Vigilant Veriloqy
I have, from time to time, written political speeches. Here, on this blog, you get the rough draft, the raw idea, not the finished speeches or rants. Those, I reserve for publication. There are rules I follow when I write for publication.
Mind, I don’t follow those rules when I’m blogging, because blogging (for me, anyway) is a spontaneous, off-the-cuff, activity. It is full of errors, knee-jerk reactions, and hasty thoughts scribbled down to jog my memory later on, when I have time to ponder those thoughts and develop them into something viable. Sometimes, the thought is incomplete enough I can’t remember what I wanted to remember from it, or it is too trivial to pursue. Often, the final thoughts, developed through research and query, are utterly different from my initial reaction. When I blog, it’s all notes and fragments.
When I write a speech or essay, it’s more thought out, includes quotes and references, documents the thought trail, and it is better developed and coherent.
The rules I follow when I write essays and speeches are simple:
1. No clichés, metaphors, similes, or other figures of speech that have lost their power of origin. How many people have actually ground and axe and understand what that means? And how many people understand “toe the line” well enough to spell it correctly, let alone use it correctly?
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If you can cut a word, cut it.
4. Use active words and phrases.
5. Never use a foreign language, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. This one I break depending upon the audience, but for the general public, to reach as many people as possible, I follow this rule.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say something stupid, barbarous, or confusing.
Most modern political speeches suffer from two major problems: stale images and lack of precision. It’s vague and abstract, written as if words and phrases are cobbled together like a sugar cube castle – all sweet and pretty but with no real substance. The turns of speech are hackneyed and overdone. How many of you are tired of hearing words and phrases like “surge” and “post 9/11” and “perfect storm”? Words are chosen less for their meaning than for their presumed ability to evoke specific images or reactions. Worse still, many modern political writers twist metaphors out of their original meaning (the aforementioned “toe the line”, which is sometimes rendered as “tow the line” – a completely different image and meaning) and they mix incompatible metaphors, demonstrating either their utter incompetence in speech-writing or their indifference to how the listeners will hear what they say.
There is a vast dump of worn out phrases and metaphors that are used simply because they are time-savers. Everybody presumably knows what they mean. They’re tired, worn out, and have lost all evocative power, yet speech-writes keep using them because it saves them time and effort. They don’t have to think, just scribe.
I try to reach for new images, new current evocations, when I write. I look to everyday lives and seek the epiphanic instant that sparks a reaction. I may inject modern slang into the mix to reach specific audiences, and I use modern technology in my new metaphors. We don’t “give a call” anymore, we “text” or maybe “cell”. I’ll even use LOL and L33T if the audience is right for it.
Modern speech writers also have a tendency to turn verbs into phrases. Instead of “break” they’ll say “render inoperative”. To make matters worse, they use a passive voice with these weakened verbal phrases. Noun constructions are used instead of gerunds: “by examination of” instead of “by examining”. They try to make some sentences more profound-sounding by using the “not un-“ phrase. See how much sense it makes: “The not unbrown fox played a leading role in rendering inoperative a not unwhite egg to serve the greatly to be desired purpose of subjecting the contents to a separation from the not unfragile shell, bring to a satisfactory conclusion a not unwelcome snack.” Or, in plain English: “The brown fox sucked eggs.”
While such circumlocutions make work well for word-padding a NaNovel, they suck eggs for political speech writing. It doesn’t even serve the poetic purpose of purple prose, it just clunks.
Worse still, they use further pad political speeches with pretentious, archaic, or foreign words to give their speech an air of culture or elegance, when all it does is make the speech slovenly and vague. I don’t know when it became the mode to substitute Greek or Latin or German words for English ones, but if there’s a common English word for it, we should use it when addressing large segments of our population. I’m sure there are plenty of people who understand “gleichshaltung” and “mutatis mutandis”, but there are probably many more who don’t. Political speech-writing is not about showing off how prettified and elegant one can speak, but about conveying information.
