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"Phony, academic-sounding verbal junk... trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels...."

By Ann Althouse

I've been ignoring this Dick Cavett thing in the NYT that's been sitting at the top of the most-emailed list for days, but now I'm reading it. I don't want to delve into Cavett's earnest opposition to the war ? he's lambasting Petraeus ? but there's some discussion of language that interests me:

In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to ?Eyewitness News.? Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of ?learnedness? and ?scholasticism? ? possibly even that dread thing, ?intellectualism? ? to their talk. Sorry, I mean their ?articulation.?

No crook ever gets out of the car. A ?perpetrator exits the vehicle.? (Does any cop say to his wife at dinner, ?Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our vehicle??) No ?man? or ?woman? is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the ?individual.? The other day, there issued from a fire chief?s mouth, ?It contributed to the obfuscation of what eventually eventuated.? This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real life, like Rocky Balboa. And there?s nothing wrong with that.

Who imposes this phony, academic-sounding verbal junk on brave and hard-working men and women who don?t need the added burden of trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels?

And, General, there is no excuse anywhere on earth for a stillborn monster like ?ethnosectarian conflict,? as Jon Stewart so hilariously pointed out....

Petraeus?s verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How about ?ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel??

Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers.

It?s like listening to someone speaking a language you only partly know. And who?s being paid by the syllable. You miss a lot. I guess a guy bearing up under such a chestload of hardware ? and pretty ribbons in a variety of decorator colors ? can?t be expected to speak like ordinary mortals, for example you and me. He should try once saying ? instead of ?ongoing process of high level engagements? ? maybe something in colloquial English? Like: ?fights? or ?meetings? (or whatever the hell it?s supposed to mean).

I agree. So did George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language," which Cavett really ought to have cited.

Anyway, last night I was reading the most atrocious sentence, written by (the highly acclaimed blogger) Josh Marshall:

Some of it is likely equally demagoguable, but shows up some of the tendentious misconstruals of what he said.

Talk about phony, academic-sounding verbal junk and trying to talk like an effete character from a Victorian novels! "Demagoguable" and "misconstrual" are not even words. I'm not saying you can't coin a word, but coin something less ugly. (I mean, those are the Wisconsin and Louisiana quarters of word coinage.) "Likely equally demagoguable"... "tendentious misconstruals"... ugh! That's misconscrewed. Makes me want to demagag.

***

But the actual substance of Marshall's post is excellent. I was going to say, after reading Cavett's post, that we tend to find language especially irksome when we are irked by the message. But Marshall's post is something I would like to link to uncritically. He's found a 4-year-old clip of Barack Obama saying something very close to what he said this week about bitter small-towners:

Full post as published by Althouse on April 13, 2008 (boomark / email).