Since primary school I have served 75 years of apprenticeship with English, the heritage of Macaulay’s Minute in 1835 that continues to shadow us “in this day and age”. Generations of Indian children have grown up singing “a b c d e f g”, with its desperate refrain, “x y z, Oh dear me, when shall I learn my “a b c”? Despite those triple-lined copybooks and homework, I began to love words for their sounds as well as sense. My reading of stories like Alice and Treasure Island and excursions beyond text-books taught me one thing. Brevity is best, to avoid mistakes, tedium and feuds.
At college, I opted for economics and politics, not maths and science. The “arts” subjects encouraged verbosity, while the sciences promoted precision and condensation. In the “humanities”, there were two kinds of examinees: those who raced through blank pages and kept asking for more answer books and slow coaches like me.
I was recruited into the diplomatic service and became familiar with both the verbose kind and the summers-up. Prolixity is at a discount in the media. As an occasional scribbler, I found that brevity is far harder to achieve than verbiage. Winston Churchill, who won the Nobel for literature in 1953, once decreed: “The short words are the best, and old words best of all.”
Swift believed that style in prose is the use of “proper words in the proper order”. A model writer was Orwell, whose essay, “Politics and the English language” is worth studying, especially for showing readers both the lure and the folly of jargon and clichés. Jargon becomes familiar and people are lulled into habits of using such idioms without suspecting distortions. Thus a civil war may be reported as “ethnic cleansing”, and an invasion as a “rectification of frontiers”.
But jargon has defenders too. Every branch of knowledge, every trade needs its vocab. Imagine the computer age without terms for blog, iPad, YouTube or password. An acronym like BP and ailments like stress and tension are understood. We cling to old favourites like “time is money”, “time will tell” and “writing on the wall”, because such phrases percolate current vocabulary.
“Tip of the iceberg” may be space opera in tropical lands, but we respond to the lilt of such idioms. The word jargon is from old French, meaning “the chatter of birds”. How apt that is for tweet and Twitter buzzing round in the social media! I had to giggle when a speaker praised someone for “hitting the nail on the head”. I wish readers will pass on their own pet aversions or diversions. Sports are a rich source of amusing jargon. A star batsman may be out for a duck.
Going back to square one, I pay my tribute of imitation to some gems of current jargon. When all is said and little is done, we must think out of the Pandora’s box and grasp the silver lining of every cloud before the sands of time run out.