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When Words Betray Us: Stop Showing Off

By Roy Peter Clark

Never mind the story. Sometimes a headline alone is enough to fire up a controversy. The New York Daily News once turned the trick with this beauty about a president who refused to help a bankrupt metropolis: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." And now MoveOn.org has given us this headline atop an ad in The New York Times: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Republicans have denounced the thought behind the headline while Democrats have mostly danced a little sidestep. Meanwhile, liberal bloggers have piggy-backed on the word play with headlines that denounce "General Betrayous."

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I think what we have here is more than a failure to communicate. It's a seduction by creativity, an insincerity mated to hyperbole to meet the demands of a snarky and polarized political culture. The headline writer should have followed the advice, almost a century old now, of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lectured his Cambridge students that "style ... can never be ... extraneous ornament ... Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it -- whole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

In other words: Stop showing off. Never permit clever language to distort your message.

The MoveOn.org writer should indeed have written the phrase "General Betray Us," showed it off to friends and colleagues, and then murdered that little darling, burying it and leaving possible exhumation for another day. I make this case as someone who leans left of center, but who thinks the characterization of the general as a traitor is as reckless and dishonest as the accusation that those who oppose the war are hurting the troops and lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

Here's how the American Heritage Dictionary defines "betray": "To give aid or information to an enemy of; commit treason against." The word belongs to a constellation of language that includes the words "treason" and "tradition." All three words derive from the Latin verb "tradere," meaning to hand over or hand down. The good meaning allows us to hand down the fruits of culture and family; the pejorative meaning condemns us for handing over help to an enemy.

I do not believe that the headline writer thinks that General Petraeus is a traitor to his country.  Nothing in the ad under the headline supports the pun in the title. Instead, I think writer and editors succumbed to the oldest literary temptation in the book: to look clever in front of the world -- meaning and consequences be damned.

When used wisely, the pun, the rhyme, all wordplay can illuminate the world and speak the unspeakable. My best example comes from a lyric I just discovered in the song "Manhattan," already famous for the line: "The city's clamour can never spoil / The dreams of a boy and goil ..." That's child's play compared to this Rogers and Hart adventure: "We'll go to Greenwich / Where modern men itch / To be free...." Think of that wordplay as a coded celebration of gay sexual culture in Greenwich Village, and be startled and delighted, as I was, at the date of its origin: 1925.

"The great enemy of clear language," wrote Orwell, "is insincerity." Even the brilliant phrase must die if the writer doesn't mean it.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on September 21, 2007 (boomark / email).