Deep Thought: Babbling Our Way Along
Created | Updated Jun 24, 2023
Deep Thought: Babbling Our Way Along
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moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves. |
Yesterday I spent a lot of time listening to reporters babble. My ears hurt.
It's hard to be a reporter when you have to do live commentary on an ongoing event. On the one hand, your bosses are terrified you'll miss something major: on the other, there's a lot of hurry-up-and-wait about it. You have to fill that time, while your viewers are staring at images of people milling about, with what is meant to sound like insightful analysis, but may in fact come out as word salad. You're talking and you can't stop.
I sympathise. You have to keep doing it. I mean, what if the bomb threat wasn't a hoax? What if something exciting happened and your cameras weren't there to see it? So keep talking. 'Back to you, Steve: walk us through that procedure...' Yeah, walk, Steve. Not too fast: we have to fill up time before the next commercial.
I was busy working on the Post at the same time, but one part of my brain was analysing the reporters' use of language – and wincing. I heard malapropisms. I heard mixed metaphors. I heard people doing what Mark Twain told them never to do, which was 'use the second cousin of a word.' At any minute, I feared one of them would break down and say something like, 'Oh, the humanity,' as the guy did when covering the Hindenburg fire.
Of course, it wasn't the Hindenburg on fire. It was just democracy at a low smoulder.
I pick up phrases:
- They believe that somehow, this is gonna redound to Trump's benefit...
- ...just because Trump's been Teflon before, he's gonna be Teflon this time...
- How important is that, to really get something on the bones about the legal argument?
- ...this is bleeding into Trump being able to run as a candidate…
Stop already. I've had enough. It's like listening to that scene from Much Ado About Nothing, where Dogberry drives everybody crazy with his malapropisms.
And that's when it hit me: it is exactly like that scene. And for a very good reason.
Deutsche Sprache, Schwere Sprache, and English Is Hard, Too
Like every language, English can be a subtle and richly expressive tongue – as spoken by the right person. When misused properly, it can be a glorious muddle for comic effect. But when wielded by terrified amateurs, it can be merely painful. Those commentators cast more heat than light on the situation yesterday.
'More heat than light' is an old expression used a lot in the early 20th Century. You may never have heard it. It's one of the problems we have right now: we've got a lot of old expressions like that. Some desperate journalist is likely to dredge it up from their reading and misapply it, leading to all manner of mischief.
A few decades ago some sportscaster or other who had been reading Shakespeare for reasons known only to himself misapplied the term 'sea change'. You know, 'nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea change...' He said some team or other was 'undergoing a sea change'. Journalists are like monkeys, very imitative. They picked it up. Suddenly there were sea changes everywhere. Then the news reporters heard it. Boy, were there sea changes.
So what does that have to do with Shakespeare, who after all was the injured party here? I'll tell you.
When Shakespeare was writing, the English language was undergoing massive changes. No, not sea changes. (Stop that.) Vocabulary changes. It seems the educated people had decided that English didn't have enough words. So they started 'borrowing'. I have never understood why we say we 'borrow' words. We never give them back – certainly not in good condition.
In Shakespeare's day, they 'borrowed' half of Latin and a third of Greek and a not inconsiderable amount of French. The educated people were happy: now they sounded even more educated. They knew how to use the words properly, of course. If you want to hear how they worked, read Shakespeare's plays aloud or listen to some actors doing it.
Only the educated characters, of course. The uneducated characters, like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, show you what happened to everybody else. These kinds of characters show up in just about every Shakespeare play, and they make the audience laugh and laugh. They misuse the fancy words. They drive everybody else crazy trying to figure out what the heck they're talking about. Hilarity ensues.
Playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan had a character like that. He called her Mrs Malaprop. In the 1940s there was a brilliant movie character who did that, too, by the name of Slip Mahoney. Instead of malapropisms, I often call these misused expressions 'Slip Mahoneyisms'. There are characters like that in every era: the one from the Civil War claims 'they grafted him into the Army'.
Malapropisms and comic misuse of language are usually associated with people trying to sound more educated than they are. There's nothing wrong with plain speech: I have known many people who were quite eloquent without grafting strange words onto their personal linguistic vines. So here's the question: why are the reporters doing it? These aren't sportscasters. Sportscasters are allowed to butcher the English language. It's practically a requirement of the job, at least in the US.
Could it be, I ask myself bemusedly, that we're on the downward slope of English as a language? Is everybody going to wake up one day soon, unable to talk in anything except technobabble and adspeak? Or...is it perhaps the case that journalism majors need remedial English writing courses?
Just asking a question, as the trolls say. As for the subject of all this misapplied discourse, I can't describe my feelings in English, so I'll do it in German: Er kann mir gestohlen bleiben.1