Politicians also use words in dishonest ways. “Fascism” for example, has been so abused by politicians it now means “I don’t like it.” The definitions of such words as “democracy”, “socialism”, “freedom”, “patriotic”, “justice”, “class”, “reactionary”, “equality”, “progressive” are used in consciously dishonest ways. They’ve been abused like this so often that no one has any clear idea of what they really mean. Let’s take that first word – democracy – for example. We habitually use the word as praise – when we call a country “democratic”, we signify approval of that country. Defenders of every kind of regime claim their country is either a democracy or is working on becoming a democracy. If we tied “democracy” down to one meaning, they’d have to stop using it, and be revealed for what they truly are. The person who uses it has his own private definition, but allows the listener to think he means something quite different. This is not just lazy speech-writing, it’s fraudulent.
Modern political speeches almost never contain fresh, vivid, homemade turns of speech. It’s the same familiar phrases, the same abused words (Bush will probably become the most famous example of abusing words), and the pasting together long strips of words already placed in order by someone else that make the speeches presentable but ultimately meaningless. It’s easy to write and speak this way. If you use ready-made phrases, you don’t have to hunt for words or bother with the rhythm of the sentences since these phrases are already set in a more or less euphonious manner. You save a lot of mental effort using stale similes, metaphors and idioms. But it leaves your meaning vague not just for your listener, but yourself. You aren’t seeing a complete picture, only fragmented composites and flashes of emotions. Nothing is coherent. The listener leaves, convinced something must have been said, but without any real clue as to what. This is why I have stopped listening to political speeches and prefer to read a transcript. I can spend time combing out a meaning from the tangled phrases and twisted metaphors.
Orthodoxy of every style seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. Some politicians are charismatic enough to imbue their speeches with some liveliness, but when you examine the words, they say very little. Speakers who use a lot of familiar phrases become mechanical in what they say and how they say it. The appropriate noises are coming out of his mouth, but his brain is no longer engaged. Part of this is that modern political speeches are written to defend the indefensible. It has to consist of euphemisms and cloudy vagueness because clarity would expose a lot of ugliness. It would also mean we’d have to take action, action that may not be profitable for the politician. I have not yet met a politician who would use his wealth and power to do what is right. He is determined to maintain things as they are, to “protect” the public from reality, and to stay in control.
All issues are political issues. We can’t hide from that. We are committing brutal acts and covering it up with pretty words. Those acts may well be defensible, but the words we need to defend should be brutal. We can’t prettify them by calling the theft of the farms of millions of peasants a “transfer of population”, or the imprisonment of anyone without trial or access to attorneys or outside communications an “elimination of unreliable elements.” Our politicians need to stop with this inflated style of euphemism and they need to speak plainly. We can take it – we’re American citizens.
When the general atmosphere is bad, language suffers. Those who argue that language is a merely reflection of social conditions say we can’t change the development of society by tinkering with the language. This may be true in a general way, but we have examples where people have changed society and language by deliberate action. Words and expressions have left our language not through any evolutionary process but by the concerted effort of a minority of people. Consider the word”gay”. It once meant carefree joy, now, it is never used for that purpose but instead applies to a specific type of gender identification. The phrases “explore every avenue” and “leave no stone unturned” were jeered out of journalistic use, and are losing their hold in general usage as a result.
I propose that we work magic by changing our word usage. When we write speeches, we need to refrain from using words until we have thought out the images and feelings we want to be evoked by our words. Then, with the emotion and the image clear in mind we can choose – not simply accept – which words best cover the meaning we want conveyed. Then we switch things around and consider what impression those words make upon the listener. When use our minds this way, we will cut out stale and mixed images, prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, humbuggery, and general vagueness.
We need to defend our language by using it honestly. If we do this responsibly, we can mitigate some of the atrocities being carried out in the name of our country because we will have to face up to them. Our politicians will have to listen to us because if they don’t their speeches will reflect this and they won’t get elected. Vigilant veriloqy.
