The phone rang last night. I picked it up and - as this wasn't an unsolicited call from somebody I didn't know asking me to part with money I didn't have in order to buy something I didn't want - had a brief conversation with the caller. I put the phone down and my partner asked drowsily "was that the guy from tomorrow?" The Guy From Tomorrow - what a great title. All I need now is a plot and several hundred pages of appropriate prose and that's my off-the-wall science fiction novel off to the publishers. In my significant other's head, "the guy from the tomorrow" was just sleepy shorthand for "the man with the van who's due to be delivering some second-hand furniture tomorrow" (and the mystery caller was, indeed, he). If I ever had the time, energy or inclination to make him a fictional character he'd have to be something a bit more surprising - an employee of the Milky Way Transit Authority, perhaps (I was going to cite the blog which originally drew my attention to this little gem, but seem to have mislaid the bookmark - all I can say is "oh dear link", in the same tone that my two-and-a-bit year old son uses to say "oh dear milk" after having created a milk lake in the kitchen, either by accidental spillage or a deliberate act of tipping).
This potential title got me thinking about language which, some people insist, is constantly being "dumbed down". Sometimes they're dead wrong, especially when they decide that that simpler always equals dumber. Compare the title of H G Wells' early short story about time travel, The Chronic Argonauts, with that of his later novella The Time Machine. The early title uses more complex vocabulary and drops in an allusion to a classical myth, but the simpler title The Time Machine is far, far better - short, snappy, understandable and straight to the point.
For me, the adulteration and debasement of language happens, not when you make things shorter and simpler, but when you introduce fuzzy abstractions and groupthink into the mix. The Time Machine is about a machine which does something with time - a baffling concept, back in the 1890's, but the title couldn't be any less baffling. If you're looking for examples of language getting dumber, communicating less, you could do worse than taking a look at the wonderful world of branding. Take the Post Office - by the early 21st Century most people understood what the Post Office was and what it did. Some managers who clearly took their eyes off the ball, assisted by a bunch of highly-paid brand consultants decided that everybody would be happier if the name they knew and understood was replaced by the made-up word Consignia. Fail!
There's a certain inevitability about re-branding creating something more abstract, nebulous and silly than what existed before. For many years I used to work for the Norwich Union insurance company, now to be assimilated into the global brand called Aviva. Resistance is futile. The word "Aviva" doesn't mean anything concrete in most languages where the company does business*, but was created by committee to sound as if it stands for something vaguely positive and life-affirming. It's no coincidence that it sounds a lot like "Arriva", the name of a bus company also made up by branding wonks, who decided that passengers .. sorry, "customers", might form a closer relationship with the brand if the name subliminally suggested that some of the buses might actually arrive, or something of the sort. I'm not a Star Trek fan, but there is something Borg-like about the way that global branding sucks the individuality, history and identity out of institutions we know and (sometimes) love, replacing them with an aggressively bland, characterless corporate identity. There's recently been more on the triumph of the Aviva hive mind over at the Chicken Yoghurt blog.
* According to Wikipedia Aviva means "spring" or "renewal" in Hebrew, which I suppose has positive connotations, although it might damage sales of insurance products to the Hamas demographic.
This potential title got me thinking about language which, some people insist, is constantly being "dumbed down". Sometimes they're dead wrong, especially when they decide that that simpler always equals dumber. Compare the title of H G Wells' early short story about time travel, The Chronic Argonauts, with that of his later novella The Time Machine. The early title uses more complex vocabulary and drops in an allusion to a classical myth, but the simpler title The Time Machine is far, far better - short, snappy, understandable and straight to the point.
For me, the adulteration and debasement of language happens, not when you make things shorter and simpler, but when you introduce fuzzy abstractions and groupthink into the mix. The Time Machine is about a machine which does something with time - a baffling concept, back in the 1890's, but the title couldn't be any less baffling. If you're looking for examples of language getting dumber, communicating less, you could do worse than taking a look at the wonderful world of branding. Take the Post Office - by the early 21st Century most people understood what the Post Office was and what it did. Some managers who clearly took their eyes off the ball, assisted by a bunch of highly-paid brand consultants decided that everybody would be happier if the name they knew and understood was replaced by the made-up word Consignia. Fail!
There's a certain inevitability about re-branding creating something more abstract, nebulous and silly than what existed before. For many years I used to work for the Norwich Union insurance company, now to be assimilated into the global brand called Aviva. Resistance is futile. The word "Aviva" doesn't mean anything concrete in most languages where the company does business*, but was created by committee to sound as if it stands for something vaguely positive and life-affirming. It's no coincidence that it sounds a lot like "Arriva", the name of a bus company also made up by branding wonks, who decided that passengers .. sorry, "customers", might form a closer relationship with the brand if the name subliminally suggested that some of the buses might actually arrive, or something of the sort. I'm not a Star Trek fan, but there is something Borg-like about the way that global branding sucks the individuality, history and identity out of institutions we know and (sometimes) love, replacing them with an aggressively bland, characterless corporate identity. There's recently been more on the triumph of the Aviva hive mind over at the Chicken Yoghurt blog.
* According to Wikipedia Aviva means "spring" or "renewal" in Hebrew, which I suppose has positive connotations, although it might damage sales of insurance products to the Hamas demographic.
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