Two dangers of colloquialism

Failure to communicate. Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke.

This has been a mad month, and on top of everything else keeping me busy I injured my right hand last week, so all the book reviews and other writing I had hoped to do over Thanksgiving Break came to nothing. For now. I’m glad to say I can type again, at least.

But if I had some enforced inactivity on the writing front over Thanksgiving, that at least gave me time to think. One topic I returned to several times was the danger of idiom, colloquialism, or unpredictable connotation in language. Two incidents—one-sided conversations overheard, really—separated by several years awakened me to two related aspects of the danger and drove home the need for clear and unmistakable meaning to me.

The more recent of the two came from a YouTube true crime channel that provides commentary on recorded police interviews. In one featured interview with a murder suspect, two detectives, a man and a woman, take turns applying pressure. It’s not exactly the good cop/bad cop routine, but the female cannily uses persuasion and emotional leverage while the male presses aggressively and confrontationally. Several times he uses the expression “come to Jesus” in the colloquial sense of a reckoning coming due, i.e. “It’s time to fess up.”

The YouTube narrator, apparently unaware of this common and (to me) obvious idiom, pauses to express outrage that the male detective is introducing religion to his interrogation and suggests his obsession with Jesus is undermining the female detective’s technique. Commenters also showed their ignorance—and, this being the internet, their violent irreligion—in predictable terms. Only one that I saw after scrolling through hundreds pointed out the narrator’s basic misunderstanding.

That’s one danger—in using an idiom or colloquialism, your meaning may be utterly lost, especially to observers or third parties. Take the image at the top of this post, for example. Some of y’all will be able to hear this image in your head. Some will have no idea what it means. It would be a mistake, then, to tie the meaning of this post to repeating a phrase like “Failure to communicate.”

The second, which I witnessed long ago on Facebook, is related but not identical. During an unexpected snowstorm back home in Georgia, a storm that occurred during a school day and threatened to trap students at school, Governor Nathan Deal took to social media to reassure the public that their kids would be taken care during the emergency, that Georgia public school teachers “are adequate to handle this situation.”*

Georgia’s state of preparedness for winter weather became a hot political topic for a few minutes afterward, but that’s not what greatly exercised an old acquaintance on Facebook. No, a guy I went to school with—after the manner of “guys I went to school with” the world over—posted a tantrum about Deal’s description of public school teachers as “adequate.” The problem? The word adequate itself, which this guy took as a negative of the “meets expectations” variety, anything not exceptional being perceived as bad. “We are more than just adequate!” etc etc.

The second, related danger—despite using precise, accurate language (Georgia’s teachers did, in fact, prove adequate to take care of students during the emergency), your audience may supply their own meaning based on purely informal connotation, what a word or expression means to them.

The problem in both cases is informality, a “you know what I mean” attitude toward language. In the first, informal expression from the communicator leads to misunderstanding on the part of a receiver ignorant of that informal expression. In the second, a precise, neutral message from the communicator leads to misunderstanding on the part of a mind that understands the words but, accustomed to informal use of a perfectly acceptable word, imputes false meaning to them.**

Speak colloquially and be misunderstood, or speak precisely and be misunderstood. This is just the nature of communication in a limited, fallen world, I suppose, but it’s frustrating, especially in the second case. You can’t, after all, predict every way your meaning can be misconstrued by someone.

The only solutions to this kind of misunderstanding that I can conceive of are erring on the side of precision (and you can be precise even when using idioms and dialect, sometimes even more precise than standard English allows); a commitment by everyone to learn more about English expression and even words and not jump to conclusions (easily the most optimistic idea I’ve ever floated on this blog); and—whether failing or in addition to those two—good faith and charity.

* I’ve tried and failed to find the exact wording of both Governor Deal’s message and the Facebook status referenced here, but the one word that matters most I remember clearly.

** It’s telling that both responded with outrage and an apparent unwillingness to discern whether they had misunderstood, but that’s a topic for another time.

Dorothy Sayers, Steven Pressfield, and soldier slang

Alan Jacobs has an interesting post today on how Dorothy Sayers and WH Auden, at roughly the same time, approach the same problem: “How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?” Both, albeit in different ways, strove to make the story fresh and immediate through the use of contemporary language.

Read Jacobs’s whole post for more, but this chunk of Sayers’s apologia for her technique in The Man Born to Be King stuck out to me:

The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. . . . We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The military examples are well-chosen for the precise reasons Sayers lays out. The jargon and slang of soldiers’ speech offers riches to be mined in archaeological layers: antiquated vocabulary surviving in specialized senses, foreign technical terminology, foreign borrowings from campaigns that may have occurred before the current generation was born, myriad protean shortenings, acronyms, and euphemisms, and a huge stock of inventive, poetic, and almost always highly vulgar slang.

Mastering it is probably impossible if you’ve never served. Time intensifies the challenge. Marines now and Marines during World War II both swore a lot and used a lot of slang, but the precise words used and the way they were used, the posture of the language, so to speak, are going to be different. The further back in time—and the language—that you go, the bigger the problem.

