Modern Language is Rubbish

I read an article by Aditya Chakrabortty (Guardian, 31st August, 2010): “There’s a good reason why so many of us no longer like our jobs.  There’s not much call for thinking these days”.  In it, he set out a few sociologists’ insights: briefly, workers have come to exercise ever less control over their jobs.   Every aspect of work, for every employee, is set out, standardised and, occasionally, scripted by the experts at head office; technology allows this.  A labour market academic, Phil Brown, coined the term “Digital Taylorism” , named after the American time-and-motion  expert’s ideas, which themselves followed Fordism (I think that’s right).  These were ways to extract more production from employees through increased control of the process of manufacture.  This has been extended to the professional sphere;  the point is that you don’t write the script any more.

It is more than that.  The evidence?  Another journalist, Mary Dejevsky, writes on a coroner’s pronouncement on  police procedures before a fatal shooting (Independent, 12th October, 2010).  She praises him for demanding less long-winded jargon in police  training and (written) procedure.  “Of the few examples of these documents I managed to find in the public domain, the language and presentation veered from the puerile to the impenetrable”.  Now think about one of the standing criticisms of the Blair governments: that is, the one which railed against “micro-management” of the public services.  Add to that, say, the prescriptiveness of the curriculum and teaching styles imposed over the years, and then think about the style of language used in all these, from Government policy statements, to OFSTED reports, to the imposed scripts used by call centre workers.  It’s the original ban on thinking; it’s Linguistic Taylorism,  and the partner of the Digital kind. 

Language is the essential tool for thinking.  We have retreated from teaching it as a set of bright, sharp tools which should be given to all.  Perhaps prescriptive language teaching was too limiting; set it free a little, and we shall be less oppressed by class-bound English.   However, nature abhors a vacuum, or rather they won’t let us get away with  that.  Managerialists (I’ll call them that for the moment, but there are more than them) rushed in to fill the gap, seeing an opportunity; but you’ve lost the magic set of tools you need to stop them running everything: tight language, tight verbal logic.

George Orwell knew this.  Finely honed skills in English are the main weapon against management consultants, marketers, advertisers and duff politicians.  This bunch of apparatchiks cannot write and very likely cannot think either.  How could we tell?  Politicians, advisers, senior civil servants all frame policies and practices in Newspeak drivel.  I imagine that they mean well; again, how could we tell?

Incidentally, teaching language as a set of rules imposed on our spontaneous chatter did help the boys at school; they might well be good at science and “techie stuff”, but have trouble with the language-based subjects.  Teaching English as a rule-based set of skills (grammar, syntax, how to phrase an argument and so on) gave them language in a boy-friendly, absorbable form.  It is no wonder that they retreat into business studies and web-site design.  The rule-based method also made teaching foreign languages easier: boys!  This is a sentence; it must have subject and a verb  related to it; this is the direct object of the verb; it must go next to the verb, etc.,  etc.  Now go to German and see how it is done in that language.  Do it that way………..