Australian raconteur Clive James once wrote about ''the perfectly bad sentence''. He'd spotted it in Britain's Sunday Telegraph in 2001 and put it aside for several years until, in his words, he was ''finally ready to examine the subtleties of its perfection''. Sports journalist Neil Harman was the author of the nugget, which he placed amid a tennis report. It reads: ''Now, the onus is on Henman to come out firing as Ivanisevic, the wild card who has torn through this event on a wave of emotion, did yesterday.''
You'll note that, technically, Harman's sentence is error-free. James writes, ''It is on a sound grammatical structure that he builds his writhing, art nouveau edifice of tangled imagery, as if Gaudi, in Barcelona, had coated his magic church of the Sagrada Familia with scrambled eggs, and made them stick.'' James's essay on that 28-word sentence lasts about 2000 words and is too wonderful for me to condense. It explains how his ''suffering'' began as a schoolchild: one of his teachers was an amateur philologist who cursed him with a love of etymology. When James reads words, he sees the pictures they evoke; rendering a sentence like Harman's as a meaningless collage of junk. An example: why do we use the word ''onus'' - Latin for weight - when we mean responsibility or pressure? How does a weight make Henman ''come out firing'' (and what's he firing, anyway)? Harman's sentence combines seven jarring images, which he no doubt painted unthinkingly.
Like many born to Generation X, I left school with only a patchy knowledge of grammar and no understanding of etymology. I was 24 years old when I first realised, while learning another language, that English is much clearer when it is active (i.e. when our sentences follow the template subject verb object, or who does what to whom). I began to use simple verb forms wherever possible and to shun deverbals.
Yet what was a useful revelation grew slowly into an obsession. I spent two years at this newspaper as a sub-editor; one of a handful of people who try, each day, to edit about 100,000 words between them. Of course we failed to do it perfectly; typos, ungrammatical sentences, jargon and dead metaphors appear in every issue of The Canberra Times (indeed, in all newspapers). Those two years scarred me. I still flinch when I see the dregs of passive language: by, being and been. On many nights, as I read books to my toddlers, I catch myself translating clumsily crafted clauses into simpler phrases. (Yes, I realise there's something pathological about that.)
Yet as unhealthy as it can be to obsess over words, most of us would benefit from thinking more about what we're trying to communicate. So much of the language used in this city is empty. Words such as ''framework'' and ''strategic'' rarely add any meaning to a sentence, yet count how often they appear in your email inbox. Public servants' briefs say ''a decision has been made''; passive, unaccountable language that omits the decider's name. I meet people who apparently specialise in ''managing policy implementation'', as though that's a task in itself. In sub-editors' utopia, ugly deverbals such as ''implementation'' are always broken down to their simple verb form (''implement''), to force the speaker or author to answer who implements what. Yet, these days, we regularly hear politicians and others speak glibly about ''hosting a consultation'' or ''undergoing an engagement process'', as though these fractured phrases actually mean something.
I fear many of us now use words and phrases by rote, rather than because they convey what we mean. Perhaps we began parroting jargon like ''innovation'', ''stakeholders'' and ''governance'' because we heard our managers use them, and we wanted to impress them. Perhaps we have no idea what we're talking about, and are thus unable to select more precise words.
The novelist George Orwell wrote of this same descent into meaninglessness almost seven decades ago. ''A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.''
It's never too late to start thinking before we write. Just don't repeat my mistake of letting the words get in the way of the story.
Markus Mannheim edits The Public Sector Informant. Send your tips to aps6@canberratimes.com.au
.gif)
