The Language Fascist strikes again!

[sabotabby]

I just came across the term "material solidarity" in an (otherwise well-intentioned) e-mail. What they meant, I think, was "aid."

Is anyone else getting sick of the way corporatespeak, or at least the structures of corporatespeak -- euphemism, jargon, etc. -- has infiltrated activist vocabulary? All of a sudden, I'm hearing about "point-people" and "bottom-lining." (One friend remarked: "You [the Wobblies] still use 'secretary'? Why?" Because it's the most accurate description of the task. Why else?)

It actually irritates me more than "wimmin" and "persyn," fundamentally misguided though those may be. Corporatespeak is pernicious in any context because it robs the language of meaning. In the realms of business and government, this is done for very specific reasons -- to shift accountability and to obscure information. ("The functionality of the copy machine has been compromised by our Associate Coffee/Errand Assistant I." vs. "The intern broke the copier.")

So what does it mean when we do it?

I'm out of here for the night. Politicos and language geeks -- discuss.

Comments

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

O.k., sabotabby's heard this before:

Corporate-speak, PC-gone-wakko language, jargon, techtalk — they're all examples of the same thing. They're in-group speak, and writers use them to speak to other members of the tribe, and either consciously or unconsciously to alienate others.

On a functional level, they restrict communication to within the in-group. If you're comfortable with "wimmin" and "persyn," then seeing those spellings isn't going to throw you out of the text. You're going to know exactly what they mean, and have some notion of why they're being used, and you'll be habituated to them. If you're not used to that, if you've only seen the standard spellings, you're probably going to have a "WTF?!" moment, which will distract you from the content of the text.

If you're comfortable with language like "We must facilitate the implementation of a system of content management to avoid reduplification of effort and redundancy in our internal processes," ditto—you're in the group, you speak the lingo, you're part of the tribe.

Back at the Comma Mines, sabotabby and I had a series of shorthands, some taken from netspeak and blogspeak, some fannish, some possibly original to us, which served the same function. Since none of the other comma miners read the same blogs or follow fandom, we were, essentially cutting them out of the communication loop, just as some of the Classics students and I used to do by speaking Latin to each other on campus.

There's nothing wrong with in-speak, when you're in-group. It may be ugly to someone else's ears, but if they're not the intended audience, who cares? If we all speak the same code/jargon/slang/bureaucratese, if we all accept that "persyn" means non-sexist [probably] carbon-based humanoid sentient being of indeterminate gender, but pretty specific political views," we can use those words and usages to communcate clearly within the group. Problems arise when we try to use in-speak to communicate outside the tribe. If I used "w00t!" in my comments to my aged authors, I wouldn't be communicating anything to them. Saying that an author's writing is cracktastic at a meeting isn't going to tell anyone at the textbook mills what I think. Similarly, using "wimmin" in a document meant for people who don't know anything about non-gendered, or anti-gendered language is going to alienate and confuse some of them. If your goal is to challenge their assumptions, fine. If your goal is to communicate something else entirely, maybe not so fine. And if you want to denote the person who takes minutes at the meetings, then most people are going to recognise either "secretary," or "minute taker." If, within your group, you want to refer to this person as "Scribe of the proceedings," that's fine. But don't expect the lingo to transcend the in-group.

[sabotabby]

Yes, but what's disturbing me isn't so much the use of in-group jargon. (That's old; Orwell was complaining about it in 1946. It's still alienating, and good writers still transcend it, but it's a different story.) It's the shift in where the jargon is coming from.

The terminology used by activists has historically come from revolutionary movements, government, unions, and academia. (For good reason, almost every activist is familiar with the terms used in Robert's Rules of Order, even if they don't know the origin.) Increasingly, I've been seeing the appropriation of business terminology for no apparent reason. It's doubly alienating -- it distances us from outsiders, but it also distances us from each other, because no one is exactly sure what these words mean.

I'm now very amused by the image of someone using netspeak/blogspeak at a meeting. Who isn't me. (I'm known for slipping up and saying that such-and-such idea is "teh awesome.")

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing a false dichotomy here, in the language of governments, unions, and academia (the latter represented here by "persyn," etc.) and that of business.

The language of business and the language of government weren't that far apart in the not-too-distant past. Business found that language inadequate to the levels of obfustication it needed, and government, which for some reason also feels the need to muddy clear waters cheerfully jumped on that bandwagon. Plain-language activitsts from Orwell on have been running behind, waving their hands, trying replace "implementations" with "setups."

I think it speaks to where the language-users are getting their ideas from -- lots more people work as low-level corporate drones than work in coal mines, in our immediate social circles. Lots more people are therefore exposed to and comfortable with bureaucratese. It's part of the background, for them, and they don't think about it, any more than they think about whether to call a plebiscite a referendum.

I would argue that the language of academia is equally alienating, though, even within the group.

Also, people who are insecure with their own language will almost always adopt what they perceive to be prestige language in an effort to cover what they see as their own inadequacies.