I find that, as with regional dialect, suggestion, hinting at a system of slang or way of speaking, works much better than overwhelming the reader with every term one can dig up. My biggest experiment in this regard so far is The Snipers, in which, to a greater extent even than Dark Full of Enemies, I tried to give my young, unrefined, casual, but hard-bitten GIs a distinct, period-authentic linguistic posture that would both evoke the period while being instantly understandable through use and context. I tried to do this minimalistically, with specifically selected lingo. I gather from a handful of readers that it worked.

No credit to me, necessarily. Just like you train your ear for realistic contemporary dialogue by listening and talking, you can do something similar with historical sources. I have a WWII slang dictionary, which can be helpful, but the best method is simply to read lots of lots of contemporaneous writing by people who were there—the less formal the better. I listed three books I found helpful in the case of The Snipers at the time I published it; there are plenty of others.

But I also had the advantage that my characters, regardless of the changes wrought over eighty years, were still speaking modern English. What if, like Sayers and Auden, you’re trying to suggest the distinctive patter not only of a foreign language, but one from 2000 years ago?

Someone who does this exceptionally well is Steven Pressfield. His novels The Afghan Campaign, which tells the story of part of Alexander’s conquests from the perspective of a squad of grunts, and the incomparable Gates of Fire both excel in this regard. Perhaps its Pressfield’s varied experience in lots of fields, including serving as a Marine, but his ancient Greek and Macedonian characters have a distinctive, contemporary-feeling, lived in argot that sells itself as authentic immediately. Some of it accurately translates ancient Greek, some of it is contemporary military equivalents to ancient concepts, some of it is pure invention. But it works exceptionally well.

I’ve wrestled with this problem of capturing the tone or texture of a dead language plenty of times and am trying to figure out a looser, livelier approach for a project I’m outlining now. I’ll probably return to some of Pressfield’s work for inspiration.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

Borges on the two registers of English

An interesting clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language and some of its peculiar strengths has been going around lately. In the clip, excerpted from Borges’s 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line,” Borges talks about why he regards English as a “finer” language than his native Spanish. After describing how he grew up reading English books in his father’s library (“When I think of the Bible, I think of the King James Bible”) and how even having forgotten Latin is better than never having known it, Borges continues:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

WFB: The most what?

Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

WFB: “Asomó?”*

Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

You can watch the whole discussion here, with the above beginning at approximately 17:20.

I speak no Spanish and so can’t vouch for Borges’s perspective on his native tongue—though I’d seriously hesitate to call his perspective into question, as some internet commenters on this clip seem unduly confident in doing—but I think he perceptively draws attention to two useful and beautiful features of English.

First, the interplay of verbs and adverbs. Immediately after the examples he gives of “live down,” “laugh off,” “dream away,” and “live up to,” Borges offhandedly suggests, “I suppose they can be said in German.” Any German speaker will be familiar with the separable prefix verb, a verb-preposition pair with a distinct (sometimes dramatically different) meaning from the root verb. I’ve always thought this feature had a grammatically more flexible cognate in the English use of prepositions in the way Borges describes. The physicality of these idioms, many of which give a subtle spatial quality to an abstract action, is worth considering.

This extends to rhythm as well. Here’s Borges on English adverbs slightly later in the interview:

Borges: Of course, in Spanish words are far too cumbersome, they’re far too long. Well, I go to one of my hobbies: For example, if you take an English adverb, or two English adverbs, you say for instance “quickly,” “slowly,” the stress falls on the significant part of the word. Quick-ly. Slow-ly. But if you say it in Spanish, you say “lentamente,” “rapidamente,” then the stress falls, let’s say, on the non-significant part, on the gadget.

The capacity of English for onomatopoeia is an often overlooked and underexploited quality. English isn’t limited to being spoken or written—it can be played.

But what I really love is Borges’s talk of the “two registers” of English, which seems to me exactly the right metaphor for the way English meaning and especially connotation work. (Another metaphor I’m accustomed to use: texture.) Depending on which words you choose to say something, you can pitch it high, low, or anywhere in between, with subtle variations in meaning in each. The good speaker or writer will choose carefully and precisely.

Consideration of the registers of the language—direct versus vague, concrete versus abstract, blunt versus diplomatic, coarse versus tactful—lies behind what many writers have written about the relative merit of Germanic and Latinate vocabulary. It is not precisely correct to say, as Borges does, that English is both Germanic and Latinate. It is Germanic. But it does have an enormous hoard of loanwords from Latin and other Romance languages. These borrowings were often heavily contextual—the jargon of medicine, theology, government, and even military ranks are often Latin, Greek, or French—and brought with them not only synonyms but finely differentiated shades of meaning.

And that’s what both features Borges discusses have in common. The availability of many shades of meaning is one of the things I love most about English, allowing incredibly fine precision. (Note that in the explanation of separable prefix verbs I linked to above, one of the purposes of such a grammatical feature is to be “more precise.”) To use another musical metaphor, English has a range of many, many octaves. Reading widely—especially in poetry—can strengthen your command of them.

A really interesting discussion. I’m watching the rest of the interview in fits and starts today. You can find the whole thing on the “Firing Line” YouTube channel here. It’s worth your while.

