Category Archives: Essays
City-speak
Here’s a sentence for you. It comes from the deeps of Hell where toxic sentences smolder forever: Spring seasonal weather variations due to erratic planetary climatic shifts and wind circulation and moisture route changes due to oceanic adjustments in temperate zones can significantly alter daily and even hourly precipitation and wind currents over a specific land mass. This stupefying thing was written many years ago to explain delays in construction. It was composed by a nice person who thought she was “intellectualizing” information. She went to work for a distant municipality. I hope she doesn’t talk now the way she writes, in adulterated City-speak. I copied the sentence on an index card because I wanted to keep it as an example of how not to think, write or be. I dug it up after listening to city staff give vague, sometimes incomprehensible answers to neighbors’ questions at a planning meeting.
Take another look at the condemned sentence. Note its horrible use of due to, its repetitiveness, its ghastly meandering. Here’s how it should be written: Spring weather is changeable. Here’s how Shakespeare would have written it: “The uncertain glory of an April day.” Nobody expects city functionaries to be Shakespeare, but really, shouldn’t they climb up from that bog of obfuscation and give us simple facts?
I assume City-speak exists because the authors and speakers of this prose 1) think technical, abstract and leaden language is impressive and makes them appear to possess special, even scientific knowledge, or 2) they really don’t want you to know what they’re talking about, or 3) they don’t themselves know what they’re talking about, or 4) they’re trying to foist an injurious proposal on you.
Technical jargon rendered incomprehensible makes the listener or reader tune out. This is how Wall-marts get built across the street from your house and why you sign documents riddled with slippery clauses that escalate your costs on, say, Thursdays.
Efforts to correct this abuse of language have been around since Cicero. Shakespeare parodied it in Much Ado About Nothing, (which might also serve as an good title for some of the promises developers make). In 1946 George Orwell decried it in his terrific essay, “Politics and the English Language.” In 1979 a “Plain English Campaign” began in London to “combat gobbledygook, jargon and legalese.” On March 23rd of that same year President Carter signed Executive Order 2044 which stated that “Each regulation must be written in plain English and be understandable to those who must comply with it.” Unfathomably, President Reagan rescinded this in 1981, but a memorandum from President Clinton in 1998 revived it, with Vice President Al Gore given charge of PLAIN, the Plain Language Information and Action Network. But this is not a partisan divide. Neither party can lay claim to lucid prose; both employ focus groups and rely on them to frame positions in the most familiar and comforting language. This is why political pronouncements are so often so excruciatingly bland.
These problems, as noted, are not new. Our second president, John Adams, employed a high-minded version of City-speak that historian John Ferling describes as “turgid, legalistic jargon.” We’ll call it Elite-speak. In 1775 Adams wrote a pamphlet in which he declared, “This statum Walliae, as well as the whole case and history of that principality, is well worthy of the attention of Americans…’Nos itaque,’…” Then came an eighty-nine-word paragraph entirely in Latin. (Ferling notes that Thomas Jefferson could say the same thing, but eloquently, in two clear sentences in English). Adams was not speaking to the average citizen but to a rarefied, educated minority who were possibly impressed and flattered by the Latin. Maybe they quoted bits of it to one another to affirm their status.
Anyway, today’s new Latin can be found the specialized double-talk City-speak of an EIR (Environmental Impact Report). If you like flabby and passive language, crafted by consultants hired by developers to vindicate land acquisitions, you’ll love slogging through the droning, zombie prose of an EIR. There the writers call traffic invasion “Level of Service,” and nowhere in their report do they tell you that they assess traffic only by how many times a driver has to pause on a given route. They don’t analyze (or mention) pedestrian hazard, exhaust pollution, collisions, crashes, or gridlock. When these hired consultants say impact to depict traffic, it’s because impact is an overused word that has become so neutralized it conveys little visual imagery. They say things like, ‘Anticipated Level of Services issues will be of insignificant impact due to proposed project mitigations’—an utterly hopeless chain of common tech phrases that means a glut of traffic is coming your way and there’s nothing you can do about it. But good luck trying to get a traffic body count or lung damage report from these writers. Some people think this technical jargon impressive and its users “smart.” Others suspect that they avoid clarity on purpose. I think the doubters are smarter than those who think EIR writers are smart. The doubters know dangerous whoppers can lurk behind insensate terminology.
The EIR, for all its pretentiousness, is not an objective document. If it was an actual scientific analysis we might tolerate the specialized phraseology. But the language of science is precise. The EIR is little more than hired ad copy, dressed in dull babble to discourage us from turning the page. The same can be said of the crooked, arcane mortgages that helped topple the economy in 2007.
In the seventies a young Sacramento student, thinking she was helping to subvert a corrupt educational Establishment, made money ghost-writing term papers. A client asked for a paper on John Locke. “I’ve got all the ideas,” he said. “I just don’t have the words.”
Words. Those little things.
Because he was patronizing and dismissive she decided to educate him. She told him that ideas came in words. If you didn’t have the words, you didn’t have the ideas. She said John Locke himself thought in words.
He didn’t like hearing this, but was not equipped to argue. The paper was overdue. “Could you make it heavy?” he asked. Heavy was the seventies adjective for anything serious and consequential.
So she asked if he wanted it bloated with superfluous abstractions. After an unblinking stare he said that would be great.
