LANGUID LANGUAGE

If the information revolution has taken any prisoners, then one of its most important baggings has been language. With knowledge allegedly doubling every twelve months, one would expect a corresponding growth to the words, phrases and texts that describe and support it. However, it’s my contention that language, in whatever form, is a long way back in the field and displays an unwillingness to get with the program. There are a number of reasons for my assertion.

A couple of weeks ago I came across an article in the Parramatta Advertiser with the headline ‘Dealing with drop-offs’. Briefly, the story was about how schools need to effectively wrangle vehicles that bring the kiddies to their doors and pick them up in the afternoons. Parents should be careful/ safety issues and so on. Traffic coupled with school entry and exit periods have always been a problem for as long as I can remember and I’m an ex-teacher. But what attracted my attention was the following paragraph-

There can be a variety of reasons why more parents are choosing to drive their children to school. Research suggests that the main reason is to do with concerns around safety and children crossing busy roads.

Research suggests! Now I’d ‘suggest’ that a hastily assembled committee of garden slugs would come up with exactly the same findings as the alluded to research. Are we to believe that such research actually exists or is it merely a persuasive clause to stiffen the take-home message? That’s one problem with modern language. Buzz words and phrases that really have no place around a topic or article are now regularly imported and exploited. They weaken the story and probably conceal the main idea.

When employed by the Department of Education, I found myself often unpacking curriculum materials which, themselves, were rolled out. As any mere observer might expect, you’d have to immediately gauge what it looks like in the classroom and determine the best practice to secure worthwhile outcomes. Evidence based teaching featured high impact strategies but only when significant leverage points were recognised and acted upon. Pedagogy was the key to all of this shit and the enrichment of tomorrow’s leaders was assured.

But the world of work is far from the only territory where language skill and meaning are subjugated. Just recently I’ve been told that I have a lot on my plate which almost caused me to miss a deadline. One suggestion was to drill down to the real issues but not before I gathered the low hanging fruit as a possible- and easier- alternative. This stuff just goes on and on.

Geoffery Leech, in his description of the ‘Five Functions of Language’ (1974), tagged the ‘directive’ function as one of ‘… social control which places emphasis on the receiver’s end rather than the originator’s end of the message.’ When the user discards his or her responsibility as a communicator and lazily employs the tools of buzz words and clichés for the audience to decode, then language itself is the victim. Further, I reckon that this is occurring more frequently in our information-rich era.

But nowhere is language’s integrity more suspect than in the social media environments. Facebook is where modern written language goes to die. The ‘awesome’s, ‘quaint’s, ‘That moment when’s and ‘so excited’s are only challenged by the retro time bombs of 1 year, 2 years, fuckin’ 10 years ago with their bylines of- not the author’s name (that’s redundant)- ‘Can’t believe it’s been……. etc etc’ garnished, of course, with an exclamation mark (or five). The imperatives of speed and amassing ‘likes’ trump both revision and reflection on the language used and, just as importantly, its meaning.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, ‘All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.’ If this proposition is to be accepted, then social media users’ language has the aerobic capacity of a newly born.