*A fascinating bit of trivia: Buckley is quick to suggest a possible Spanish equivalent for to loom over because Spanish was actually his first language. Largely raised by Spanish-speaking nannies, he purportedly didn’t learn English until entering school at age seven.

What run-on sentences are (and aren't)

Back in January I grew sufficiently annoyed with misunderstandings of what passive voice is to write about that here. Now it’s December and as the result of a more recent irritation I’m bookending 2022 with another post on misunderstood grammar, this time concerning a much rarer creature from the bad writing bestiary.

In the “Dumb Sentences” segment of a recent episode of 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, a bad books podcast hosted by Mike Nelson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and Conor Lastowka of RiffTrax, a listener submitted the following sample from the show’s current read, a cozy mystery called Murder in Christmas River:

But then, a pickup truck pulled up, and a boy got out and pulled his guitar from the flatbed, and he walked over and sat down, and mesmerized everyone there with his playing and singing.

The listener who mailed this sentence in criticized it as a self-evidently ridiculous “run-on sentence.” The writing is inelegant, inconsistently punctuated, and somehow both vague and very specifically cliched, but this is not a run-on sentence.

What a run-on sentence is

A run-on sentence is a fusion of two independent clauses, clauses that could stand on their own as sentences, into one sentence with no division between the two clauses. Some further explanations:

• From Grammarly: “Run-on sentences, also known as fused sentences, occur when two complete sentences are squashed together without using a coordinating conjunction or proper punctuation, such as a period or a semicolon.”

• From UNC Chapel Hill’s Writing Center: “These are also called fused sentences. You are making a run-on when you put two complete sentences (a subject and its predicate and another subject and its predicate) together in one sentence without separating them properly.”

• From the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing: “A run-on sentence is two or more independent clauses incorrectly presented in a single sentence.”

A run-on sentence is not

• Any long sentence.

This is much simpler to explain than the many things people mistake for passive voice, because the one thing people commonly mistake for a run-on sentence is a sentence that, to them, subjectively, just goes on too long. Because it runs on, you see.

But that’s not why the run-on sentence has that name. The mental image conjured by “run-on sentence” should be more like the head-on collision of two trucks than someone wheezing his way through a marathon.

Here are a few things that I’ve seen called run-on sentences that are not:

The opening paragraph of “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” Kevin D Williamson’s marvelous takedown of an annually observed imperial spectacle here in the US:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship—it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting—with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

This is all one long, elaborately structured sentence—especially in its second half, with parenthetical interjections and dependent clauses—but it is grammatically correct. (Subject: State of the Union. Verb: is. Predicate: all the rest.) It is not a run-on sentence.

Occasionally people mistake a sentence as a run-on not because of its length but because of a stylistic choice, such as Cormac McCarthy’s use of polysyndeton—the repeated use of conjunctions like and, especially as a substitute for commas. Here’s an example pulled at random from McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian:

The last one fell in a doorway and Tobin turned and drew the other pistol from his belt and stepped to the other side of the horse and looked up the street and across the square for any sign of movement there or among the buildings.

Here’s another from earlier in the book:

They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works.

Again, these are all long sentences that could be broken up into separate ones, but they are joined grammatically correctly with a conjunction. This is a stylistic choice, not a mistake. To break these sentences up would be to lose their tonal effect, one of both busy movement, solemnity, and distance.

I think the author criticized in the listener e-mail to 372 Pages was straining for this effect—a more artistic way to suggest a boy’s activities over an entire evening. It was not well done but not that badly done either, and the author certainly did not commit the catastrophic grammatical blunder of writing a run-on sentence.

Actual run-on sentences

Real run-on sentences are not a matter of stylistic difference or minor mistakes, like spelling errors or typos, but a grotesque mashing together of two sentences that produces obviously wrong grammar. I use the word obviously deliberately. You can dither about stylistic choices all day but there is no mistaking a run-on as anything but an error.

The run-on is such an elementary mistake that I actually had a hard time finding mentions of it in my books on writing. Even the classic, Strunk and White, only mentions the comma splice (see below). But the run-on is covered thoroughly in a lot of writing aids for students, like that UNC guide I linked to above. Here’s the example provided there:

My favorite Mediterranean spread is hummus it is very garlicky.

Here’s one from another university writing center:

Raffi sings upbeat children's songs he is an excellent musician.

Anyone reading these sentences would immediately see the mistake.

As a result, it is exceedingly rare to see an actual run-on sentence in professionally published writing. But they are rife in informal writing, especially—speaking from my own experience—student writing.

Here’s an exmample of a run-on sentence I recently spotted in the wild. This comes from a letter by Maria Clemm, Edgar Allan Poe’s beloved mother-in-law, recounting his last words to her as he left on a business trip from which he never returned:

God bless my own darling Muddy do not fear for your Eddy see how good I will be while I am away from you, and will come back to love and comfort you.

This is three sentences fused into one, but I think anyone would be forgiving of an old lady writing a personal recollection by hand in an era in which letters were not held to the same standards of punctuation (or even capitalization, as in this letter by Thomas Jefferson) as published writing. But in rare cases real run-on sentences do show up in modern, professional writing.

