New Zealand English falls prey to a linguistic pandemic

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, May 27.)

I’m not sure whether this qualifies as some sort of psychological disorder, but I have become mildly obsessed with the way we use the English language. It’s reached the point where I find myself frequently jotting down newly observed quirks of linguistic usage and pronunciation.

Some of these irritate me because they’re lazy or ignorant, but just as often I’m simply curious about how they originated and fascinated by the speed with which they take hold. They are as virulent as the most rampant pandemic and as invasive as old man’s beard.

One example is the use of “surgeries” in place of “operations”. My Oxford New Zealand Dictionary, published in 2005, doesn’t define “surgery” as an operation and lists no plural form of “surgery” other than doctors’ surgeries – i.e., the premises where GPs work.

But somewhere along the line, “surgeries” has morphed into a synonym for “operations”. The takeover is now so complete that the latter word is rarely used.

How did this come about? Beats me. “She had three surgeries” conveys no more information than “she had three operations”. But someone, somewhere, decided surgeries was the preferable term, and it took off like a fire in the fern.

The pluralisation of “surgery” is consistent with the equally inexplicable fashion of putting an “s” on the end of other nouns that previously didn’t have one, such as “harm” and “behaviour”.

A British language writer perceptively noted recently that people who talk about “harms” and “behaviours” tend to be the same ones who begin statements with the word “so” – another linguistic practice with no obvious purpose.

Academics and bureaucrats are particularly prone to such usages. Linguistically they are early adopters – eager to embrace new trends, presumably to show they are ahead of the game. Language, after all, has always been a potent means of demonstrating exclusivity and superiority. That’s why so many academics take refuge in pretentious, impenetrable gibberish.

Now here’s another weird thing: “pupils” have become “students”. There has always been a sensible and commonly understood distinction between these words. Children are pupils while they’re at primary school and become students when they move on to secondary school and later to university.

But primary school pupils are now routinely referred to in the media as students, and logically it’s only a matter of time before kindergarten-aged children are similarly labelled. This may result from a misapprehension that the word “pupil” is somehow demeaning, in the same way as “actress” and “waitress” are commonly but mistakenly thought to imply inferiority.

Thus language becomes an ideological tool for putting everyone on the same level, theoretically at least. In the process, English is robbed of words that helpfully convey a precise meaning.

But if some changes in the usage of words may be explained by ideology, others can only be attributed to ignorance. Twice recently I’ve heard broadcasting journalists, one quite senior, say “exasperated” when they clearly meant “exacerbated” – a muddling of two words that sound vaguely similar but have completely unrelated meanings. 

Some journalists also confuse “formally” with “formerly” and “incredulous” with “incredible”, and mangle their tenses – for example, using rung instead of rang and shrunk when they should have said shrank. The present generation of journalists may be the most educated ever, in terms of paper qualifications, but their understanding of basic grammar is often poor.

Does it matter? I suspect some journalism tutors would say no, as long as the meaning is clear. But the rules of grammar exist for a reason. Journalism depends on precision and clarity in the way sentences are constructed and words are used. Meaning can be blurred by sloppy writing.

Speaking of grammar, another distinction in danger of being lost is the one between adjectives and adverbs. We’ve all been exhorted recently to “drive safe” and “shop local”.  Apparently that extra “ly” – safely, locally – is just too darned cumbersome.

Harmless? I suppose so. In any case, we have to accept that English is in a constant state of flux. But the puzzling question remains: how and where do these linguistic fashions start? “Bored of”, instead of “bored with”, is another. Do these usages originate in some linguistic equivalent of a Wutan wet market?

Last but not least, there’s the relentless advance of American English. Recently heard Americanisms include grocery store for supermarket, yard for garden, to-go for takeaway and the ridiculous “reached out to” for contacted.

We can expect to see more instances of the conjunction and vanishing, resulting in such phrases as “go see this movie” or “come stay with us”. American pronunciation is gaining ground too; “route” is increasingly pronounced to rhyme with “out” and the emphasis is shifting to the first syllable in “address”. This is especially noticeable among millennials.  

I have nothing against American English; it’s swell in America. But language is a key part of our culture and identity, and we should treasure it as one of the things that sets us apart.

On the other hand, perhaps we should at least be thankful that we’ve been spared some of the more exceptionally unpleasant Americanisms, such as sonofabitch, asshole and mother****er. Long may it stay that way. 

One morepork, two moreporks

You sometimes have to smile at the confusion that can result from misguided attempts to display cultural sensitivity.

Many New Zealanders (me included) long ago dropped the “s” from the plural form of Maori names and words, since there’s no “s” in the Maori language. Hence Maoris became Maori, tuis became tui, pauas became paua and so forth – this despite a valid argument that as long as the words were being used in English, the English practice of adding the “s” should be followed.

Where it starts to get a bit silly is when people become so locked into the habit of dropping the “s” that they reflexively start doing it with non-Maori words too. There’s an example in a story about native birds in today’s Dominion Post, which quotes a Te Papa bird expert as saying that “morepork were common around Wellington”.

Hello? Morepork is an English word (onomatopoeic, since you ask – the same bird is found in Tasmania, where it’s called the mopoke). Ergo, the same practice should be followed as with the plurals of other English bird names – for example, thrushes, seagulls, hawks. So, moreporks and fantails, though not tuis and wekas – or rurus or piwakawakas, come to that. 

Because the morepork in this instance was mentioned in the context of birds that are commonly known by their Maori names, either the bird man or the reporter (I don't know which, because the bird man was quoted using reported speech) apparently couldn't see the distinction.

Using language to mould the perfect society

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 26.)

 

It’s a truism that the English language is a dynamic thing, constantly re-inventing itself. But the ground is shifting so fast these days that it must be hard for language scholars to keep up.

Consider the word “pupil”. In one of those inexplicable quirks of English usage, it seems suddenly to have been purged from the language.

