http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=029e27cc-99df-4664-8aba-ab8a6b43b2ee&&Headline=Counterpoint%3a+Mind+Your+Language
Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times
December 15, 2007
Mind Your Language
Am I glad that I no longer edit a magazine or a newspaper? You bet!
It isn't that I mind the work -- I quite enjoy the thrill of putting
a publication together. My relief stems from something entirely
different. I no longer know what rules to apply when it comes to
language. There are so many variations of English floating around
that it has become almost impossible to decide what is a mistake and
what is acceptable usage; what is jargon and what is gibberish.
All Indian editors start out by watching out for the traditional
mistakes that are the trademark of sub-continental English.
Top of the list is the misuse of the word "inform" to mean "said":
as in "he informed". Then there are the Indian words like
"air-dashed" ("the minister air-dashed to Delhi") or "youngmen"
which is really two words needlessly fused into one (and on par with
"gangs of youths", another Indian usage). Nobody in India is ever
strangled, they are always "strangulated" (we like big words) and
there are few criminals, only "miscreants."
The Indian obsession with polite euphemism is best captured by our
reluctance to admit that anybody has ever died. They have "expired"
(like a passport or a driving license) or "passed away" or, even,
"left for heavenly abode". But the obsession with euphemism often
translates into mistakes -- few Indian newspapers bother to
distinguish between "marriage" or "wedding" (the actual ceremony) so
you will always read that "there were 200 marriages in the city
yesterday so traffic was jammed". It isn't that I mind the work -- I
quite enjoy the thrill of putting a publication together.
Some of the Indian usages are regional. Gujaratis have colonised the
word "fine" to mean "good" to the extent that is part of our
language ("bahu fine chhe") and as far as Bengalis are concerned,
all the maa-bahen gaalis mean nothing compared to the biggest insult
of them all: "You are a nonsense!"
North Indians and Punjabis contribute their own pronunciations and
usages to the glorious traditions of the English language. In my TV
job, I have to worry about pronunciation: why are there "roits" in
Ghaziabad and why are the "loins" dying in the Gir forest? Why
should the DMK pledge its "sport" to the Centre when all that the
Congress wanted was "support"? Why should India and Pakistan make a
"giant declaration" when a joint declaration would have been enough?
(There are some unintentionally funny moments though. A minister in
our Foreign Office during the last administration believed that his
British counterpart was called Jackie Straw -- because of the north
Indian tradition of putting an "ee" sound before an "s" as in
"iskool", "istudio". And when General Zia-ul-Haq called Imran Khan
the Lion of the Punjab, Benazir Bhutto retorted that in the Punjab,
they said "lion" when they meant "loin" -- which in Imran's case was
entirely appropriate.)
In print terms, however, the biggest problem for anyone editing copy
in Delhi these days is that ninety per cent of young journalists do
not know where to put the definite article -- where "a" or "the" go
in a sentence -- largely because "they are not writing the English
very well." A second problem is that they have no sense of number.
Is police singular or plural? Why must every airline be treated as
plural ("The airlines said that its pilots were on strike") for half
the sentence?
But, in defence of Indian English, there's a certain practical logic
to some of our usages. There may be no such word as "prepone" but if
there is "postpone", then doesn't "prepone" capture the sense of
advancing something? And isn't "relook" crisper than "take another
look"?
Then, there are the literal translations from Hindi. We all say,
"Isn't it?" at the end of sentences when we mean the Hindi "hai na?"
And the misuse of "only" to mean the Hindi "hee" has been
immortalised in the Channel V slogan, "We are like this only".
But we should recognise that it's not just Indians who misuse the
language. All over the world some mistakes have because so common
that we now accept the wrong usage over the correct one. For
instance, "hopeful" only means "full of hope" (as in "I am hopeful
that we will win"). But it has been twisted to mean "with a bit of
luck" as in, "Hopefully, there will not be too much rain tomorrow."
Exotic simply means foreign. In Harold Evans' stylebook for journos
(Newsman's English), he famously noted "an Italian peasant is as
exotic as Gina Lollobrigida". But we now use the word to mean
glamourous and unusual.
Americans routinely misuse English words so often that language
teachers have all but given up. In America, "momentarily" does not
mean "for a moment" but "in a moment" ("I will be with you
momentarily"). This usage doesn't make it into big city papers but
you find it in papers throughout the Midwest and on TV.
Some words are on the verge of losing their original meaning. Many
people still use "disinterested" as it should be used -- to say that
somebody is unbiased or has no stake (as in "may I declare an
interest?") in an issue. But mostly, the word is confused with
uninterested and I suspect that within a few years, nobody will
remember that "disinterested" ever meant something different.
And as bad as the incorrect usages of middle America and middle
India are, nothing annoys me as much as the assault on the English
language routinely perpetrated by businessmen. Some of these
mistakes are peculiarly Indian. Only in India do business
journalists use corporate as a noun rather than an adjective. I used
to beat my head against the wall telling the business desk that a
company cannot be a "corporate". It is a corporation that engages in
corporate activities. But because nearly every business journo
refuses to make the distinction, I have now given up.
Business people themselves often talk gibberish. Have you ever met a
manager who wants to tell you something? He'll always want to
"share" something with you. Do you understand what the expression
"no issues" means? I thought at first that it meant that you had no
children or that you worked for a periodical that had suspended
publication, which is why there were no "issues". But apparently it
means, "I don't have a problem with that."
Why can't business people ever say "now"? In the early 1970s,
Ronaluality and then being caught in flagrante with a bell boy. "But
Oscar!" moaned his friends. "You said you were turning over a new
leaf!" "Oh yes," Wilde replied, "but only after I get to the bottom
of this page.")
The problem with management jargon is not that so much of it is
gibberish -- some of it can actually be rich in imagery: for
instance "low-hanging fruit" conveys the sense of an easily
attainable goal.
My two basic objections to it are that, one, it is often used to
exclude rather than communicate. You'd have to be a manager to know
that when an executive says, "We don't have the bandwidth to handle
it", he doesn't mean he can't get YouTube on his computer but that
"we don't have enough people/managers/competence for the job". And
you really have to keep up with jargon to know that "bottom-line"
("the bottom-line is that this won't work") has now been replaced by
"net-net".
My other -- and more fundamental objection -- is that much of this
gibberish is spouted by people who couldn't be bothered to learn
correct English in the first place. Something like half the managers
I know will be up on the latest jargon but will continue to make
basic grammatical mistakes in every sentence. Jargon may have a
place (and God knows, perhaps one day we'll find that place) but it
can never be a substitute for speaking a language correctly, for
communicating crisply and efficiently.
Oscar Wilde (him, again!) said of America that it was a society that
had gone from barbarism to decadence without the intervening stage
of civilisation.
Too many managers make a similar jump. They go from illiteracy to
jargon, without the intervening stage of literacy.