The run-on’s more respectable cousin

Let me pause here to note the existence of the comma splice, which makes almost the same mistake as the run-on sentence but separates the two clauses with a single comma, like this:

Greg Maddux played for the Braves for elevens seasons, he was one of their best pitchers.

The comma splice is sometimes conflated with the run-on (as in Dreyer’s English, where he treats them as the same thing), but I learned them as separate mistakes and I’m going to stick with that. My reason: comma splices can sometimes work as a stylistic choice (see the quotation from Garner’s Modern English Usage here), but a run-on is always a mistake.

Identifying and fixing run-on sentences

To return briefly to what a run-on sentence is, it is not just a long or grammatically complex sentence, but will have:

• two or more independent clauses and

• no conjunction or separating puncuation.

The result, as I’ve tried to emphasize, is obviously incorrect. Real run-on sentences sound childish. When you run across one or, God forbid, accidentally write one, identification is not usually the problem. (Misidentification is, which is why I wrote this.)

Fixing them can be relatively easy, depending on how much you care about style. The two simplest mechanical fixes are:

• Sticking a semicolon between the two clauses. Like Cormac McCarthy, I hate semicolons and would prefer two separate sentences to the unholy hybrids created by this punctuation, but separating the clauses this way is grammatically correct and a legitimate option.

• Breaking the clauses into separate sentences. My preferred solution, but one that—again, if you care about style and sound—might turn a run-on into a pair or string of equally childish-sounding simple sentences.

After choosing either of these solutions you can go on to weigh the stylistic choices and all the wonderfully complex artistic questions they raise—sound, tone, structure, rhythm, connotation, and on and on. You may end up reworking an entire paragraph, or more. But sometimes, as anyone who drives an older car will understand, just getting the obvious mechanical problem fixed is the most important step.

Conclusion

My main problem with run-on sentences is not the error itself, which, as I’ve suggested above, is 1) easily indentifiable and 2) easy to fix. My main problem with run-on sentences is the term itself. “Run-on sentence” is misleading, suggesting to many people for a long time that any long or complex sentence is somehow a mistake, and I wish there were a more precise term for this elementary error. Perhaps “fused sentence,” the alternate term used in a few of the definitions I quoted earlier, is the best candidate. It certainly suggests what the actual mistake is with more precision than “run-on.”

But until a term like “fused sentence” or something else can displace the one we’re most familiar with, I hope this will be a helpful guide to what a real run-on sentence is, and that people will go easier on authors who try something a little different and come up a little short.

On the term "Anglo-Saxon"

Last week, when I took exception to the great Tom Shippey’s arguments for the continued use of the term “Dark Ages” to describe post-Roman or early medieval Europe, I had in mind a counterexample for a follow-up post: “Anglo-Saxon,” a term that tends not to suggest much to the ordinary person and to which very few preconceived notions are attached.

Unless you’re a particular kind of academic.

Briefly, in a technical sense the term Anglo-Saxon is most commonly used three ways:

• Describing a period, it applies to England from roughly the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest in the late 11th century.

• Describing people, it applies to the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain during the “migration period” c. AD 450 and who originated in modern-day Germany, Denmark, and Frisia.

• As a noun, it is synonymous with Old English, the language spoken in many regional dialects by the people described above.

Other uses, such as for the material culture found at sites like Sutton Hoo or the literature produced by these people, are elaborations on these three basic uses. But Anglo-Saxon as a term for a period in a particular place and the people typical of that period and place has been in common usage for a very long time, right up until today. Just looking at the shelves I can see from my desk, I can see the great medieval historian Frank Stenton’s volume for the Oxford History of England, Anglo-Saxon England (1943), Hilda Ellis Davidson’s great study The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England (1962), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s literary anthology The Anglo-Saxon World (1982), John Blair’s Very Short Introductions volume The Anglo-Saxon Age (1984), and Marc Morris’s excellent The Anglo-Saxons (2021). Even the Nature study regarding Anglo-Saxon genetics that I linked to above uses the term to describe the migration, the period, and the cemeteries excavated as part of the study. This is a respectable term with a long history.

There has, recently,* however, been a move to stop using the term “Anglo-Saxon” within the study of the Middle Ages because of some of the ways the term has been used outside the field. I almost said “popularly used” but, again, I’ve found that very few people have any firm associations with the term. A vague, historical sense of Englishness attaches to it sometimes, and a very few might think of the term WASP, about which more below, but that’s about it. Nevertheless, because the term was sometimes used to designate certain subsets of “Nordic” or northern European racial types by 19th century scientific racists or casually used for people of a certain ethnic background (like the much, much, much vaguer and more insulting “white people” today), it is now “problematic.”

You can find all the kinds of arguments for this view that you’d expect in this piece from Smithsonian last year, which is where I first learned that there was any controversy about it. A few points raised in the essay:

• The Anglo-Saxons didn’t use the term Anglo-Saxon “much.” The authors try to have this both ways, pointing out that they did use it, but mostly in Latin documents like charters (or the Welsh chronicler Asser’s Life of King Alfred, which uses it in the very first sentence) and hoping you don’t realize that if someone uses a specific term of themselves in a second language they are still describing themselves using that term.

