MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ANYONE who has had experience of public speaking or lecturing will agree with me that, whereas the limits of human under- standing are strictly confined, there are no limits set to human misunderstanding. The line of comprehension runs strict and narrow as a military canal ; the area of incomprehension possesses no outline at all, but fades beyond the horizon, having the immensity and the countless silly smiles of the Pacific ocean. For three-quarters of an hour one will have expounded in simple language and with becoming clarity the thesis, let us say, that the French romantic movement owed much to the romantic movements in England and Scotland by which it had been preceded. The audience, let us assume, is com- posed exclusively of men and women who would resent being told that they were wholly uneducated and quite incapable of using their minds. And yet, when one has finished speaking and the chairman calls upon the audience to put questions to the lecturer, one becomes aware that, by some curious process of transmutation, one's words have assumed in the minds of one's hearers totally different and unwanted shapes. There will be the man who, after a few tiresome and irrelevant remarks about Burns, will ask whether the lecturer does not agree that the OitaMali of Rabindranath Tagore shows in- fluences deriving from the Celtic school. There will be the woman who, adopting in her nervousness a tone of truculent suspicion, will enquire with scorn how it comes that the lecturer should never have read Madame de Stael's book on Germany. It is of no use replying to such a question with the remark that Madame de Stael has nothing whatever to do with the theme of the lecture just delivered. The questioner, with increased truculence and suspicion, will carry the rest of the audience with her in having demonstrated that the lecturer is either deliberately concealing an important fact, or is else a man of no knowledge or qualifications, an unlettered impostor, not ignorant only, but in addition deceitful.
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A former colleague of mine in the House of Commons once in- formed me that it had become for him a physical torture to listen to speeches other than his own. I go further than this. If I find myself faced by a dull audience, it becomes an almost intolerable burden to hear the sound of my own voice. I sometimes resort to a device to test whether my audience is really such a moron as it looks. I introduce into my speech or lecture a passage regarding the tendency of human beings to use comforting phrases without examining the meaning or implications of the words they use. I then illustrate this remark by telling them a true story. The moment one says " Now, I can tell you a story to illustrate my point," their attention, which has been drooping, becomes alert ; all audiences like stories. I then tell them how, at the time of the Hoare-Laval crisis, I received a letter from a constituent. " Sir," the letter ran, " cannot you persuade the Government that what the people of this country want is Collective Security, and that they will never stand for any European entanglements? " If the audience is amused by this story, then I decide that they are less stupid than I had imagined and my interest in my own lecture revives. But if, as frequently happens, they receive the story with expectant eyes and mouths half opened, indicating that there must be more to come, then I conclude my lecture as best I can, saddened by the dull weight of human incomprehension.
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I was reading this morning an interesting leaflet sent me by Mr. Tom Harrisson of Mass-Observation. The leaflet describes the results of a survey which had been conducted in order to ascertain how far the ordinary citizen understood the Government White Paper or, in its more popular garb, The Battle for Output. Mass- Observation began by asking people how they interpreted the draw- ing on the cover. This drawing was designed for the Central Office of Information in order to impart a matey appearance to Cmd. 7046; to me it seems a spirited and simple picture. Yet according to Mr. Harrisson the purport of the design is not always understood by the ordinary citizen. A working man approached the picture from an ideological angle ; to him it was intended to convey the struggle between the forces of the Left (coloured red) and the forces of the Right (coloured blue). A housewife in Kilburn decided that the picture was meant to represent a man trying to commit suicide by hanging, whereas an artisan when shown the design decided that it symbolised a working man striving to do his work but eternally entangled in the meshes_ of red tape. It is not surprising therefore that if the popular cartoon upon the outside of The Battle for Output could lead to misunderstanding an even greater degree of incomprehension would follow as the pages were turned. Mr. Harrisson and his friends were anxious to discover how many of the words used in the tett were understood by the ordinary citizen and how many were not. They thus selected a few typical specimens and used them for what, I regret to say, Mr. Harrisson calls " re- action-tests." He found that the word " flexible " was generally understood, as was also the word " deprive." The word " assess " however was often supposed to bear some relation to the word "assist." Many people were confused by words such as "ulti- mately," " resources," and " subordinates." The expression " formu- late," which to my ears is a simple if tiresome Civil Service word, was variously interpreted as meaning " speed up," " get together," and " first to get going " ; whereas the word " conception " was defined as " the Government's personal point of view."
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Having experimented with these reaction-tests in the shape of isolated words, Mass-Observation then proceeded to examine how far whole sentences could be understood. They took the sentence, " The gap between resources and requirements will in the end be closed by some of the requirements being left unsupplied." I admit that this sentence is a pretty stiff example of officialese, but, when read the third time, its meaning is not in doubt. Yet Mass-Observa- tion discovered that few could understand it, many were infuriated by the long and tortuous words employed, whereas one citizen, when asked to interpret the phrase, plunged his hands into his hair and ejaculated " Oh, God! " Another sentence—not perhaps in itself a gem of basic English—ran as follows: " The objectives of this paper embody the Government's determination to put first things first." This, as we may well believe, led to a whole crop of variant interpretations. " It probably means," said one citizen, " that the Government want to run all industries instead of being run privately." A labourer of the age of thirty, when confronted with this horrible sentence, remarked (and I should hesitate to say that he is wholly wrong), " It means sort of conscription." Another labourer, a younger man, opined that the sentence meant, " They are going to fetch things up to a standard of living what we were used to before the war." When asked more precisely to define the meaning of the words " objectives " and " embody " people answered that the first signified "obstacles " and the second " enforce." All of which leads one to suppose that when the Prime Minister stated on February 27th that the White Paper " is written in simple language and I am sure the bulk of the people can read it and under- stand it," he was either speaking optimistically or else using the word " bulk " in a specialised sense.
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Mr. Harrisson does not conclude from this that the public are unintelligent ; he concludes, and I think he is right, that there is a wide gap between the ordinary citizen's powers of understanding and the language in which he is addressed. Many political speeches, he contends, are delivered in a language which is above people's heads and is in fact a " ritual survival ". from an age in which electors were few and literate. Mr. Harrisson's opinion coincides with that of Hitler, who always held that a demagogue should use very few expres- sions, but repeat them all the time until they became detached from their own meanings and echoed as cries and calls. All this becomes for one a salutary lesson. May it not be, perhaps, that when I get angry with audiences for misinterpreting my remarks, the fault lies, not with the audience, but with myself? Am I quite certain that neither in speech nor writing would I ever use words such as " re- quirements being left unsupplied "? No, I am not quite certain.
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