Coded, generic speech hinders language efficiency

Evan Casper-Futterman Guest Writer

It is no longer politically valuable (if it ever was) to note that President George W. Bush and his administration have an awkward, even antagonistic, relationship with the English language. But that does not mean that we should be able to get away with it either. If their troubles provide us with any “moral of the story,” it should be that the words we use mean what we want them to mean, because we have thought them through. We shouldn’t foster euphemized or coded language in academia simply because that is what the “real” world demands of us. I begin the semester with a criticism that indicts myself as much as anyone else on campus.

When we were younger, our teachers were supposed to draw words out of us, not only so that we talked instead of fought (diplomacy before war—those pinkos!), but because they knew our brains would develop more fully if we could describe a book or picture we liked with more than the words “nice” or “good.” But why, they asked our struggling 9-year-old brains, is it nice or good? “I liked it because” was their goal, and we all go to Vassar now, so they clearly achieved it.

What we need once again is more of that old-fashioned intellectual accountability to keep us sharp. At all levels of academia, various forms of violence are perpetrated against the English language and human intellect, but they are usually forgiven as a matter of professional courtesy. These range from the large-scale violations—those who argue inadequately and trick the reader into thinking poorly of themselves for not understanding—to medium range violations such as the postmodern neologismization of everything, to the smaller scale—the acceptability of the passive voice and the pillaging of any semblance of comprehensible syntax.

Last semester, my professors finally noticed that a festering small-scale violation had reached a critical mass. After Spring Break, there were two instances in which two of my professors stopped class in order to ask us to describe our readings as something other than “interesting.” We were only able to find alternative words with difficulty—the way Bush might pause or stammer when asked to name the Prime Minister of Turkmenistan. Their frustration and embarrassment as professors soon became ours as students, as we collectively realized that our capacity for articulation had not surpassed those old days of “nice” and “good”—we merely found a longer word to mask our stagnant intellectual development.

Not that this is anyone’s fault specifically. We have a standard of living and a pace of life to uphold and protect. Here on the east coast, we buzz through our days and weeks on a variety of legal and illegal uppers and downers in defense of this lifestyle. We can’t be held responsible if we let little things slip from time to time. After all, we all know what we mean when we say interesting, so it actually makes our lives more efficient to just say the word as it is, packaged up with various sentiments and definitions, and keep moving right along. We know what we’re doing.

As do others. In the Zulu culture, the months have long, juicy, descriptive names that might relate to the natural processes occurring during the month. The same was true of medieval peasant cultures in present-day Europe. A rainy month, for example, might be called the month of the rains, while a spring month might be called the green month, or the month when the flowers come out, etc. These are examples of language achieving efficiency of description as it actively resists industrialization and commodification. It is descriptive, not analytical; meaningful, not representational; honest, not coded.

Any word that enriches our lives or contributes value to our world should not be coded. In the industry of higher education, in which we are all shareholders, a constant barrage of words and ideas tend to lead us away from descriptions based on thought and analysis and into knee-jerk, reactive, encoded responses: the word “interesting” would be appropriate if that were its honest, thought-out, intended meaning, but we can do better than that—we are dynamic and intelligent citizens. As beings in the digital age, our use of the “i” word and others often amounts to little more than if we had raised our hand and recited an intricate series of ones and zeroes. And really, how interesting is that?