• The Anglo-Saxons more commonly called themselves Englisc or Angelcynn. True, but historians refer to historical peoples using terms they didn’t themselves use all the time. Witness the Egyptians or Greeks. There are even whole civilizations for whom we have had to make up names, like the Minoans. (It’s also worth noting that the cynn in Angelcynn is our word kin, as in kinship, raising the dread specter of blood-relationship that these authors clearly abhor. Naturally they don’t dwell on this.)

• The “Saxon” part of Anglo-Saxon is inaccurate because it “was not widely used and only for the Saxon groups,” not all the related Germanic peoples who invaded Britain in the 5th century. Flatly false, as any Welsh or Scottish person (or binge-viewer of “Outlander”) could tell you. The Welsh refer to their Angle enemies as “Saxons” in the 7th-century poem Y Gododdin and, to this day, the Welsh and Scots Gaelic words for “foreigner” or “English” are Saesneg and Sassenach. Who’s being ethnocentric now?

• The term obscures or erases ethnic minorities living in Britain at the time. There are whole libraries’ worth of controversy about the specific example the authors cite, of the presence of some sub-Saharan Africans in Britain during the period in question, but any argument along these lines is specious. Marginal cases cannot define the whole, and the presence of outsiders among a people group doesn’t make terms describing the predominant people or culture inaccurate. This is akin to some arguments I’ve seen that the term “Norse” is inaccurate because Scandinavians occasionally intermarried with the Sami.

• There are “more accurate” terms available. There are not. All the terms on offer in the essay are actually less precise and more awkward than Anglo-Saxon. And I’m astonished that one proposed alternative is “early medieval English,” since although “Anglo-Saxon” was never a problem when I was in grad school (see note below) I was specifically cautioned away from the term “English” for this period because of its anachronistic connotations.

• Racists used it. This is what the authors really want to argue—the kind of guilt-by-association cooties talk that somehow gets respect today—and most of their Smithsonian essay is taken up with examples of Bad People using the term. They even use the phrase “dog whistle,” and you know what I think of that. But the authors’ problem with many of the examples they offer is, tellingly, not really with the use of the term itself but with the motives of the people using it. The authors are practicing Bulverism.

Well, I didn’t intend to get into that much detail here, but that essay annoyed me so much when friends sent it my way last summer that it was hard not to.** I could go on, but I’ll conclude with its crowning stupidity, the opening sentence of what the authors clearly believe to be a trumpet blast of a final paragraph: “Historically speaking,” they write, “the name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has more connection to white hoods than boar-crested helmets.”***

Let us now turn to intelligent people, and the reason I’m returning to contested terminology a week after I mulled over the Dark Ages.

This week on The Rest is History Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook presented a wonderful two-part series on Alfred the Great, and among the many topics they touched on was the term Anglo-Saxon. What began as an aside early in the episode, when Holland noted out that the term could not have been invented as a racist codeword because it was in use in Alfred’s lifetime, turns into a more pointed discussion later on (at approximately 39:45 if you listen here) regarding why there would be any controversy about the term in the first place:

Sandbrook: So, you mentioned earlier on—some people might have found that a bit weird if you don’t follow academic disputes on Twitter—which I advise you not to do—is you mentioned the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” which has now become… incendiary in America. In American academia. People don’t want to call them, they don’t even want to call them the Anglo-Saxons, do they?

Holland: Yeah, so, the word “Anglo-Saxon” has different significations in different countries. So, here it means the Anglo-Saxons. It’s the period—

Sandbrook: Yeah.

Holland: It’s shorthand for the period between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and 1066. It’s been that for a long time. And in France or Germany or the Continent Anglo-Saxon basically means the English-speaking world—

Sandbrook: Well in France it means Margaret Thatcher and McDonalds, doesn’t it? [laughs]

Holland: Exactly. Kind of liberal free-market economics. But there is the use of Anglo-Saxon as, you know, Britain, American, or Australia, New Zealand, and so on, Canada—“the Anglosphere” might be another way of putting it. In America, the word WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, um, there’s a sense there that it is used to connote a kind of 19th-century, well, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hegemony. And because that is now seen as something oppressive, therefore there’s a desire to get rid of the very word. It’s seen as providing succor to racists in America. But because America is an imperial country and preponderant, there is an absolute assumption among, I think, too many American academics that their use of a word should have global resonance, and they don’t acknowledge the fact that, firstly, in England “Anglo-Saxon” has the connotation that it does. It does not connote racist supremacy.

Sandbrook: No no no.

Holland: We have the English Defence League, we don’t have the Anglo-Saxon Defence League. And they want to call it “early English.” English is a much more problematic word in the context of Early Medieval History. But the other problem with banning the word Anglo-Saxon is that it ignores the fact that, as we said, that Alfred is using Anglo-Saxon in his charters, and its a word that underpins his entire sponsorship of the entire idea of the Angelcynn, the idea of Angles and Saxons being part of a unitary kingdom, a unity people, that in the long run will give birth to England. And this is looking forward to the future, but it’s also rooted in the past because it’s drawing on Bede’s great work, you know, and he’s writing in Northumbria, the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, a long time before Alfred. So the word Anglo-Saxon seems to me to be by far the best description of this very complicated period and it seems insane to try to get rid of it. Anyway, that’s my rant.