He got his paper and she got a steady client for a year. He was a Business major and had a couple of teachers who tolerated mushy thinking and overloaded verbiage. The more passive and flabby the multisyllabic language, the more they liked it. The student’s theory papers could be written drunk. This customer-ghost relationship lasted until the ghost realized she had become an unregulated capitalist and quit the business. The client was dismayed. But she assured him he’d be fine: all he had to do with these two specific teachers was resubmit old paragraphs in a new order, and she was right. He graduated. Today he’s a developer-consultant in a Texas town that looks like a gargantuan spatter of mini-marts. He’s bi-lingual now. He speaks City-speak and Business-speak and repeats your name frequently when he talks to you. This is supposed to convey sincerity and create between you an intimate bubble of trust. It’s about as believable as an EIR.
I checked out the Plain Language.gov website to see if clarity was still popular with the Feds and if the battle was still on. It is, and it is. There’s “Plain Language Guidelines, Plain Language Training (yes, it has to be be taught), a Plain Language Bootcamp, Tips and Tools,” and even this startling admonition: “Plain Language—It’s the Law.” So now we know.
Hereafter when you’re assailed by jargon-spouting, double-talking, tech-term reciting, rhetoric oozing, babbling, bamboozling, pseudo-elitist City-speakers, you can tell them, plain English, please, or you’re going to Washington. To be retrained. Bootcamp. It’s The Law.
Pat Lynch
Professionalism
East Sacramento Preservation Pat Lynch Essay
I worked for a while in a place that was the most wretched of its kind in California. It was a failing high school that served, along with non-English speakers and poor kids, a thundering population of gang-bangers. It was the loudest place I’ve ever been, including the rock concerts of youth. Male students spat incessantly and horribly on the covered pavement walkways, the front entrance was peppered with bullet holes, the fire alarm was set off several times a month, and when gangstahs (not gangsters) stole wallets and cell phones they threw them on the roof to retrieve after the plump and fatigued security guy had given up the search. Fights broke out daily. Fighters bashed opponents’ heads with bike locks.
Our new principal did not address these matters. He orated frequently about professionalism and enjoined us to comport ourselves in a professional manner. We were to dress well. We were to be positive and polite, not critical and negative. We were all to conspire in the genteel presumption that everyone was doing his or her best. A cadre of about six teachers promptly formed around the principal and began dressing up in suits and carrying coordinated purses or briefcases. Charles Dickens himself could not have invented a more servile and unctuous bunch. They too began to discuss “professionalism.” It wouldn’t be “professional,” they told a team of worried teachers, to complain to the School District about school management. (This reminds me of criticisms leveled at neighborhood activists who oppose certain projects; the word, unprofessional, is sometimes hijacked and used against them. The subtext here is that a deferential, even sheepish approach to power is more effective. This of course plays perfectly into the hands of the powerful).
Back to school. Things got worse. We spent way too much time managing behavior problems. It took our attention from the majority of kids who needed us. I felt I was on a lifeboat with starving student passengers, meager amounts of water and food, and one gigantic sociopath delinquent I had constantly to battle lest he gobble the resources and capsize us. That was the labored metaphor with which I tried to identify the crisis. There wasn’t enough security. We were losing control. We weren’t police: we needed police. And we needed cameras in the classrooms. When a committee of alarmed teachers finally wrote a collective report about campus violence and attributed it specifically to administrative neglect, one of the principal’s covey was dispatched to meet with the team. The report was “unprofessional,” he said. “Casting blame” was “unprofessional.” Sharp, decisive language? Unprofessional. Then came a mass email from the principal himself. “We’re all professionals here,” he began grandly. “We need to act like it.”
Professionalism commonly means conforming to loosely accepted standards of dress and etiquette. People who talk a lot about being “professional” usually aren’t. And anxiety about being perceived as professional can make some employees so morally timid they become mute and paralyzed. But professionalism doesn’t mean not criticizing, not agitating for reform; nor does it mean substituting innocuous blandishments for clear, vivid language. Do you imagine decision-makers in the Supreme Court talk about being “professional?” Hardly. I suspect lower level bureaucrats are the people most concerned with these appearances.
Back again to the crisis. Since the administration would do nothing, somebody on that campus (not I) called the media. One ordinary morning during an ordinary semi-riot, TV trucks drove up and reporters and camera operators entered the mayhem. A reporter approached me. “This is crazy,” he said. “How did you let it get this bad?”
“We had to be professionals and not criticize our betters,” I said. He laughed and wrote it down but it didn’t show up in the paper. However film, pictures and stories about the campus did appear, and days later School District representatives strolled the grounds. More security guards were hired. The principal announced that he would retire. I saw him in the faculty lounge. “I hear you’re leaving,” I said with professional politeness.
He placed his hand on his chest, as if to indicate heart problems. “Health,” he said with a wan smile. I nodded as though I believed him. Because that’s what professionals are supposed to do.
The next fall we got a new principal. She was breezy and smart. She walked around without an entourage. She facilitated the speedy transfer of some of the most violent trouble-makers, reminding us the while that they were profoundly disadvantaged kids. She hired more security and aides. Our imperfect work world began to hum along. One kid, Bo, said he could now go to GLBT meeting without getting beat up. The principal said her office was open to drop-ins from faculty, staff and students, and she remained accessible to everybody. Memos and mass emails about professionalism stopped. Instead, we were invited to submit suggestions for improvement.
We would only have her for a year, and knew it, so we called it, “The Year of Not Living Dangerously.” In June we bade her a sad goodbye. We wondered who we’d get next fall. One of the old devotees of the former bad principal said, “I hope it’s somebody who’s a real professional,” and I can still hear the collective reaction—a huge groan followed by protracted bursts of laughter.
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