As opinionated as a George Orwell essay
Writing about metaphors reminded me of the collection of George Orwell's essays that I read recently, mentioned here briefly, and said I might come back to. One of the pieces was 'Politics and the English Language', which first appeared in Horizon in April 1946. In it, he complains about the use of meaningless filler words, mixed or misunderstood metaphors, and in short, language unfit for communication. Stale images and a lack of precision are both the cause and effect of woolly thinking, he suggests, and we should combat them before our minds and our language become useless.
If Orwell thought that in 1946, what would he say today? Jargon and buzzwords are everywhere, people speak in catchphrases from TV and films, advertising straplines or phrases borrowed from business. A couple of weeks ago I overheard someone on a mobile phone, trying to obtain a quote for some work; he said "Just a dog-rough stab in the ballpark will do, I just want someone to stick their finger in the air" and I laughed, then wondered whether that meant anything to the person on the other end.
The thing is, we all do it, from politicians trying to disguise their meaning, or hoping we'll all die of boredom before they get to the end of their convoluted sentence, to secretaries trying to sound 'sophisticated' by throwing in phrases that sound superficially clever but on closer inspection add nothing to the sentence and probably even detract from it. I do it, usually from laziness or to fulfil expectations - I had a report 'corrected' the other day by someone who is well-educated but socially a sheep, picking up phraseology that he thinks makes him sound like he's up-to-date; he padded several paragraphs that I'd written in blunt English, changing short words to longer ones, replacing one precise word with a tired three-word phrase, everything that George Orwell warned against, but I made the changes because there didn't seem much point in getting into a linguistic argument over a short, limited-circulation internal report. Maybe I'm heading into territory summed up in Half Man Half Biscuit's Turn a Blind Eye.
Having heard someone suggest this on the radio recently, OneMonkey has decided to help rejuvenate the language by twisting well-known phrases: don't say 'a walk in the park', say 'a stroll through well-managed woodland'. Apart from making someone listen (or read) with more attention because it's not what they expected to hear, it may also brighten their day, and should present them with a fresh image that means something to them. George Orwell pointed out that mixing metaphors only becomes possible when the phrase is just a collection of words and no longer conjures any image in our minds. Broaden the language (throw in some dialect if you like - if you use it enough it might enter the mainstream), use your imagination and help other people use theirs. It's better than stabbing rough dogs in ballparks.