Sandbrook: No, no, Tom, I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve never had a better rant on this podcast in this series. As so often, why get rid of—it’s bonkers to get rid of the term that is natural to most people.

Holland: It think there’s a certain, a kind of cultural cringe on the part of too many academics in Britain to truckle to American hegemony. They are—in a way, they need to decolonize themselves, to coin a phrase. They need to stop behaving like colonial subjects, and assuming that what happens in America should automatically determine what happens here.

Sandbrook: I couldn’t agree with you more, Tom.

Me neither.

Anglo-Saxon poses a problem nearly the opposite of Dark Ages—it’s a term not commonly used by ordinary people, allowing it to retain most of its technical precision, but objected to by academics on grounds that only bother academics. These are not good reasons, and the continued American export of American neuroses to other countries and, worse, to the past should not extend to the Anglo-Saxons.

My favorite passage of Mark Twain comes from A Tramp Abroad and is a footnote to the phrase “pretty much”: “‘Pretty much’ may not be elegant English, but it is high time it was. There is no elegant word or phrase which means just what it means.” Anglo-Saxon may not be the preferred term of the elegant in American Humanities departments but it means something specific in a way no other term quite does, and most especially to people outside the university.

Let me conclude by heartily recommending any of the books I mentioned at the top of this post, and by commending to you Part I and Part II of The Rest is History’s Alfred the Great series. It’ll be well worth your time.

Footnotes:

*How recently, I wonder. While I’m sure you could trace objections to Anglo-Saxon further back than the last few years, when I wrote and defended my MA thesis in 2010 neither the two medievalists nor the military historian on my committee ever raised even a question about the term, which I not only used throughout but included in the subtitle to indicate the time, place, and culture I was researching.

**I’ve also been horribly sick all this week, so caveat lector throughout.

***Let me here urge the formulation of a corollary to Godwin’s Law for stupid invocations of the Klan.

Y'all. OMG. Not okay. I can't even.

This short piece from Kit Wilson says a lot of what I’ve been thinking about the shallowness and especially the infantilization of modern political discourse for a long time, and much more.

Have you noticed that strange new verbal tic going around: that everything we once considered “wrong” or “evil” is now simply “not okay”?

Spend an hour online and you’ll see what I mean. Overturning Roe v Wade was “not okay”. Church sex abuse scandals are “not okay”. Body-shaming is definitely “not okay”. The more somebody disapproves of something, the more “not okay” it is—perhaps warranting a firm “Not Okay” or even, under exceptional circumstances, “NOT OKAY”.

Yes, I have noticed. He also invokes “Normalize X” and “Do better” (both, tellingly, imperatives) from the nearly infinite supply of available clichés.

Welcome to the new, strange, mealy-mouthed vocabulary of true emotivism. All of the above, you’ll notice, deliberately avoid communicating any kind of moral content whatsoever—they could, indeed, be talking about anything. It’s “not okay” to jaywalk in certain American cities. I can “normalise” a snazzy new hairstyle. You can “do better” at throwing socks into your clothes basket blindfolded.

Wilson’s piece is not only funny but insightful. He chalks this decay in our language up to the triumph of ethical emotivism, to the hollowing out of the idea of objective moral truths that can be invoked, argued about, and even occasionally agreed upon. Believing that all ethical judgments are “mere personal preferences” eliminates the ability to talk about good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, and leaves one attempting instead to impute negative connotations or “emotional association[s]” from one concept to another (as in “such-and-such is violence”), a sloppy process, or to dig through the pockets of dead ideologies looking for useful rhetorical bludgeons (as in “fascist,” every time). The result is,

perhaps, a more appropriate form of morality for an age in which we no longer believe we have souls, but like to think of ourselves as rational biological computers. Notice that “not okay”, as the negative form of “okay”, suggests a binary switch that can only ever be on or off—just as there are only two options between legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable, or permissible and impermissible. We reduce the messiness of morality to simple 1s and 0s. It isn’t surprising that our behaviour towards one another follows suit. People are simply “okay”, or they aren’t. And if they are “not okay”, that’s the one strike—they’re out.

Wilson invokes AJ Ayer, logical positivist, as one of the roots of this trend, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe as important but unsuccessful countervailing forces.

I think there’s a lot to this, and you should certainly read Wilson’s piece. But I also think there a lot of other, simpler culprits. I’ve already used the word infantilization. You could also call it memeification. It used to be called shallow, dumbed down, childish. I recall the time someone I know called an argument against certain gun control measures “weak sauce.” In all caps. And I’m struck that the people I’ve most often seen lament “adulting” are the most vitriolic in their reaction to Dobbs.

Memeified discourse is marked by (simultaneously) sloppiness and staggering oversimplification, expressed through the most ephemeral, unserious, and substance-free set of formulae and clichés on offer. Being bite-sized, it lends itself readily to incantatory repetition and achieves through repetition—the blunt force trauma of argument—what actual reasoning can’t. And it is almost always purely declaratory and often hyperbolically emotional, as in the title of this post.

Let me offer both an aside and an example: Y’all. My dialect is not your slang. #culturalappropriation

Repeat ad nauseam.

