Number 9
I can’t easily turn off my inner editor, no matter what’s going on, good or bad, so even as I listened to news about the space shuttle exploding, one part of my brain was listening to the language used to report the news. Most people, from the president on down, understand that tragedy calls for the simplest, most direct and honest language. We also know, moreover, that the audience should listen to the intention more than the form, yet we also have a concept of propriety of sentiment, speech, and behavior on these occasions.
This is why the following sentence jumped out at me from a TV news program: “So-and-so went to the White House to implement his role as a coordinator of domestic incidents.” Actually I’m not sure if I heard the last two words correctly, but I hope this person did something more concrete and useful than “implementing his role as a coordinator” of anything. For one thing, the emphasis here is on the person’s position, not his actions; and it sounds like he was playing a role, not being real or doing something real. It doesn’t sound like someone doing a job. Yet, most people feel that a somber occasion calls for a more formal diction, and many feel that a more formal level of diction is achieved by using, again, these Latinate or Greek words rather than the short, simple Anglo-Saxon. But the sentence quoted above was jarring because the language was too elevated for whatever the speaker was trying incoherently to convey ~ we don’t know what that person who went to the White House was doing, and how important could it be anyway?
This isn’t of much consequence right now, but we have a classic example of English used formally, but simply and elegantly, to convey respect for our fallen friends:
“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.”
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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