Minister announces bold initiative | The Power of Language

Owing to the current
Economic climate
There is a dearth of words.

We are left with no choice. We must
Make challenging efficiency savings
To reduce our expenditure of vocabulary
To sustainable levels.

In order to help us
To achieve our targets
The verb to say is withdrawn from circulation.
Its meaning can be adequately conveyed
Through the use of to be like
Or to go.

Adverbs are a luxury. It is unfortunate
That because of the credit crunch
We can no longer afford them.
Adjectives already perform many of their tasks.
The new arrangements merely regularise
Existing good practice.

Negative forms act as a brake
On economic recovery. A carefully managed programme
Of quantitative easing
Will introduce additional affirmatives
Which used in pairs will stimulate growth.

Language is an asset. And like all assets
It must deliver value. One hundred thousand words
Are far more than any modern society requires.
A twenty-five per cent reduction
Over the next five financial years
Will place our language on a sustainable footing
Fit for the twenty-first century.

The Minister of State for Doing Your Bit
Was like, “Everyone must do their bit
And speak proper.”

Yeah, right.

via Minister announces bold initiative | The Power of Language.

Nurturing the polymaths…

My Power of Language post last week, Precision Tools, referred to the recent James MacTaggart Lecture given in Edinburgh by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. The lecture is, I understand, a keynote of the television industry’s year and Schmidt is the first non-TV professional to deliver it. His most uncomfortable message, though, came not from Schmidt the outsider to TV, but from Schmidt the foreigner to the UK.

“Over the past century,” he said, “the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths.”

Ouch.

First a definition or two. The OED defines polymath as “A person of great or varied learning; a person acquainted with many fields of study; an accomplished scholar” and polymathy as “Great or varied learning; acquaintance with many branches of knowledge”.

Next a word of explanation. I’m writing this post to contribute to an online discussion amongst RSA Fellows, in response to the question “What can the RSA do about it?”; but I’m interested in any and all answers to the wider question, “What can we do about it?”.

Precision tools | The Power of Language

I have a new hero.

His name is Lindsay Johns. He is a writer and broadcaster and a mentor to young people in Peckham, and I first encountered him on Radio 4 two weeks ago.

Why is he a hero? Because, in his own words (in the Evening Standard of 16 August), in his mentoring work with young people in Peckham he has “zero tolerance towards inchoate street slang”.

It is quite a stand to be taking in today’s culturally tolerant society. It is a long-overdue rebuke to the well-meaning but destructive philosophy that the rest of society should be embracing street patois, complete with all its incoherence and intellectual limitations (implied and actual). It is a direct challenge to those who believe that the evolution of language is something to be observed and recorded, rather than influenced or even resisted.

It is a quiet but authoritative reproach to those who think that accuracy in language doesn’t matter – to the self-publisher who releases an e-book riddled with typos, sloppy grammar, punctuation errors and muddled homophones; to the politician whose diction is a contrived series of glo’l stops and dropped aitches; even (God help us) to the occasional English teacher who has decided that it is cool or “relevant” to allow text-speak in essays.

And Mr Johns gets results. Amazing results. Read more…

Merchants 1, Culture 0

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An enormous amount has been written, both online and in print, about the publishing industry in recent years – some of it perceptive; a little (a very little) well-informed; much of it complete rubbish, ranging from the ignorant to the merely opinionated.

The vast majority of this body of commentary has one common factor: its authors have a relationship with the industry, whether as insiders (publishers, agents, authors, booksellers) or as outsiders (mostly self-published authors). That is to say, everyone has some kind of an angle to play, a stance or interest (vested, conflicted or otherwise) to defend, or in plenty of cases an axe to grind.

That stops here. John B. Thompson has written Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century from perhaps the only possible and credible disinterested perspective – that of the academic. He has examined publishing as a business phenomenon, and based his work not on opinion nor on wishful thinking, but on five years’ systematic research, including some 280 interviews with industry insiders amounting to 500 hours of first-hand evidence.

Fiction improves our social understanding

Last Thursday morning, Radio 4′s Today programme hosted an interview with Professor Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and author of the book Such Stuff as Dreams.

His thesis is that reading fiction is good for you.

Well, I, inveterate bookworm of this parish, could have told you that – though I couldn’t have offered any hard evidence. I’m sure there are members of book clubs all over the world who would say the same thing. The Greeks thought it was the case, but again, without proof.

Professor Oatley, on the other hand, has come up with something more empirical. His study established a direct link between the amount of fiction a person reads, and their degree of empathy with and understanding of others (as measured by accepted psychological tests). The link was so strong that it seems to have surprised even him.

