The press
Verbicide
Paul Johnson
Academics, 'serious' intellectuals and the more self-conscious writers often equate journalism with cliches, jargon and sheer bad writing. But I have noticed that it Is such people, above all, who fall into these traps when they contribute political articles to the press, as they seem to do on every Possible occasion. I am thinking, for in- stance, on this side of the Atlantic of E. P. Thompson. An even worse offender is Noam Chomsky. He published an article in the Guardian last week — the very title, 'Priorities for averting the holocaust' was a warning — which is worth examining. It was an attack on the United States and, still more, on Israel, and its arguments aroused the wrath of at least one Guardian reader. A Mr Bill Oak field of Leicester protested that Chomsky's 'flights of fanciful im- agination' had been 'unequalled since the stories of Baron Muenchausen' and that it could 'almost be described as a sequel to the Infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion'. He was 'surprised and saddened that a responsible British newspaper should Print such material unless, as I believe, Motivated by latent anti-semitism, of which the Guardian has been accused on more than one occasion'.
I am not, however, concerned with Chomsky's arguments but rather with the manner in which they were expressed. It seems to me very odd indeed that a man described as 'professor of modern languages and linguistics' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an academy in high repute, could print such expressions as 'this is not to say that one Should not be concerned' or 'as would Otherwise not have been the case'. Of course all of us may produce such horrors as we are setting our thoughts down. But we then cross them out, disentangle the syntax, and start again. There is nothing to be ashamed of in getting a sentence wrong the first time. What shows contempt for the reader is the unwillingness to embark on even the most cursory revision.
Bad writing is nearly always the product of lazy thinking or indeed the absence of thought, the reliance on mental reflexes, a particular sin of those who call themselves 'committed'. Now the whole burden of Chomsky's case is that he is accustomed to think clearly, whereas his opponents, the Cold Warrior, Israelis etc, merely use 'rhetoric', a favourite expression of his (and of the Left generally), producing the juxta- position 'I argue — you indulge in rhetoric'. He says his great fear is that 'superpower rhetoric' may be believed by 'leadership groups and the mainstream intelligentsia', the sort of people who are not accustomed to thinking with Chomsky's rigour. But if Chomsky himself thought while he wrote, or better still before he wrote, he would not juggle around crude and imprecise categories like 'leadership groups' and 'mainstream intelligentsia', which are mere generalised abuse and unhelpful to under- standing. Nor would he write of those who hope `to resist World War Three in a meaningful way' because it does not actual- ly signify anything: by an irony of cliche- logic, the word 'meaningful' when used to- day is nearly always meaningless. Nor would he write 'opposition to these tenden- cies exists but is increasingly becoming marginalised', because a second's thought — the slightest pause in the flow of 'rhetoric' — would tell him that what he means to say is that opposition is declining.
To make a general point, the real and in- fallible sign of 'rhetoric' as opposed to argument is the use of jargon words, which have been drained of their freshness, preci- sion or capacity to provoke thought, by constant squeezing in the hot hands of fanatics. Like Most pacifists, the anti- nuclear Left are people with a strong pro- pensity to violence; they are excessively brutal to the language, notorious murderers of words. Condemning one writer's handl- ing of English, Evelyn Waugh used the im- age of a Ming vase in the paws of a gorilla. It recurs to me whenever I read a unilateralist in spate. Chomsky has a hom- ing instinct for a burnt-out adjective or an exhausted figure of speech. He scrutinises 'operative factors'; he laments 'ominous developments'. For him, aggression is always 'naked', potentials are forever 'enormous', and Cold War 'interpreta- tions' are inevitably 'simplistic'. He is never content to write of 'weapons': they must be 'weapons systems'. He is as fond of 'highlight' as any tabloid sub-editor. He uses 'escalate' when he means rise, 'pro- liferation' instead of increase. Nor does he disdain to flog again that decaying carcass, 'holocaust', now one of the most abused words in the language, closely rivalled by 'genocide'. There is, or there ought to be, a name for this crime against language: ver- bicide.
Of course nearly all of us who do a lot of writing are guilty of it from time to time. When I find too late that I have slipped in- to jargon and examine the reason, I usually discover that the particular sentence was written, as it were, on automatic pilot, because I was not consciously seeking to ar- ticulate the thought I was trying to convey — the thought was so familiar, so (to my mind) unarguable, so much part of my col- lection of idees revues. In short, the thought itself had become a cliche and I had ceased to test its validity. I believe this to be a com- mon experience with writers. Jargon is the outward sign of slipshod or non-existent reasoning; bad writing usually reflects con- fused thinking. It is also true that highly in- telligent people think least clearly when they belong to a 'movement' of the like- minded, which imprisons them in a closed fortress of shared beliefs, debating points and images. Once inside these mental jails, which are often emotionally comfortable, even the best can write very badly indeed because they are scarcely thinking at all: Bertrand Russell in his 'Committee of 100' phase, for instance. At the end of his arti- cle, Chomsky warns that what he terms, with characteristic imprecision, the 'mass disarmament movement' will 'fade away' unless it is able to break away from 'the assumptions of the prevailing doctrinal system', which he identifies with 'the simplistic interpretations of the Cold War system'. What he does not seem to realise, poor fellow, is that he is already buried alive in another set of assumptions, the 'simplistic system' (to use his term) of the anti-nuclear campaign. That is why he has taken to writing like a computer mechanic.
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