Shades of linguistic snobbery

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS WEEK the Plain English Campaign announced its annual award for gobbledegook. The winner was the Welsh First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, for stating: “The only thing which isn’t up for grabs is no change and I think it’s fair to say it’s all to play for, except for no change.” It is Mr Morgan’s second award; the first was in 1998 for asking: “Do one-legged ducks swim in circles?”

Yet, while Mr Morgan’s winning entry is cliché-ridden, it is not gobbledegook. It is a statement, comprehensible on first reading, that many outcomes are possible, excepting only stasis. Likewise, Mr Morgan’s comment about ducks, in context, is a clear and arresting metaphor. Had Mr Morgan used the hackneyed equivalent phrase about ursine toilet habits, the Plain English Campaign would have taken no notice.

Every year undeserved attention is paid to a group that might more accurately be called the Obscurantism Organisation. Its gobbledegook award is not about English usage so much as a populist suspicion of ideas. Past winners include Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, for a long analysis involving “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns”. The campaigners described it as “truly baffling”, but the joke was on them. Rumsfeld’s statement was intricate but pellucid. The intricacy was intended to be funny, and succeeded.

The actor Richard Gere won for: “I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I’d think, ‘No, actually I am a giraffe’.” The idea may be peculiar, but the sentences are well constructed and the language idiomatic.

Gordon Brown, when Shadow Chancellor, won for a speech about “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. This is not gobbledegook either. All disciplines have terms that are valuable shorthand for specialists. Endogenous growth theory is an important branch of economics, and if you know what “endogenous” means, you can make an informed guess about its subject matter.

Mocking convoluted English is a public service. As George Orwell wrote: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” The Plain English Campaign adopts the unrelated approach of intellectual snobbery; British public life has quite enough of that already.

UPDATE: Bob Borsley, who has been very helpful in advising me about Noam Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, draws my attention to this discussion of the Donald Rumsfeld remarks, by Geoffrey K. Pullum, co-author (says Bob) of the best grammar of English:

The quotation is impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically. There is nothing baffling about its language at all.... Hate Rummie if you want for political reasons, but don't try to get grammar or logic on your side. There is nothing unintelligible about his quoted remark, linguistically or logically.

A prominent political journalist writes to say that the Gordon Brown remarks are an even worse case for the Obscurantists to cite than I had given credit for. He listened to the speech in 1994, and recalls that Brown remarked that "post-neoclassical endogeous growth theory" was not the stuff of soundbites, i.e. it was a self-mocking reference, rather as Rumsfeld's comments were.