“Pupil” used to be a handy way of distinguishing children and teenagers of primary and secondary school age from those attending tertiary institutions. But now it seems they’re all students, no matter what their age.

Hence when a primary school is damaged by fire, television reports that the “students” are in shock. Some of these “students” are only five or six years old.

To be consistent, this presumably means that children at kindergarten are now students too.

Changes like these don’t happen spontaneously. They have to start somewhere – but where?

I blame those shadowy figures known collectively as the language police, who are active in academia and the bureaucracy.

These ideologues view language as a means of achieving their vision of an ideal world – one in which all traces of discrimination, real or imagined, are ruthlessly rooted out.

If you view “pupil” as a demeaning word implying subservience, as they presumably do, then it follows that it must be stricken from the language. Impressionable young journalists fall into line and before you know it the word has virtually vanished from the media.

But in the process, the English language has lost another word that helps us express ourselves with precision and clarity – surely the primary object of communication.

“Actress” and “waitress” suffered a similar fate. It’s now considered sexist to distinguish females in these occupations from males; they are all actors and waiters.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage, the grammarian’s bible, laments that the feminist movement has had a devastating effect on many “-ess” words. In a triumph of ideology over logic, feminist language reformers decided there was something inherently degrading in that “-ess” suffix.

In fact all it does is convey an important and obvious distinction. Acknowledging there is a biological difference between males and females doesn’t mean the sexes are unequal, as the language police would have us believe.

A commonly heard argument is that it doesn’t matter how the language changes, as long as the meaning remains clear. But gender-free English can be ambiguous and misleading. To give an obvious example, to write that a man fancied a waiter in a Courtenay Place bar would create uncertainty as to whether the object of his desire was male or female. For journalists especially, words should be used to avoid ambiguity rather than create it,  

Misguided ideology is responsible for another linguistic absurdity in the form of the word “client”. A client used to be someone who paid for a professional service; now it’s any person who has received a service of any sort, even when someone else is picking up the tab.

The purpose is clear: it’s to make people feel better about themselves. “Client” sounds so much more dignified and deserving than “beneficiary”. It’s probably only a matter of time before imprisoned murderers and rapists become clients of the Corrections Department.  

But ideology can’t be blamed for all the puzzling changes taking place in the usage of English.

A surgery, for example, used to be a place where doctors or dentists administered treatment. Now the word is a synonym for an operation. Hence we hear that an injured sportsman has had a surgery, or that an eye specialist has carried out hundreds of cataract surgeries. “Operation” is bound for extinction.

Then we have nouns being used as verbs and vice-versa. “Impact”, “reference”, “leverage” and “task” used to be nouns. Now we read that a new health policy impacts on sick people, an author references previous works, an entrepreneur leverages his investment and an employee is tasked with increasing sales.

With “reveal” and “disconnect”, it’s the other way around. These are verbs that have morphed into nouns. Kim Dotcom promised “the big reveal” in the Auckland Town Hall and we heard after the election that there was a “disconnect” between Labour and the voters.

Odder still, consider “infringe” and “trespass”. People used to infringe rules; now we hear that a district council has “infringed” someone, meaning it has issued an infringement notice. The usage has been neatly inverted.

Similarly with trespass. You trespass when you illegally enter someone else’s property; all perfectly clear. But police and bureaucrats now talk about troublesome people being “trespassed” from premises such as casinos and ACC offices, meaning they have been banned.

What’s going on here? We can’t blame all these changes on ideologues bent on using language to mould the perfect society. More likely it’s the irrepressible human urge to re-invent things so as to create an illusion of progress.

Either that, or the English language is under the control of bored hobgoblins who keep switching everything around for the sake of pure mischief.

"Deetch" or "dutch"? Both are capable of being made to sound absurd

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 17.)

 

YEARS AGO, while on a government-sponsored visit to Germany,  I noticed my official guide smirking as he eavesdropped on the conversation of some of our fellow passengers on a train trip between Karlsruhe and Berlin.

He later explained that the group’s accent identified them as coming from a provincial region in the north of Germany. A resident of sophisticated Bonn himself, he clearly regarded them as yokels. His contempt couldn’t have been more obvious.

It lodged in my memory not just as extraordinarily unprofessional, coming from someone employed to promote a newly-unified Germany, but as a striking lesson in how human beings put others down purely because of the way they speak.

Mocking other people’s accents is an age-old way of asserting cultural and social superiority. 

It’s also one of the easiest ways in which to poke fun at other nationalities - a fact cleverly exploited by the scriptwriters of TV comedies such as Hogan’s Heroes and ’Allo ’Allo!, in which the Germans and French were mercilessly caricatured on the basis of their accents.

Fifty years ago, Peter Sellers sold lots of records with his wickedly clever impersonation of Indians. Would he get away with it today? Probably not. Cultural sensitivity would rule it out. Yet some accents are still considered fair game - including our own.

On the American talk show Last Week Tonight, British comedian John Oliver had great fun recently with a New Zealand television news clip about the fuss over the National Party’s alleged plagiarising of a track by rapper Eminem in its election advertising.

Two aspects appealed to Oliver. The first was National campaign manager Steven Joyce’s reaction when journalists asked him whether National had obtained copyright clearance to use the Eminem song.

Joyce’s reply - "We think it’s, um, pretty legal”  - amused Oliver, who suggested the politician would make an entertaining defence lawyer.

But what also attracted Oliver’s attention, perhaps inevitably, was the accent of the New Zealand television reporter featured in the clip. Her pronunciation of “Eminem”, in particular, so amused him that he attempted his own imitation – not once but twice, to the great mirth of his audience.

Fair enough; I cringe too at the pronunciation of television journalists. Some give the impression they’re on a mission to destroy every trace of euphony in the English language.

This particular reporter’s pinched pronunciation of the vowels in “Eminem” was enough to make even me wince, and I’m a New Zealander.

But then, with accents, who’s to say that one is worse than another? All accents are capable of being made to sound ridiculous.

