[ Carolyne Lee,The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 6, No. 4 12 April - 3 May 2010 ]


Managerial weasel words are endangering the English language, while the other contemporary influence of the abbreviations of texting and networking can have a beneficial role in the learning of reading and spelling, explains Dr Carolyne Lee.

There seem to be two main influences on the English language at the moment. At one end of the spectrum we have frenetic constant communication via mobile phone text messaging and social networking, much of it produced by young people, usually in abbreviated format (for example: lol, cu l8r, plz, ppl, gr8, btw, hmwrk, thnx). At the other end we have ‘managerial’ language, produced mainly by corporations and government, and then reproduced unthinkingly in the media and almost everywhere else as long-winded clichés.

To take the second phenomenon first: it is now not unusual to hear, say, an injured footballer speak about his recovery in terms of his ‘career going forward’, ‘at the end of the day’. Meanwhile governments talk of ‘quantitative easing’, and corporations speak of ‘responsible human resources adjustments’ (read: printing more money, and laying off workers, respectively), as well as the now tragically infamous ‘collateral damage’.

Such manipulations of language are often an attempt to control public perception, in the view of British language researcher Norman Fairclough. This may be true, but often the statements can be such impenetrable sludge that we have no idea what they mean. Yet this style has become so pervasive that many of us do not even notice it any more, even as we ape it.

One of the first people to criticise this opaque and clichéd managerial language in Australia was author Don Watson. He calls such language ‘weasel words’, a term said to have originated in 19th-century American politics. When we use weasel words we suck the meaning out of sentences, and the language more generally, like a weasel sucks all the goodness out of an egg, leaving the shell unbroken.

Although it is now seven years since Watson’s first published critique (in his book Death Sentence), weasel words continue unabated. For example, Victoria Police are trialling the use of conducted energy devices (read: Tasers). And Federal Attorney-General Robert McLelland had this to say in a recent interview on ABC radio: “The UK are already rolling out the biometrics. What we’ll be endeavouring to do is to supplement and value add to that framework that’s already in place…”

In order to teach my first year media writing students not to duplicate this sort of thing, at the start of the course I supply three columns of words, taken randomly from a collection of organisational and public relations documents. I then ask the students to take any word from the first column and combine it with any word from the second and third to compose typical weasel phrases. The lecture theatre usually erupts in laughter (this semester one student went so far as to claim he would have done much better in a recent Business exam if he’d seen the list beforehand!). Here is a small sample from my lists: Core, Non-core, Sharpened, Responsible, Autonomous, Provisional, Prioritised, Logistical, Strategic, Institutional, Regulatory, Entrepreneurial, Affirmative, Divisional, Benchmarks, Deliverables, Management, Accountability, Outputs, Inputs, Framework.

Young people such as my students are usually not the sources of weasel words, though. But they are part of the demographic responsible for what is thought to be the other main influence on English at the moment – the abbreviations that make up most of our text-messaging. It is hard to escape the well-aired view that this phenomenon is what is wrecking English expression and literacy levels more generally. This view can best be summarised by an article titled I h8 txt msgs written in 2007 by well known British journalist John Humphreys. He likened the “relentless onward march of the texters” to “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary”.

It’s strange, then, that in the more than a million words by young people (most of whom are surely txtrs, sorry texters) that I mark each year, I have never seen an abbreviation, nor even a lower case i. The writing is as rich and well expressed as such writing was 20 years ago, long before texting entered our lives.

It’s true that we can sometimes see SMS abbreviations on Internet bulletin boards, written by a young contributor (well, I assume they are young). He or she will immediately be called to account by the other contributors, with comments such as, ‘We don’t do that on this board. Write English.’ And the person promptly mends his or her ways. Quite unlike corporate-speak, SMS is really just another ‘register’ (to use the technical term) of the many English ‘registers’ we all know, and which we choose to use, depending on the social circumstances. For example, we speak in one register to our friends, another to our boss, another to our close family members, and yet another to our 90-year-old grandmother. The use of SMS language doesn’t automatically mean the users don’t know the correct register, it is more likely that they’ve forgotten to switch.

So I see no evidence at all of Humphreys’ argument that “the danger – for young people especially – is that [text message abbreviations] will come to dominate. Our written language may end up as a series of ridiculous emoticons and ever-changing abbreviations”.

Neither does Dr Clare Wood, a developmental psychologist and researcher from Coventry University in England. She recently led a research team to discover whether texting was impoverishing children’s language use and lowering their literacy skills. The results show that the abbreviation involved in texting actually increases children’s phonological awareness, and enables them to do additional reading and spelling each day as they compose their many texts. But most importantly, texting encourages the enjoyment of words, via its playful mix of features of both writing and colloquial language. “If we are seeing a decline in literacy standards among young children,” says Wood, “it is in spite of text messaging, not because of it”.

All of this seems to indicate that anxieties about literacy levels could well be redirected to a forceful critique of the present turgidity, the loss of subtlety and beauty in written English that is largely the result of the spread of managerial language. The use of that type of language is far less innocent and much more damaging to our language than simply forgetting which register to select for which context.

And if we seek further evidence that texting is not restricted to inane and truncated exchanges, we need look no further than the winning entry of a poetry competition run by a British mobile phone company for World Poetry Day in 2007, to find the best romantic poem in SMS (quoted by David Crystal in his book Language and the Internet). Entrants could use abbreviated and non-abbreviated words. The winning entry, by Ben Ziman Bright, was as follows:

The wet rustle of rain
can dampen today. Your text
buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles
like a paper boat, so that even
soaked to the skin
I am grinning.

Dr Carolyne Lee is a lecturer and researcher in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her latest book is Word Bytes: Writing in the Information Society, published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2009.