This is the language of memes, but it was the language of AOL Instant Messenger, and talk radio, and televised presidential debates, and bumper stickers, and the commercial before that. Did Ayer and emotivism cause the rise of not-okayese, or simply prepare the minds of people to be degraded by technological developments like Twitter? Probably both, with a host of other contributing factors like laziness, as a generalized sloppiness of rhetoric and argument is useful cover for both bad ideas and bad thinkers, who thrive upon imprecision.

Final notes:

Here I have to invoke Orwell again, specifically his remarks on carelessness of thought and language: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” I blogged about this long ago here.

And the results of Ayer’s approach to ethics, framing ethical judgements as nonbinding statements of preference, were anticipated if not outright predicted in CS Lewis’s critique of The Green Book, his lectures published as The Abolition of Man.

You can read all of Wilson’s excellent short essay at The Critic here.

What passive voice is (and isn't)

Permit me a moment of annoyance.

It’s become apparent to me, through years of reading, that a lot of professional writers don’t know what passive voice is. I emphasize that I’m noticing this in professional writers, because these are people who should know better. Here’s the passage that finally broke me, from a long-form essay on cognitive dissonance within the pro-life movement:

A friend of mine was at a big conservative Christian donor conference recently and told me a prominent speaker there used the phrase, “women who have experienced an abortion.” . . .

This extreme passive voice expression goes beyond saying that women who abort their babies are victims who don’t deserve moral blame; it treats abortion as something that just happens to a woman. . . .

Emphasis mine.

Here’s the thing—the phrase the writer here picks out is not written in the passive voice. It’s vague, clunky, and awkward, an unnecessary circumlocution, but it is not passive. What the writer means here is everything I’ve just said about the phrase’s construction, with the added implication that the use of this phrase betrays deceitful intent, but it is not passive.

So, a brief, highly annoyed primer on what passive voice is (and is not):

Passive voice is not:

• Any sentence including the verb “to be.” This should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Because to be is a passive sentence’s auxiliary or “helping verb,” this can trip people up. As I’ve argued before, reliance on to be in your writing can weaken it, but that’s not the same thing as the passive voice. Here’s an example from way back of an otherwise careful and observant writer striking blindly at any passing be verb in hopes of hitting a passive construction.

• The progressive aspect. This is, in any verb tense, a construction that indicates than an action is ongoing. Above, I wrote that I am noticing this trend. I am still the subject of the sentence, and I am doing something. This is the active voice, even if the main verb is still to be. See above.

• Vagueness. This is the real bone of contention for the writer quoted above, and I’ve noticed “passive voice” or “passive language” used disparagingly of vagueness, bureaucratese, or other (usually official, almost always political) obfuscation and deceit—what Dilbert calls “weasel words.” I hate these forms of linguistic shiftiness as much as anyone, but obscuring your meaning behind jargon or constructing statements so as to diffuse or avoid blame is not, in itself, the passive voice.

Passive voice is:

Not a particular usage, tone, or even intent, but a grammatical voice—that is, per Britannica, the “form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself.” To demonstrate using the classic example:

Active: The pitcher threw the ball.
Passive: The ball was thrown by the pitcher.

There are two “participants” in this “narrated event”: the ball and the pitcher. In one, the pitcher (actively) acts upon the ball; in the other, the ball is (passively) acted upon by the pitcher.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. This shouldn’t be hard.

How to identify the passive voice

Here’s a simple way to identify passive voice constructions: you should be able to ask By whom? or By what? of them. Asking these questions of a passive sentence highlights the fact that the “participant” that would ordinarily function as the subject of the sentence has gone missing as the action has been inverted. So:

• “Mistakes were made.” (The classic weasel word statement.) By whom?

• “The town was destroyed.” By what?

• “The generalissimo is being overthrown.” By whom?

• “The cornfield has been destroyed.” By what?

• “It is said that money cannot buy happiness.” By whom?

Now compare a few other sentences (or fragments) that I’ve seen incorrectly labeled “passive” online:

• “Women who have experienced an abortion.” A fragment in the first place, but as it’s the women who are doing the experiencing, this is still grammatically the active voice.

• “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Whatever this is, it’s doing the unfolding, and despite its clunkiness this sentence is still written in the active voice.

• “The suspect’s death at the hands of police appears to be entirely unjustified.” Chop out all but the grammatical essentials and this reads death (subject) appears to be (verb) unjustified (predicate). This is an overcomplicated and clunky sentence, but not passive.

Conclusion

If when you describe some language as “passive” you mean written in the passive voice, with what would normally be the object in the subject’s place but being acted upon, then more power to you.

But if when you say this you mean that the language in question is deceitful, misleading, obfuscating, suspiciously hedging, or simply a lie—if, that is, your problem is not with the speaker’s grammar but with his motives—then say that. You’ll be more accurate and, what is more, you’ll make your own meaning clearer.

Pickled monarch

I’m currently a little over a hundred pages into Andrew Roberts’s 700+ page The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. It’s excellent so far, and full of surprises. Here’s one.

This is the twenty-year old George, Prince of Wales writing to his tutor and “dearest friend,” John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute in 1758:

What a pretty pickle I should be in a future day if I had not your sagacious counsels.