Several years ago, simple-minded Australians (no jokes about tautology, please) hooted with delight at the famous “Beached Az, Bro” video – an Australian-made cartoon in which a beached whale with a Kiwi accent declined an offer of a potato chup because he could only eat plinkton.

It wasn’t terribly clever, but it played to the widespread perception among Australians that New Zealand is a slightly more backward version of Tasmania.

Even an intelligent magazine like the Spectator Australia can’t resist having a dig. In an editorial devoted to National’s election victory a couple of weeks ago, it referred to events across the “dutch”.

But really, can anyone say the New Zealand accent is intrinsically more absurd than one that pronounces chips as cheeps, kiwi as koy-woy, pool as pewel and today as to die? Or, for that matter, ditch as deetch?

I suppose we just have to accept that New Zealand English can sound odd to other ears. What apparently doesn’t occur to most Australians, with their nationalistic braggadocio, is that their accent can sound pretty tortured too.

And what about the Brits? Once, travelling on a train in France, I spent several minutes trying to figure out the nationality of the young men who were sharing my compartment. It eventually dawned on me that they were from England and that the language they were speaking was nominally the same as mine.

No one from a country with Britain’s quaint assortment of impenetrable regional accents is in a position to poke fun at the way other people speak. At least a New Zealander from Kaitaia can understand one from Invercargill, which is not something that can be said for the British.

So perhaps people like Oliver should lay off the jokes about other cultures’ accents. It’s a cheap way of point-scoring, and it often says a lot more about the mocker than the mocked.

Molesworth Street revisited

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 9.)

IT’S NO exaggeration to say that for some of my generation, the 1981 Springbok tour was as much the defining event of their lives as the 1939-45 war had been for their parents.

Over 56 days, they rose up in a cathartic rebellion that gathered momentum as the tour progressed.

The anti-tour protests brought to a head all the frustrations and resentments of a baby-boomer generation that had chafed through two decades of conservatism and conformity, topped off by the snarling authoritarianism of Robert Muldoon.

It was more than just a protest against apartheid. It was an emphatic rejection of the values of the old New Zealand – values associated with the short-back-and-sides generation that ran the rugby union and the RSA.

For many of the protesters, raised in middle-class comfort in the suburbs, confronting police skirmish lines was the closest they had come, or were ever likely to come, to real danger. It could be hazardous, but it was exhilarating.

It's no surprise, then, that aspects of the tour have entered the realms of cultural mythology. It's widely thought, for example, that the police responsible for batoning protesters in Wellington's Molesworth St were members of the famous (infamous?) Red Squad, the elite police team specially formed for the tour. In fact, the Red Squad was nowhere near Wellington that night.

But there's another aspect of the so-called Battle of Molesworth St that needs to be clarified.

It's often presented as a brutal, gratuitous attack that came out of the blue. An article in this paper last Saturday perhaps unwittingly reinforced that impression. But the truth is that Blind Freddy and his dog could have seen the confrontation coming, even if the protesters didn't.

I had taken part in the protest rally that preceded the march up Molesworth St that night. The police had co-operated fully, but then the protest leaders announced a previously undisclosed plan to march on the South African consulate. That wasn't part of the deal with the police.

Inspector Bert Hill gave a clear warning of the likely consequences. "I am sorry, we cannot let you walk on Molesworth St," he said through a megaphone. "Please do not go onto Molesworth St and block the street."

The protest leaders ignored him. Only four days before, protesters had succeeded in forcing the abandonment of the Springbok match against Waikato. They probably thought they were unstoppable.

But police pride had been seriously hurt at Hamilton and it should have been obvious that they weren't about to be humiliated again. Their credibility was at stake.

Small wonder that the night air was soon filled with the sound of batons striking protesters' heads. Despite opposing the tour, I thought my fellow demonstrators brought the battering on themselves that night.
 

* * *

HAYDN JONES, who writes an entertaining column in this paper's Your Weekend magazine, devoted his most recent piece to the subject of single-income families.

He's the sole earner for his young family and says their one luxury is that his wife stays at home and looks after the children. They can afford to do this, because they live in a relatively cheap provincial city.

His Auckland friends put their children into daycare and spend so many hours at work that they have little energy left at weekends.

Jones laments that often both parents have to work to put food on the table. He adds: "That's the great New Zealand tragedy."

But is it? I agree that it's sad, but I don't believe parents have no option.

That may sometimes be the case, but more often it comes down to choice. It's a tradeoff: Either they have a good car, a flash house, expensive holidays and modern appliances, or they accept a lower standard of living in return for the benefits of spending precious time with their children – something they will never get a second crack at.

Jones and his wife have chosen the latter, and good on them. Plenty of other young parents could do the same; it's all a matter of expectations.

* * *

WAS THERE ever a sillier euphemism than the expression "to sleep with" someone, meaning to have sex with them?

I recall reading an interview with Bill Wyman, the most carnally active member of the Rolling Stones, which referred to him sleeping with 265 women in three months.

Good grief. They must have been short naps.

Recently, this nonsensical term cropped up again. A columnist in the British Spectator wrote that the racing driver James Hunt was alleged to have "slept with" 33 British Airways stewardesses in two weeks.

This coy phrase dates back to a time when polite people couldn't quite bring themselves to mention sex explicitly. How it survives in an era when we insist on being shamelessly blunt about most other things is a mystery.

 

Packing a sad over the decline of New Zealand English

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 17.)

Some of the silliest things get on my nerves. Words, for example.

Reading my paper the other day, I came across the word “lorry”. The story in question – about Greenpeace activists who used a truck to get access to Britain’s tallest building, which they then climbed to protest against oil exploration in the Arctic – was sourced from a British newspaper, The Times.

In The Times, “lorry” is perfectly acceptable. It’s a word peculiar to the version of English spoken in Britain, so would be familiar to that paper’s readers. But what on earth was it doing in a New Zealand publication?

