Mauve Moments with Orlando Plumbe

Avoiiding Buzzwords

Link: WSJ.com - In the Lead.

A new crop of buzzwords usually sprouts every three to five years, or about the same length of time many top executives have to prove themselves. Some can be useful in swiftly communicating, and spreading, new business concepts. Others are less useful, even devious. "Too often people use buzzwords to muddy or cover up what they're actually saying," says Warren Bennis, management professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It would be wise, then, if executives who want to be believed and understood, carefully select their language.

Profile of Linguist Who Is Framing Issues for the Democrats

Link: 'NY Times' Sunday Preview: Profile of Linguist Who Is Framing Issues for the Democrats.

But Luntz tells Bai that the problem with Lakoff's ideology is that if an idea is bad, no language can make it sellable. “He's one of the very few guys who understands the limits of liberal language,” Luntz says . “What he doesn't understand is that there are also limits on liberal philosophy. They think that if they change all the words, it'll make a difference. Won't happen.” Other Republicans simply see Lakoff as a deeply desired messiah for the left. Some liberals ridicule Lakoff as what Bai called a "new progressive icon." In the April issue of The Atlantic, contributing editor Marc Cooper wrote that Lakoff sees the American people as, “Red-neck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley.”

Weak knowledge of History and Devalued Rhetoric

Link: We Are Our History -- Don't Forget It.

"Gulag" must not go the way of "Nazi" and become virtually meaningless. Europeans love calling Israelis "Nazis" — a transparent attempt to slough off their guilt like rattlesnakes shedding skin. ("See, the Jews are as bad as we were!") I'd like to ban the word "Nazi" except when applied to … Nazis. Lawbreakers would be ordered to learn what Nazi actually means.

Phony Argument Drowning Out Real Argument.

Society needs real debate. Instead, most debate today is set up in the phony "point/counter-point" or "crossfire" mode of having two extreme positions advances in a take no prisoners way, and then calling the tournament "balance." Not only is style unhelpful, it is also drowning out real discussion consider this from Martha Bayles. Link: ArtsJournal: Serious Popcorn.

Columbia University reported Monday that it is closing its well known National Arts Journalism Program.

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The overriding problem is what linguist Deborah Tannen calls "the argument culture": the media’s habit of framing every topic as a highly polarized debate between two extremes, even when this is not appropriate. This has a distorting effect on many issues, including the arts. Just think about the quality of discussion, even among reputable critics, on issues like government funding of the arts; violence in entertainment; censorship and the Internet; and the "canon" in the humanities.

C. Hitchens on Opacity of Literary Criticism

From Chris Hitchens in Today's NYT , Book Review, Transgressing the Boundaries - New York Times.

The French, as it happens, once evolved an expression for this sort of prose: la langue de bois, the wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and the dishonest can be offered. ''The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism'' is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities. In another unconsciously funny entry, on the Kenyan Marxist Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Nicholas Brown appears to praise his subject for a postcolonial essay entitled ''On the Abolition of the English Department.'' Like the other contributors to this shabby volume, Brown ought to be more careful of what he endorses. The prospect of such an abolition, at least in the United States, becomes more appetizing by the minute.

Question Time and the Adversary Tone

Link: .

American political junkies love to watch question time in the House of Commons, with all its insulting questions and responses, the cheers and groans going up from the party benches. But British voters, it seems, are heartily sick of the adversary tone of their politics.

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British political debate may be nasty, but politicians on the stump are, by American standards, reticent. Candidates do not ask for votes, they just present themselves as their party's candidate and ask for consideration. M.P.s do not identify themselves as such because, technically, they are not: When the Queen dismisses Parliament, there are no M.P.s until their election is announced late on election night. The voters in turn are reticent -- but not as reticent as they used to be. This year, I found Britons on the stump and at polling stations much more willing to say which party they're voting for and why than I have in past elections.

The New Pomposity

By Richard Jenkyns in the UK Prospect on why we all aspire to sound like bureaucrats..

But there are also political pressures to make us talk like this. For instance, universities are now expected to produce mission statements. That ought to be easy: "We teach, study and write, and try to do these things as well as we can." But of course such plain, frank words will not do, and we are driven to swathe simple meaning in the language of bureaucracy.

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In the academic world, it may be easier to detect the forces which discourage good, plain English. Modern societies have created large salaried intelligentsias, which are required to keep publishing. Some subject matter is essentially difficult: philosophy, for example, must often be done at a high level of abstraction. But the aim ought always to be to make difficult matters as simple as the subject allows, and the conditions of modern academic life tempt people to do the opposite. History is an almost limitless field, and my impression is that historians usually write well. But the study of popular culture easily tends to statement of the obvious, and its practitioners naturally want to disguise that fact. The English literature industry is so big that in many areas there is not enough material to go around, and here the temptation is to claim that even the most perspicuous authors need the professionals to interpret them. It is like the plumber telling you that it will cost a grand to fix that leaky tap.

The Decline of Discourse Charted

For a fascinating catalog of early sixties cultural phenomenon, check out Bruce Bawer's Article, "The Other Sixties" in the Wilson Quarterly. He sums up:

Though new issues occupy the front burner, that polarization endures today, and the concept of civic obligation—so central to the early 1960s—has long since been supplanted by a reflexive cynicism and a tendency to judge all public discourse by its entertainment value. Who, in the early 1960s, would have imagined that 40 years later the best-selling books on public affairs would be not earnest tracts on poverty and the environment but crude partisan rants by the likes of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Michael Savage? Likewise, the respectably middlebrow common culture of the early 1960s is only a memory, as is the pipe dream of an America enchanted by serious literature and classical music; instead we have American mass culture, a worldwide economic powerhouse that transforms almost everything it touches. And though that mass culture is, admittedly, large and diverse—and fragmented—enough to include many bright spots, it also has staggering depths of vulgarity, is aimed (largely) at 12-year-olds, and has little regard for intelligence, seriousness, or wit. The early 1960s’ naivet頭ay be gone, but philistinism and ignorance thrive unashamed. In a time when many Americans appear far more eager to be coarsened than to be edified, the early 1960s look very attractive indeed.

Bawer might miss the mark ever so slightly in pinning the cultural decline on the Sixties. As David Frum masterfuly shows in his How We Got Here, The Seventies, the real cultural decline took place after Watergate and the fall of Saigon tarnished our institutions. We are still recovering from these self-inflicted wounds.

Bad Argument--An Example

David Brooks discusses last week particulalrly lame Meet the Press.

"Tim Russert is a great journalist, but he made a mistake last weekend. He included Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton in a discussion on religion and public life.

Inviting these two bozos onto "Meet the Press" to discuss that issue is like inviting Britney Spears and Larry Flynt to discuss D. H. Lawrence. Naturally, they got into a demeaning food fight that would have lowered the intellectual discourse of your average nursery school.

This is why so many people are so misinformed about evangelical Christians. There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored."

This is typical of the mud wrestling style of debate favored by all the networks and cable new outlets. Pioneered by 60 Minutes' Point/Counter-Point and take to its dumb extreme by CNN's cross-fire, you slect two people who agree on nothing, and have them talk past each other. The netertainment comes from the phony conflict between the discussants and the policty debate is little more than a prop. Bad as matter of rhetorical style and ultimately dull TV once the novelty wore off in the late Seventies.

Why Argument Matters

Argument and rhetoric has a bad name these days. Perhaps because it is associated between the shouting/wrestling matches between pundits on cable TV. But sound argument is esential to the evolution of policy and our democarcy. It is one of the ways that ideas get sharpened and advance. As Edmund Burke observed over two hundred years ago: "He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations." True then, true now.