Bad Language and National Cohesion
Older native-born Australians frequently muse over how this country has changed, most thinking for the better and some for the worse. What is rarely in dispute is the centrality of our values, standards and core institutions. Yet something that is widely overlooked by Australians of all ages is the importance of language as a bonding agent that keeps a community together.
For a language to fulfil its true role precision is essential – otherwise nuance, wit, praise and criticism can go undetected, with the national tongue reduced to gibberish that we spray each other with every day. The more diverse our community, the more significant accuracy becomes.
As we remember from childhood, correctness doesn’t come naturally. It has to be learned. Effective communication comes from following established patterns. The road map to any language is its grammar, and if that’s not properly taught at school, you can kiss goodbye to precision, as well as to an appreciation of the richness of language, its heritage and how powerful a good command of it can be. Equally, you can forget tackling a second or third one – say Chinese, Japanese or Arabic – unless you’ve successfully downloaded the template for your mother tongue first.
Yet many of those who should be exemplars of correct English usage in Australia – TV and radio announcers, university commentators and politicians – regularly fail to come up to the mark. A Melbourne woman in her 90s was recently heard to bemoan the poor standard of English on popular night time TV cooking programs, where contestants are told to add a “little bit of a pinch of salt”. Wow, that must be infinitesimally small.
Nowadays, words that have their own distinctive meanings – like “unique” and “outstanding” – are often prefaced by “very”. Something unique either is or it isn’t. It can’t be quantified, just as a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant. The most descriptive parts of our vocabulary are commonly denied the chance to do their own thing. Words become bullets weighed down by an extra three or four casings. What a far cry from Shakespeare, who could pepper the landscape with a handful of exquisitely crafted grenades. In his hands, well-placed expletives were like Stinger missiles.
This lack of precision is widely reflected in the carelessness of announcers and commentators who opt to pronounce foreign names and words in English in the forlorn hope that will do. Key actors on the ever-expanding Chinese stage, as well as place-names in that country, are fair game for those too lazy to check what is right. The evening news in Australia often endows China with not just one president and one premier but, inscrutably, three or four more.
Then there are global aberrations like how to handle the name of China’s capital, Beijing. Many English-speaking commentators refer to it as Beishing. No one knows where that howler came from (think Jingle Bells and you can’t go wrong), but three years down the track from the Olympic Games there, it’s pretty poor to still be repeating the mistake. A Sydney sports announcer on state-funded television was heard last week extolling the virtues of an Australian athlete who had taken out gold in “Beishing in 2004”. In the memory stakes, that’s quite some performance.
How to rectify this glitch in our linguistic makeup is no easy thing, particularly when custodians of English who have a public profile fail to recognise that we have a problem at all. Perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s only something that older people notice.
Warren Reed was an Australia-Japan Business Cooperation Committee scholar in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University in the 1970s, where precision in language was highly valued – even if, for foreigners, it came at the price of premature greying.