I vaguely recall occasionally hearing, as a child, people of my parents’ generation speaking of lorries, but even then it was rare. Today it seems as archaic as the once-common practice of referring to Britain as “home”.

It must be decades since I heard the word used in conversation. Many younger New Zealanders probably have no idea that a lorry is what we call a truck. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary (which is actually quite long) tells me it originally meant a low, flat wagon with no sides, although the word’s origins are obscure.

My point is that “lorry” has no place in a New Zealand newspaper and should automatically be substituted with the local equivalent, which everyone knows and understands.

After harrumphing about this to my wife, who stoically endures my frequent rants about the misuse of the language, I turned the page of my paper and was immediately confronted by another word alien to New Zealand English: airplanes.

This report came from the Washington Post. “Airplanes” is an American term, and just as out of place in a New Zealand paper as lorry. There are several alternatives: aircraft, airliner, plane or even aeroplane (which pedantic aviation types seem to prefer), all of which are in common New Zealand usage.

Either the subeditors who prepared these stories for publication couldn’t be bothered spending a few seconds making the necessary changes, or it just didn’t seem important enough to worry about. Perhaps it didn’t even occur to them that these are not words that New Zealanders use.

Such indifference to language, by journalists of all people, bothers me.

Readers of this column may well think there are far more important things to get riled about than the appearance of non-New Zealand words in our news media, and of course they are right.

But I could say the same about rugby fans who indulge in heated debates about whether Aaron Cruden or Beauden Barrett should be groomed as Dan Carter’s successor, or people who tweet their favourite cupcake recipes. We all have our little obsessions.

My excuse is that language is a vital expression of culture. That’s well recognised; just look at the millions of taxpayer dollars being spent each year in an attempt to ensure the survival of te reo Maori.

Over the past 150 years, New Zealand has developed its own rich, colourful and often highly inventive vocabulary – a variant of the English language that’s uniquely ours.

I was reminded of this last week when I bought a copy of noted lexicographer Dianne Bardsley’s new book New Zealand Words. It includes expressions such as “away laughing”, “mates’ rates”, “pack a sad”, “perf”, “number eight wire”, “clobbering machine”, “Tiki tour” and “box of fluffies”.

Many of these expressions would mystify outsiders but are instantly understood by us. Our language is one of the things that marks us as different, even from our near-neighbours the Australians (with whom we share many slang terms while simultaneously having an idiosyncratic vocabulary of our own).

If we value this distinctiveness, we should be prepared to man the barricades against linguistic intrusions from other variants of English; hence my chagrin at the use of words such as lorry and airplane.

Interlopers like these are appearing more frequently, aided by globalisation and technology. We are being exposed more than ever to pervasive forms of English used elsewhere, such as in America.

Unfortunately, journalists are aiding and abetting this process. I cringe when I hear or read Americanisms such as “race car”, “swim meet”, “oftentimes” or “sail boat” used in local news media.

I fear that the honourable word “track” – as in Milford Track – is at risk from the imported “trail”. Similarly, it may be only a matter of time before “tramper” becomes “hiker” to conform to American usage.

I worry that “cookies” and the ghastly “buddies” are making headway too, when “biscuits” and “mates” serve perfectly well.

It’s not just Americanisms that irritate me. The English term “lads” – increasingly seen and heard locally, often in a sporting context – gets on my nerves too.

Why we seem so eager to adopt such terms, when there are long-established local equivalents, is a bit of a mystery. Presumably it has something to do with the desire to be seen as trend-setting.

The French have been grappling with this problem for centuries. They even have an official institution, the Academie Francaise, whose function is to resist the advance of English.

This involves creating French equivalents of invasive English words such as email, software, chat and networking (note how many are related to the digital revolution).  But it seems to be a losing battle, which serves to remind us how contagious language can be.

In the meantime, of course, common-sense English is also under constant assault from silly neologisms. One of the most baffling – heard every time you fly – is the term “power off”, as in “please power off your electronic devices”. For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with “switch”?

I know of teachers who work with severely disabled children whom they are instructed to refer to as “clients”. Similarly, it seems the word “pupils” is on the way out; schoolchildren are now routinely referred to as “students” regardless of age.

It doesn’t help that dictionaries, which once laid down the law on proper English usage, are now descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words they simply reflect common usage, whether it’s right or wrong.

So there’s no authority to counteract the abusers of English; they are free to vandalise the language to their hearts’ content. But it would help if journalists, who should be protectors of the language, were not complicit in the process.  

Are Brits the people to run our public sector?

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 28.)

TWO RECENT events – education secretary Lesley Longstone’s abrupt departure and the appointment of Kevin Lavery as chief executive of Wellington City Council – have touched off an overdue debate about the wisdom of appointing Brits to top public sector jobs.

Ms Longstone, who was recruited from England, joined a New Zealand public service already top-heavy with appointees from the UK.

Other British department heads include Gabriel Makhlouf at the Treasury and David Smol at the new super-ministry, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (although to be fair, Mr Smol has been here for some time).

Both men seem well regarded. Yet when Brits are appointed to lead three of our most crucial departments of state, not to mention several lesser government agencies – including, ironically, Te Papa, which supposedly embodies what it means to be a New Zealander – it’s time to start asking why there were apparently no suitable local candidates.

Did they not come forward, or were they judged to be inferior to those from the British Isles? If it’s the latter, perhaps we have yet to overcome the cultural cringe which holds that overseas people must be more capable than we are.

In Ms Longstone’s case, things didn’t work out. Perhaps British appointees are better suited to advising on esoteric policy matters than trying to run  departments such as education, which are close to the ground and have a profound impact on ordinary New Zealanders in their everyday lives.

Now Mr Lavery, from Cornwall, has been appointed Wellington’s top bureaucrat. He can expect his performance to be scrutinised very closely, especially as he was chosen at the expense of a New Zealand incumbent whom most agree has done a good job.