It’s worth listening to the interview (it’s on the BBC iPlayer, so will probably disappear in a few days’ time – though as of 24th July it’s still available). He compares fiction to a flight simulator – it is a way of encountering a wider range of situations and people, of living a richer and more interesting life than one might have the opportunity to experience directly. And it has a positive, demonstrable effect on the way people cope with the world.

Aside from its obvious intrinsic interest, there are three things that struck me about this idea.

Bringing words to life – a call for ideas

I’ve become a big fan of RSA Animate – a series of 10-minute videos combining hand-drawn animation, written words and a narrative voiceover.  It is a novel and engaging way of conveying a message – often a complex one – to a non-specialist audience.

I love the ability of the Animate concept to catch and keep the interest of the viewer. I love the impression it gives of freshness and spontaneity. I love its low-tech, non-threatening look and feel. It seems…  well, human in its tone and its scale. It seems to be something that anyone could do, given a couple of marker pens, a whiteboard, a video camera and some basic artistic ability. And, of course, a compelling story to tell.

I am not alone in thinking this.  Here’s a truly fantastic example of a California high-school student, Madison Kerst, creating her own Animate to discuss issues of gender equality in US sports.

I shall come clean.  I, Bennetts The Luddite, am completely sold on this idea (along with the notion of an app for Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is the first and only thing ever to make me regret that I do not possess an iPad).  I am wholly convinced of the value the technology can add for someone with a message to get across.

Animate has its

Portrait of the artist as a young introvert (from The Power of Language)

Sixty-seven years ago this month, an RAF Mosquito on patrol over the Thames was ordered to intercept an incoming V1 flying bomb.  It never returned.

Its pilot, Fred Kemp, left behind a wife and three young children. Its navigator, James Farrar, left arguably a more enduring legacy – an extraordinary collection of poetry and prose, characterised (in the words of a review in theSpectator) by “an inner clarity and quality, an authority of imaginative expression far beyond his actual experience”.

Unlike his near-contemporary Keith Douglas, four years his senior and killed in Normandy the month before him, Farrar never achieved recognition in his lifetime.  His mother sent his manuscripts to his lifelong literary hero, Henry Williamson, who published an anthology in 1950 under the title The Unreturning Spring (republished in 1986, edited by Christopher Palmer, as Spring Returning).

As a writer, Farrar’s extraordinary strength and maturity is in description.  (Be warned:  if you are one of those who spurn the adjective or the adverb, look away now:  there is nothing for you in this post, nor in Farrar’s writing.)  His imagery is of the sort that demands to be read deeply and thoughtfully.  (I posted about this kind of thing a few months back.  Yes, I feel strongly about it.)  Here he is at sixteen, watching a Battle of Britain dogfight:

Read more…

Internships, celebrity culture and the new publishing model

An interesting post last week by Alison Masters on RSA Projects considers whether internships are part of the problem or part of the solution.

I left a comment drawing a comparison between the internship debate and the destructive influence of celebrity publishing deals on the publishing industry. (Let me apologise here and now to Alison and to RSA Projects for hijacking what is undoubtedly an important debate.  But it got me thinking, you see…)

As I understand it, the internship debate accuses businesses of offering unpaid work to those whose parents (a) have the contacts to get them a placement and (b) can afford to pay their living costs while they get some work experience.  These interns get their placements over the heads of those who may be far more capable and talented, but can’t afford to work unpaid and can’t get a foot in the door in any case.  Have I understood that right?

There is, then, a strong parallel with the mainstream publishing industry (and the media in general) and its relationship with celebrities.  

The trouble with jargon… and with plain language (via The Power of Language)

Next month, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 comes into force in the USA.  Its purpose is “to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.” It sounds a bit like the Plain English Campaign with teeth.  Not a bad idea – not least if it forces Government officials to think, really think, about how ordinary people react to information. A … Read More

via The Power of Language

A gamble that paid off

A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charles II is, in many ways, both too easy and too difficult a subject for a biography. He is one of those great defining characters of the British monarchy – like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Victoria – whose reigns stand out in our collective memory for one or two well-known events, and about whom most people think they know plenty.

So Jenny Uglow takes a different approach in ‘A Gambling Man’. The book is indeed a biography of the Merry Monarch, but it focuses on the crucial first ten years of his reign, and on Charles’s many gambles to stabilise his three kingdoms during this period.

Her task is helped by the events of the period – restoration, war, plague, fire and constant sexual intrigue – which in themselves make for a rollicking good read. It is further illuminated by Pepys, whose voice, through his diary, offers us a ringside seat. (It’s astonishing how much he managed to witness first hand).

Given these ingredients, the greatest risk is that