Week 40.
This Advent’s advent of approved vaccines and the inception of inoculations is more than welcome. Optimism is superspreading. Despite the current lockdown, it feels like we are turning the page on the pandemic. That the end of 2020 will mark the end of COVID and the beginning of 2021 will be an opportunity to start fresh.
While we are putting paid to the plague, we would do well to also deal with the blight on the English language. It may not appear to be of comparable concern but consider the ravages we have all seen, especially this year, from the failure of language. The decline in effective speaking and writing and in comprehension of the spoken and written word has been epidemic. What is said and written is largely not what is being heard and read. The global game of broken telephone continues. And, if civil discourse and nuance are not dead, they are on life support.
Words matter. To everyone. Always. That all reasonable effort must be made to select the right words, with the appropriate cadence, and to use them precisely, cannot be a rule only for those labelled linguistic snobs. I recall with great fondness, my father’s repeated railing against the contagion of “like” - that meaningless place holder which continues to infect the language. His magnificent screed included: “A surfeit of “likes” indicates a deficit of brains. Like it or not.” But the misuse of “like” is harmless compared to the violence done daily to the language by, for example, the soon to be former President of the United States and well-known clodpate. When he speaks, it sounds exactly like two random pages of the Oxford Dictionary … after they have been carelessly stuffed into a blender.
Elder Advice? Why the Canadian high school curriculum does not include mandatory instruction in English language rhetoric, debate, logic, reason and propaganda, has long been a mystery to me. Starting in 2021, it should. They are essential tools in an age afflicted with gibberish, disinformation, double-speak and euphemism. Of course, we should also be rationally adding new words and phrases to the language, as we have done since English was an Anglo-Frisian dialect. My contribution, in this year of the pandemic:
Cof·fee
/ˈkôfē,ˈkäfē/
noun
1. a hot drink made from the roasted and ground seeds of a tropical shrub.
or
2. a person who is coughed upon.
At the same time though, balance requires that we annually purge the language of at least an equal number of words and phrases that offend, for one reason or another.
Clichés, of course, should always be avoided like the plague.
Similarly, words and phrases that have no common understanding, that are ineffective, that actively mislead or are simply drivel, need to go. On your collective behalf, Elder Advice has written to the Oxford English Dictionary this week to advise that the following must be banned from the English language commencing January 1, 2021:
“The new normal”
“Hunkering down”
“Trump era”
“Reach out”
“Awesome!”
“Fake news”
“We remain cautious…”
And the most offensive of all - as my good friend Peter observed:
“Light at the end of the tunnel.”
Like droplets, none of these should pass your lips, ever again.
Which brings me to the subject of larger collections of objectionable words and phrases - often called “books.”
A favourite client of mine is blind in one eye – an unfortunate childhood accident involving, I understand, a pop-up book about giraffes. Anyway, he sent me a note recently about the shitstorm at Penguin Books over its publication of Jordan Peterson’s 12 More Rules for Life. Young staffers melted down because, they claim, he is an icon of hate speech, transphobia and white supremacy - “disirregardless”, as my old mentor Mr. Sneath would say, of the content of the book itself.
Now Dr. Peterson plainly has little patience for political correctness, white privilege, and a variety of other social justice causes. He is certainly acerbic and refuses to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. He rose to prominence in the inexplicable havoc created by his public declaration that he would not call transgender people by preferred pronouns - unless they ask him to. His non-academic writing is largely collections of personal anecdotes from his undeniably interesting life and sensible advice drawn from his practice as a clinical psychologist and his well-regarded academic work. As with most things you encounter in life, you will find some of it controversial. As with everything you encounter in life, you are free to refute it or ignore it. What is not warranted is hysteria, slander, censorship and de-platforming. And this is hardly an isolated incident.
I would like to think that such behaviour is all carefully choreographed for political purposes and that the young people involved are not as fascist, or as fragile, as events like this would indicate. If they are, the pandemic lockdown must be a godsend because going outside is clearly not for them. Otherwise, I am bound to point out that Penguin Books has in its catalogue - Mein Kampf - a work that just might be more deserving of their attention. Given it was written by Hitler.
I would be remiss this week if I did not give thanks (effusive) and credit (total) to my friend Greg, for the creation of the magnificent ELDER ADVICE logo above and below. The pose is appropriately Rodin Thinker-like. The bent “E” is plain evidence of the weighty nature of all Elder Advice. The resemblance, but for the absence of finely muscled arms and washboard abs, is uncanny. Greg A. Woods. The “A” stands for “Art”. I kid you not.