To “be in a pickle” is not an expression I would have imagined being current in the 1730s, so it surprised to me both 1) that the expression is so old and also 2) that it’s survived to the present. Most such casual idioms go stale pretty quickly—and the more specific they are the more so. I don’t imagine much of anything written nowadays will be intelligible by the end of the century.

But notice that what I at first took to be an oddity of grammatical structure actually suggests the idiom has changed a bit: George says “what a pretty pickle I should be,” not “I should be in.” I can’t be certain that this isn’t just a twenty-year old expressing himself imprecisely (though the volume, style, and erudition of George’s letters suggests otherwise), but if not, the idiom as used by George makes himself the pickle. And in this period, the pickle could be either something soaked in brine or something served up covered in a particular salty sauce. Here’s the Online Etymology Dictionary:

The meaning “cucumber preserved in pickle” first recorded 1707, via use of the word for the salty liquid in which meat, etc. was preserved (c. 1500). Colloquial figurative sense of “a sorry plight, a state or condition of difficulty or disorder” is recorded by 1560s, from the time when the word still meant a sauce served on meat about to be eaten.

Served up garnished and ready to eat—an altogether more precarious image than even that suggested by our continued use of the phrase, and one appropriate to the situation George found himself in following the death of his father but before the death of his hostile and mean-spirited grandfather. At any rate, this figurative sense is much older than the more specific meaning of a pickled cucumber, a usage that was still pretty recent in George’s youth. Presumably, to be “in a pickle,” in which you are the hapless victim of a bad situation, is a mutation based on the baseball/tag game.

Another odd example—from the infinite and labyrinthine cellars and archival storage closets of English—of what makes even seemingly unexceptional aspects of the language fun and diverting.

I wrote about Roberts’s approach to history about a year ago. You can read that here.

Addendum: Speaking of historical oddities and surprises, here’s an offhand observation and ironic note from the very first chapter:

The Prince and Princess of Wales’s Court was a close-knit group that made its own amusements. In 1748, Lady Hervey noted that the young Prince George and the other royal children were playing ‘at baseball, a play all who are or have been schoolboys are well acquainted with.’ She added that ‘the ladies as well as the gentlemen join in this amusement.’ It was a form of rounders that later became popular in America—a game that, ironically, George III played but George Washington did not.

Dalyrmple on exactitude and evasion

Writing at the British journal The Critic, Theodore Dalrymple has an interesting short meditation on the phrase “correctional facility.” Dalrymple is a psychologist and former prison doctor, and the recent execution of a particularly heinous murderer at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana provoked in him a question about the term itself:

The word correctional in this context is not without interest. Who, exactly, is being corrected by an execution? Unless you believe that the lessons learned in this world are carried over into the next, it surely cannot be the person executed. The whole of society, then? But in this case, the “Complex”, or that part of it devoted to executions, and also to the keeping of life-term prisoners, is a Deterrent rather than a Correctional facility. If you imprison someone for life, after all, you are not correcting him, whatever beneficial effect long-term incarceration and the passage of time may have on his character.

Dalrymple has a gift for aphorism, and the one that struck me later in this piece, which began with a meditation on euphemism, was the following broader observation:

“Inexactitude, the handmaiden of evasion, is commonplace.”

Not only commonplace, but epidemic.

Dalrymple notes two motives behind inexactitude of expression: euphemism and evasion. One of these may be unconscious, a flinching away from reality, or, if conscious, simply a matter of politeness, sentimentality, or misplaced delicacy—in all cases a concern for taste over truth.* The other is of necessity conscious. It is dishonesty.

Our epidemic of inexactitude most commonly serves as “the handmaiden of evasion” by concealing the truth behind fogbanks of semi-scientific jargon—especially the language of criticism, sociology, and pop psychology—that is both vague enough and capacious enough to cover anything you want it to. Big, important words, most especially the devil terms of denunciation without which activists would be robbed of speech, are used and misused interchangeably and more and more completely confused.** Vaguery means you can waffle, sidestep, hedge, dodge, fudge, and evade—that is, you can lie—about whatever and via whatever means are more convenient and for whatever purpose serves you in the moment. Jargon, as I implied above, is especially useful for this.

The danger is that sloppy thinking and sloppy expression are mutually reinforcing, especially when there are political points to be gained from euphemism and evasion.

Here’s George Orwell, in a passage I’ve quoted here before and that is more and more often on my mind: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

Perhaps most especially among those who know better.

You can read more of Orwell’s thoughts in his essay “Politics and the English Language” here. I’ve previously paired quotations from it with similar ideas in Chesterton here. And here are the same two writers in a more recent post on jargon, in which, prophetically, the topic of evasion comes up.

*E.g. talking about someone “passing away,” a phrase I now try to avoid. Death is real and I want to acknowledge that. The problem is even worse when someone is described as having “passed away” or even just “died” when they have, in fact, killed themselves. One does not want to be callous, and there is a place for courtesy, but there is also a categorical difference between dying by some process—accident, disease, old age—and killing yourself. Obscuring that difference by inexactitude, for whatever reason, is the kind of evasion we need less of.

**E.g. racism, bigotry, and prejudice mean strikingly different things but are used almost totally interchangeably.