The issue is not whether the British appointees have the right credentials on paper. Even her critics conceded that Ms Longstone came with an impressive CV. But our culture, attitudes and ethos are different. Decades have passed since we took our cue from what we then respectfully called the Mother Country.

British recruits inevitably bring with them their own cultural baggage, which may not be compatible with our way of doing things. As a Massey University academic (another Pom, as it happens) remarked of Ms Longstone, she was possibly not well-equipped to read the New Zealand mood.

She is hardly the first such appointee to come unstuck here. If the State Services Commission goes back through its files, it will find no shortage of high-level overseas appointees who terminated their contracts prematurely, apparently after finding things weren’t quite as they expected.

Invariably the hapless taxpayer ends up picking up the tab. Perhaps it’s time to consider a different approach.

* * *

STILL, you can’t entirely blame the British for wanting to escape. They must sometimes feel like strangers in their own country.

The latest census showed that white Britons are now a minority in London. More than 7 million, or one in eight, of the people in England and Wales were born abroad – one in eight.

There’s a lot to be said for cultural diversity, but it’s surely impossible to sustain immigration on such a scale without fundamentally altering a society. Were the British given any say in this? Most would probably say they were not.

This is not a racist argument. The same would apply if Tonga was suddenly swamped with immigrants from China.  It’s not a matter of race, but the right of people to preserve their society as they know it.

Perhaps the cruellest irony is that some immigrant groups in Britain are so hostile to their host country that they commit acts of terrorism against it. France, the Netherlands and other European countries have experienced similar smouldering resentment from migrant communities.

There are lessons here for New Zealand, which is undergoing profound demographic change of its own. Most of us welcome the more vibrant and colourful society that a liberalised immigration policy has created – but it has to be carefully monitored and managed.

* * *

THREE expressions I hope not to see or hear in 2013:

“Added bonus”. By definition, a bonus is something additional. That means an added bonus must be a bonus on top of a bonus. It’s a nonsense.

“Signed off on”. Some of us recall a distant time when things were approved. Now they are “signed off”, a term that makes no sense whatsoever, or even more bizarrely, “signed off on” (as in, “the cabinet has signed off on more Treaty settlements”).  Hanging is too good for perpetrators of this atrocity.

“Fur children”. I heard a marketing executive from a chain of pet stores say on the radio that this is now the preferred term for your cat or dog. The radio interviewer was too polite to say it, so I’ll do it for him: anyone neurotic enough to call their pets fur children should be barred by law from owning any.

 

Another one bites the dust

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 21.)

A MOMENT’S silence, please, while we mourn the loss of yet another good word.

“Majority” means the greater number, as in: “A majority of MPs voted in favour”, or “the majority of New Zealanders support retention of the monarchy”.

It is specifically related to numbers. Yet increasingly, we hear and read such solecisms as “the sun shone for the majority of the day” or “the majority of the work was done by nightfall”.

Does it matter? Yes, because the English language depends on precision. Our laws rely on it, because interpretation of the law hinges on the words used. We rely on it to hold our politicians accountable, since we judge them by the statements they make. The moment meanings become blurred, the language is robbed of clarity.

Then again, if you define the world by the latest exploits of Jaime Ridge or who proceeds into the finals of New Zealand’s Got Talent, the degradation of English is probably of no consequence whatsoever. Why worry?

* * *

TIME WAS when a test match between the All Blacks and the Springboks was a veritable Clash of the Titans – an encounter eagerly anticipated by rugby fans in both countries.

But they were the days when tests between the two countries were rare occasions, occurring at intervals of several years. The infrequency served only to heighten the tension and excitement when the two sides came together. Fans would sleep overnight on the footpath to ensure they got tickets.

It’s hard to imagine anyone bothering to make that sort of sacrifice today. Test matches are now so common that even rugby journalists struggle to maintain the pretence that they are anything special.

Responsibility for the degrading of test rugby can be laid at the feet of rugby’s greedy corporate masters, who insist on wringing every last dollar from the sport. Perhaps they haven’t heard of Aesop’s fable about the goose that laid the golden egg.

* * *

 

MY FELLOW columnist Terry Hall drew attention this week to the fact that the private hospital group previously known as Wakefield Health has a new name: Acurity.

What is this pretentious, made-up name supposed to represent? Your guess is as good as mine. What was wrong with the old one? Nothing, as far as we can tell. Wakefield was a name with strong historical associations, but Acurity means nothing.

The fashion for gimmicky corporate names began in the 1980s when the Bank of New South Wales and the Commercial Bank of Australia merged to form Westpac, which sounded for all the world like a meat processing company.

Later in the decade, the L D Nathan Group launched the retail chain DEKA, a name with all the poetic resonance of an acronym for a Soviet tractor factory. Several stores formerly owned by James Smith, a company name regarded with great affection by generations of Wellingtonians, were among those that suffered the indignity of being rebranded.

Since then the trend has gathered momentum. National Mutual became AXA, Broadcast Communications Ltd became Kordia (derived, we’re told, from “accordia”, meaning “harmony”) and Norwich Union became Aviva (a pleasant name that also happens to be the name of my daughter-in-law, but what’s it got to do with insurance?).

According to its website, the former Wakefield Health changed its name to Acurity “to better reflect its own unique identity as owner of three private surgical hospitals and its investment in other health related organisations across the country”.

Which would be all very well if there were such a word as acurity, but there isn’t. We are left to conclude the board of Wakefield Health was smart-talked into the name change by a clever advertising agency or PR firm, which no doubt trousered a handsome fee for its trouble.

 

* * *

CLINT EASTWOOD was rightly lampooned for his bizarre speech at the Republican presidential convention.

There’s a lesson here. Unless they’re prepared to put themselves on the line by actually standing for office, as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger did, actors and other celebrities should stay well away from politics.

It’s a misuse of power for people to exploit their popularity as actors, writers, artists or musicians in order to exert political influence over impressionable fans. Eastwood is no more qualified to comment on politics than hairdressers and cab drivers.

