just comes – or in their words, emanates – from the bureaucracy.
This is the language of power and money. It deliberately excludes the ordinary person in the street.
As a journalist, I have been translating this language into plain English for three decades.
Alas, I think I have been far less successful in teaching English as a second language to lawyers and bureaucrats than you [teachers of English as a Second Language] have been in teaching it to migrants and their children.
At least the migrants learn English whereas the lawyers and the bureaucrats do not. They continue to use another language – gobbledygook – because they do not want to use English: it allows too much insight into their worlds of money and power.
And gobbledygook is, indeed, a different language from English. It has a history of almost 10 centuries.
When William the Conqueror came to England he imposed Norman French on the country. The Church and the courts already used Latin. In all, the post Conquest ruling classes – the church, the lawyers and the administrators used French and Latin to rule the masses.
Guess what? They still do. But they could not wipe out Anglo-Saxon. The real English was and is a powerful language. Stripped of unnecessary gender, declensions and most of the complex and irregular conjugations of other languages it was and is an easier language to learn and understand – at least the basics. The nuances, we know, are a nightmare for the non-native speaker, but that is probably true of most languages.
But the lawyers, doctors and administrators continue to use Norman French and Latin.
Lawyers use words like “vendor” and “purchaser” instead of “buyer” and “seller”. They do not use “lender” and “borrower”. They use words like “mortgagor” and “mortgagee” – imposing the dead hand of Norman French over the land and the language. That’s what “mort”-“gage” means – the dead hand.
Every Latin phrase they use has an easy English translation that should be used in its place. Caveat emptor (buyer beware), res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself), volenti non fit injuria (you consent to the risk). But they continue to use the Latin to show how well-educated they are; to shut out the masses; and to provide an excuse for charging more money.
Doctors use Latin words like “ectomy” instead of “cut out”; “pathology” instead of “disease” and “contusion” instead of “swelling”. And so it goes on.
And doctors and lawyers scoff at the use of plain language, asserting some slight difference of meaning between it and their Latin and Norman French where none exists.
The clergy used Latin for a long time. The vernacular Bible was banned and the masses were shut out. This was fine while the Church controlled the secular arm of government through the principle of the king ruling through divine right while being subservient to the Pope. The money and land flowed. But once Martin Luther nailed his 94 theses to the door, the game was up. The German princes and later the English king deserted the Church. Eventually the church had to earn its loot by direct appeal to the people – in the plain language of the common people.
As it did so, it exposed itself. Atheism and agnosticism shot up and the rating of the clergy on the scale of professional trustworthiness fell.
The clergy became a bit more like real-estate agents and used-car salesmen: they had to appeal to the masses in the common language of the masses for their money to keep body (if not soul) together.
Now the internet is going further than daily journalism to help the mass of people break the medical and legal monopoly of knowledge. And the professions and administrators do not like it one little bit.
They have not liked the work of journalists either. Journalists speak the language of ordinary people. They have to, or they would be out of a job. Sure, they may over-simplify. Sure, they may sensationalise. Sure, they make mistakes. And they are, quite reasonably, not liked for it.
But do not let that obscure the main reason journalists come under fire. It is the plainness of their language. It infuriates people in power.
At least you know what journalists are talking about. There is no cover up with clever use of obscure language.
It is more often journalism rather than “official channels” that enables skullduggery to be exposed in plain language that ordinary people can understand:
The bullied nurses who saw unnecessary deaths in NSW hospitals had to go to the media.
So did Andrew Wilkie.
And so did Dr David Kelly to expose the British Government’s lies about weapons of mass destruction.
The Chelmsford psychiatric hospital horror was exposed by media as was the corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen era. And, of course, Watergate.
And there are countless others.
Meanwhile the courts and official inquiries invariably came out with the fatuous “no evidence of any wrong doing.”
Even now, you may well think that what I have been arguing is a lot of cods because, as a journalist, I am a jack of all trades and master of none. But at least you know what I have been arguing about because it is expressed (I hope) in plain language.
Now, teachers of English have an important task. [They] must join the fight against the misuse and abuse of language. [They] must ensure your students do not aspire to learn gobbledygook – the English polluted by Norman French and Latin for unwholesome ends.
Let me inspire you [teachers] to the task with the words of a great USER of Anglo-Saxon English. In this quote directed against another attempt to conquer the English only one word has Norman French origin:
“We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”