Too much of our “communication” has become obscure. Early in my life, I was taught to write (and speak) at a “sixth to eighth” grade level. If we want to communicate, we should endeavor to make it easy for our reader / listener to understand us.
George Orwell wrote: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” In my opinion, this is just as true today as it was in the 1940s.
Far too much gibberish is published. This gibberish is commonly crafted to evoke emotions, compliance and agreement.
How often have you received a letter marked “official notification”? What makes it official? Isn’t it really just a notification? After all, they are just notifying you that you could buy something! It’s not like it’s from the government. This excessive use of the word official reduces it’s value and meaning.
“Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.” - George Orwell
That’s George Orwell’s thoughts from the 1940s, which are just as valid today!
A major premise of his book 1984 is manipulating the thoughts of people via word choice (as well as censorship and rewriting history).
Common discourse (news reports, politicians speeches, social media banter) tosses around terms like fascism, democracy, socialism, communism, pandemic, and virus without giving consideration to what these terms actually mean.
What is a pandemic after all? It’s really nothing more than a disease outbreak detected in more than one country. It doesn’t need to be dangerous. It doesn’t need to be widespread. Almost all pandemics are trivial.
Image courtesy of RawPixel.com
As an example let’s consider this from history:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Rendered in (modern) gibberish this becomes:
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
Which is more understandable? The old phrasing or the modern phrasing? I don’t know about you, but at work I see this every day as management attempts to hype up the attitude of the employees by praising the crappy software and telling us how great we are doing at making the company mediocre. It’s a shame to see their industry leading user friendly technology (website) sliding further and further into being pretty, but difficult to use. But hey, it’s new, thus it must be better.
Why did I title this “Thinking Clearly”? Because if we are bombarded by nonsense words or emotional words, our ability to think clearly (communicate clearly) is impaired.
We all slip into being “drama queens” at times. I’m urging you to stay aware of when you do this and try to avoid the meaningless use of hype words or tossing out words that are charged with emotion while using them inappropriately.
Beyond writing on Substack, I also create websites, and I strive to think about what a user wants when they come to it, to be able to make it easy to find what they're looking for in each instance of what is available on the site. I'm constantly critiquing sites being overly flashy or always changing and making it more difficult to use too.
Plain language is best. But even then, people disagree on meanings of words too. It's best to pin down the definition that both sides are using when discussing something. Otherwise the fallacy of equivocation may rear its head.