We are not immune to the Eastwood syndrome here in New Zealand, although our own celebrities invariably line up in support of the Left. An example is the “We’re better than that” campaign currently running against a government bill aimed at deterring people smugglers from bringing their human cargoes to New Zealand.

This has attracted the support of such luminaries as Dave Dobbyn, Michele A’Court, Jeremy Elwood and Oscar Kightley, who seem not to grasp that discouraging asylum seekers is actually a humanitarian act, given the number who have drowned trying to get to Australia.

 

 

 

 

The ACC scandal: politics at its most opaque

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 10.)

OBSERVING the ACC scandal unfold is like watching a scrum in an All Blacks-Springboks test match. You know there’s something ugly and unsavoury going on there, but you can’t quite see what it is.

It has provided a glimpse of politics at its most murky, messy and Machiavellian. It smells of power struggles, personal vendettas, greed and egos.

The most unsatisfying thing about it, from the public point of view, is that it has largely been played out behind the scenes.

We could sense precious little beyond the obvious fact that a bitter political contest was consuming the time and energy of politicians who should doubtless be doing more important things.

The ACC story led evening news bulletins and provided fuel for countless political columns, but not even the best-informed political commentators seemed able to spell out exactly what it all means.

Information leaks excited the press gallery but did little to enhance public understanding. The leaks were calculated to advance the political and personal agendas of the participants; nothing else.

This left the electors, to whom the politicians are accountable, unable to figure out what’s going on, still less decide who’s right and who’s wrong.

One crucial question remains unanswered. Where does the public interest figure in this imbroglio? On the few facts given to us, it doesn’t seem to count much at all.

The row has, however, brought home one or two facts of modern political life.

The first is the speed at which political scandals can gather momentum, and the unpredictability of their course.

In this case, what started out as a leak exposing apparent privacy lapses at ACC very rapidly escalated into something much bigger and messier. In a very short time the scandal had brought down one of the government’s brightest and hardest-working ministers.

Tony Blair referred to this phenomenon in a speech shortly before he stepped down as British prime minister in 2007. Noting that politicians now grapple with a relentless 24/7 news cycle, he observed that a drama can harden into a crisis within minutes.

The other thing we’ve been reminded of is that savage power struggles and ego clashes are no longer exclusively a male preserve – if they ever were.

* * *

PEOPLE find so many ways to debase the English language that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

On Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report last week, Waikato district police commander Wim van der Velde was interviewed about a report that criticised police for their handling of a case in which a mentally disturbed woman escaped from hospital care and murdered a neighbour.

In a dire example of the managerialist jargon that has taken root in the public sector, Superintendent van der Velde said of the report: “Learnings came out of it, and from those learnings it seems police could have done some things differently.”

Two questions arise. Whatever happened to the word “lessons”? And what makes people think pretentious neologisms such as “learnings” carry more weight?

The substitution of silly new words for perfectly good old ones, often by making a noun out of a verb, is one of the odder trends in the abuse of English. Even my Microsoft Word program recognises there’s something not right with “learnings” by putting a red line under it.

It’s often said that English is a dynamic language, constantly acquiring new words and usages. But when new words serve no purpose, and in fact detract from the language’s clarity and precision, they should be shunned.

For perpetrating this latest atrocity, Superintendent van der Velde should be assigned to traffic duties for a month.

* * *

SPEAKING of peculiar linguistic trends, it seems everyone these days is in the business of selling “solutions”.

Real estate agents don’t sell houses anymore; they provide “residential property solutions”. A moving company promises “tailored solutions for every customer”, Mitre 10 offers “Home DIY Solutions” and trucking company Linfox is in the business of “supply chain solutions”. (It’s what we used to call transport, but why make do with one word when you can use three?)

A few months ago, Campbell Live featured an item about a Wanganui nursery ware retailer named Baby Solutions, a name that could just as easily have been adopted by an abortion clinic.

Presumably it’s thought that the word “solutions” suggests something more sophisticated than “services”. Engage a firm called Plumbing and Heating Solutions, for which I hear ads on my local radio station, and you expect the man who turns up to unblock your drains to be wearing an Italian suit – or at the very least, crisp white overalls – rather than an old footy jersey and boxer shorts.

It’s hard to tell where this trend will lead, but it may be only a matter of time before funeral directors start advertising death solutions.

A heads-up on expressions that have passed their use-by date

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, March 14.)

It’s a truism that the English language is in a constant state of flux. And no aspect of it changes more rapidly, or more frequently, than the figures of speech we use.

Consider some of the expressions common in my childhood but now used only by people of a certain age, such as “good as gold” and “right as rain”. You may hear them at the local bowling club but not in a trendy bar in the Viaduct Basin or Courtenay Place.

Who these days cadges money or suggests going for a burl in a car? Who refers to a good friend as a cobber, or exclaims “corker” as a term of approval?

Who says “What a dag” when referring to something funny, or complains of being rooked at the corner dairy? And what member of Generation X or Y would know what it means to kick up bobsy-die or rattle your dags?

These were all common terms when I was growing up, but are unlikely these days to be heard from anyone under the age of 50. In their place we have acquired a new vocabulary which, given the speed at which things now pass into obsolescence, will almost certainly have a much shorter shelf life than some of the expressions mentioned above.

There, I’ve just used a contemporary figure of speech almost without thinking: “shelf life”. This comes to us from the supermarket business, where products that have reached their use-by date (another relatively recent term) must be taken off the shelves and discarded.

“Shelf life” and “use-by date” strike me as clever and inventive expressions. They are abstract but their meaning is clear.

I can think of many other evocative figures of speech that have come into common usage in the past decade or two. I quite like the term “high maintenance” for someone who is emotionally demanding. The same person might also be described as having emotional baggage – another apt metaphor.

Similarly, the saying that someone is out of their comfort zone strikes me as an effective use of metaphorical language, as is “wake-up call” for something that jerks you to your senses.

The expression “low-hanging fruit” irritates the hell out of some people, but it’s one of the more striking figures of speech to come out of the business sector. To pick the low-hanging fruit is to take the easy and most obvious options; after that, the going gets tougher.

The trouble with all these expressions is that they can very quickly become tired and hackneyed through overuse. “Singing from the same song sheet”? “On the same page”? These too started out as appealing expressions, but they illustrate how easily today’s vivid figure of speech can become tomorrow’s ghastly management jargon.

When the appalling David Brent uses them in the cringingly believable TV satire The Office, thinking he’s being cutting-edge (whoops, there’s another one), you know any freshness or credibility these expressions once possessed has been well and truly exhausted.

But at least they started life with the virtue of being imaginative. Other ubiquitous slang expressions sounded silly and clichéd right from the get-go (and there’s a particularly absurd cliché, one that makes no sense no matter how you look at it).

We all have our linguistic peeves, not all of them necessarily rational, and the following are some of mine.

“To die for.” Soldiers die for king and country, martyrs die for their faith and mother animals die protecting their young from marauding predators. But no one ever died for a double-shot flat white, 600 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, a perfect Caesar salad or any of the other ridiculous things that airheads and luvvies constantly proclaim are “to die for”. This silliest of expressions exposes our pathetic preoccupations with the glossy, the glitzy and the trivial.

“Gobsmacked.” If only the people who claim to be gobsmacked actually were smacked in the gob; now that would be something worth seeing. It might also shut them up for a while, or at least until the bleeding stopped.

“Blown away”. Oh, I wish. In one of my recurring fantasies, users of this expression are picked up by a rogue tornado and deposited hundreds of kilometres out to sea.

“Gutted”. Hardly a day passes when we don’t hear of someone feeling gutted because they weren’t selected for the Black Caps, or because their favourite pub closed, or because the bus no longer stopped at their gate. In fact disembowelling would be far too gentle a fate for perpetrators of this preposterous hyperbole.

“Rock up” (as in, “I rocked up to the bar and ordered a beer”). This has its origin in ghetto drug slang, which is where it should have stayed. Unless they’re users of crack cocaine, anyone talking about “rocking up” is trying tragically hard to sound cool. Leave it alone, please.

“Heads up”. A favourite phrase of mediocre middle-management types who think it conjures up images of being alert and on the ball. In fact it marks them as drearily unimaginative and conformist, and therefore never likely to progress any further.

“On the back of”. Journalists are the principal offenders here, thinking it sounds authoritative to report, for example, that share prices have risen on the back of encouraging economic news. But like the equally silly “rolled out” (as in “ultra-fast broadband will be rolled out nationwide”), it reveals them as slaves to fatuous jargon.

It pains me that journalists, who should be a good example to everyone else, resort so readily to the tedious and predictable. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was gutted by it.

The English language is under attack

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 14).

The English language is one of the most precious gifts of our culture. Used properly, it is a precision instrument. There are virtually no ideas or situations for which apposite, accurate words or phrases cannot be found.

On the few occasions when such words are not available in English, we’re free to raid other languages for terms such as “schadenfreude” or “coup de grace”, for which no exact English equivalent exists.

But this fantastic gift, refined and enriched over hundreds of years as the English lexicon has expanded, is under constant attack by people who seek to debase and degrade it – people who use words to obscure rather than clarify; to disguise rather than reveal.

It goes without saying that politicians are among the worst offenders. Certain words and expressions are now so debased by misuse that they are bound to arouse suspicion.

Consider how the word “inappropriate” has been distorted out of all recognition. Once a term of mild rebuke for socially gauche behaviour, such as turning up at a formal dinner wearing jeans, it now serves as a euphemism for all manner of disgraceful and improper conduct, from sexual indiscretions through to fraud and bribery.

Words that describe such behaviour honestly and unambiguously – such as immoral, crooked, corrupt or just plain bad – have fallen into disuse. It’s only a matter of time before the perpetrators of war crimes stand accused of inappropriate behaviour.

Other words have been robbed of their force through overuse. Derogatory terms such as sexist, racist and fascist – words that might once have shamed or intimidated the people at whom they were directed – are now bandied about so promiscuously that they have become meaningless.

George Orwell was wise to all this. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, written in 1946, he condemned the deliberate use of vague and misleading words.
He explained how euphemistic language could be used to make appalling things seem almost respectable (I wonder what he would have made of the phrase “collateral damage”, from the Vietnam War), and he pointed out the fondness of totalitarian regimes for language that disguised their inhuman oppressiveness.

Orwell also recognised that sloppy language and sloppy thinking go hand in hand. Dumb down the language and the intellect soon gets lazy too. After all, if you don’t have to express yourself clearly, why bother making the effort to think clearly? It’s easier to resort to a grab-bag of meaningless, empty slogans. Clear speech facilitates clear thinking and vice-versa.

If anything has changed since Orwell’s time, it’s that politicians no longer have a monopoly on the abuse of English. Several other occupational groups now compete to rob the language of its precision, nuance and beauty.

Some of the most egregious crimes against English are perpetrated by three of the most powerful forces in the modern corporate environment: human resources, marketing and IT people.

Human resources departments (the very phrase is Orwellian) are notorious serial abusers of the language. Pick up the executive recruitment section of any newspaper and you’ll sink in a morass of HR-speak. Study the ads and it soon becomes apparent that the phraseology is interchangeable, regardless of the job being offered. The same hollow jargon – key outcomes, customer-focused solutions and suchlike – is endlessly recycled and re-arranged in slightly different combinations. The common factor is a disregard for the integrity of the language.

HR departments may have to try harder, however, because their challengers in marketing are taking non-language to new extremes of flatulence. Consider the following, posted as a testimonial by a wine company marketing manager on the website of a research firm:

"[The research consultants] were a delight to work with,” it read. “Their commanding knowledge of the wine industry across geographies ensured we were able to quickly drill down to the key issues and deliver compelling consumer insights for our core target. They managed key stakeholders from different businesses effectively and collaboratively to deliver clear recommendations to move our business forward.”

This is not writing. It’s the equivalent of painting by numbers, whereby a limited stock of glib clichés is recycled in varying permutations, as in executive recruitment ads. It treats English as just another corporate tool, rather like a cellphone or calculator: simply a matter of pushing the right buttons in the correct sequence.

But blame for the most damaging and sustained assault on the language rests with the computer industry. Computer-speak has no relationship with any other form of English. In fact you could make a compelling case that it was created by aliens with no previous knowledge of the language.

On one level, it is either infantile (for example, “Twitter” and the internet term “cookies”) or plain ugly (as in “blog” – a word that no one with an ear for the euphony of the English language could have invented).

Computer-speak, or geek-speak, is also notable for the way it spurns logical terms in favour of silly neologisms. When I’m transferring CDs onto my MP3 player, for example, the software can’t bring itself to use plain-English words like “copy” or “transfer”. No, it uses nonsensical terms like “rip”, “burn” and “sync”.

The worst examples of cyber language are those that are incomprehensible to anyone other than geeks, and perhaps Daleks. Herewith, a few examples that have popped up on my computer screen:

“Your browser’s cookie functionality is disabled. Please enable Java Script and cookies in order to use Blogger.” This might mean something to a young man with greasy hair, body odour and bad skin, but not to me.

“Please do not power off or unplug your machine.” Understandable enough, perhaps, but "power off"? "Power" wasn’t a verb last time I looked. What’s wrong with “switch”?

“Changes have been made that affect the global template, normal.dot. Do you want to save those changes?” Well, I might, if I knew what it meant.

“A buffer overrun has been detected which has corrupted the program’s internal state. The program cannot safely continue execution and must now be terminated.” Gulp; sounds serious.

The geeks who perpetrated these atrocities are on a mission to re-invent the English language. If we value our heritage, we must ensure they don’t succeed.

Cafes aren't for kids

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, September 13.)

THERE ARE some things that just don’t belong together: Coke with single malt whisky; tomato sauce with paté (though that didn’t stop my father); the Mongrel Mob and Black Power. I could go on, but you get my drift.

To that list I would add children and cafés. I like children – I’m told I was once one myself – and I usually enjoy cafés, but the two are generally not compatible.

First, being dragged to a café is cruel to kids. They'd rather be in a playground or at McDonald's. No token collection of toys in the corner can alter the fact that cafés are places for grown-ups, and I feel sorry for small children who are expected to amuse themselves for hours while their parents chatter and slurp their double-shot soy lattes.

Second, taking kids to cafés can be inconsiderate to adult patrons who go there to enjoy conversation or read quietly – experiences that are not enhanced by children noisily racing around, especially given the fashion for minimalist décor that amplifies sound.

A recent lunch with a friend in an eastern suburbs café – one we had chosen because of its reputation as a place that takes food seriously – was marred by small kids running amok. Their mothers appeared oblivious to the racket they were making.

Parents who insist on taking their children to cafes are being selfish, both to the kids and to fellow patrons. The children are either going to be bored or make nuisances of themselves.

Café-addicted parents should accept that having children requires a modification of one’s former lifestyle – and if that means having to cut out Sunday brunch or long lunches with the mothers’ group, so be it.

* * *

IT’S DISPIRITING when journalists are complicit in the debasement of their own language.

Take the word “offshore”. Until recently it was a useful term that could be applied to anything not too distant from land, as the word implies.

An offshore island was one you could sail to for the weekend. Ships anchored offshore while they waited for a berth. Offshore drilling rigs were often within sight of land.

My dictionaries are in accord on this. The first definition they give is “situated in or on the sea, not far from the coast”, or “some distance from the shore”. The coast or shore is the reference point.

If you wanted to refer to something that was much further away – beyond the horizon and perhaps taking several hours to reach by plane, you used the word “abroad” or, more commonly, “overseas”, since to get to any other country from New Zealand requires a trip across water.

Put another way, Kapiti Island is offshore but Britain is overseas. Perfectly simple and eminently logical.

But in one of those quirks of English usage that creep up on us by stealth, “offshore” is now treated as a synonym for “overseas”. In fact it’s well on its way to monstering “overseas” out of the language altogether.

So where we previously had two perfectly good words with specific meanings, we now have one that has become ambiguous and misleading, and another that is falling out of use.

As with so many linguistic abominations, we can thank the business sector. “Offshore” was originally embraced by accountants and tax lawyers – no respecters of language – as a term meaning any country beyond the reach of tax gatherers and legislators, as in “offshore tax haven”

Had its usage been confined to the business world, there would be no cause for complaint. “Offshore” could have harmlessly taken its place amid all the other flatulent jargon favoured by the suits.

But no, the word has spread into general usage. And the worst thing is that this viral contamination has largely been facilitated by journalists, who should regard it as their professional obligation to protect the integrity and accuracy of the language.

* * *

DONOR fatigue is what happens when people get so many requests for charitable donations that they switch off and put their chequebooks away.

Charities have themselves to blame for this, at least in part, and here’s why.

You make a donation and provide your name and address so that you can be sent a receipt for tax purposes. But most charities seem to take this as a commitment on your part to support them in perpetuity and, thereafter, regularly bombard you with appeals for more money.

There are only so many worthy causes people can support. Most have a few favoured charities that they give to year after year. This doesn’t stop them from making occasional donations to other causes but once they do, they can expect to be on the mailing list for years. I wonder how many soon get donation-shy as a result.

As I write this I have a pile of requests on my desk from organisations that I have given a one-off donation to but don’t wish to go on supporting year after year. Quite apart from anything else, it’s a huge waste of paper.

FOOTNOTE: When I last checked, my comments about children in cafes had attracted 187 responses on the Stuff website. Initially they were unremittingly hostile but more recently the tide seems to have turned slightly in my favour.