Going Nucular Page 16
So it’s notable that the all-news networks have begun to recite their leads to a new participial rhythm: “In North Dakota, high winds making life difficult; the gusts reaching 60 m.p.h.” . . . “A Big Apple accident, two taxicabs plowing into crowds of shoppers.” Call the new style Inglish. Fox News Channel and CNN have adopted it wholesale, and it’s increasingly audible on network news programs as well.
The odd thing is that not even the newscasters seem to have a clear idea of what they’re doing, or why. A NewsHour with Jim Lehrer feature described the style as one of “dropping most verbs, putting everything in the present tense.” But cable news reporters don’t actually drop any verbs except “to be,” and that only in sentences like “President Bush in Moscow.” And those participles like “plowing” aren’t in the present tense—they don’t have any tense at all.
The New York Times Week in Review, December 8, 2002
What Inglish really leaves out is all tenses, past, present, or future, and with them any helping verbs they happen to fall on—not just be, but have and will. Some people have suggested that the style suggests the language of captions, but it’s used for past and future events as well. Newscasters used to say, “The Navy has used the island for sixty years but will cease its tests soon.” On CNN or Fox, that comes out as “The Navy using the island for sixty years but ceasing its tests soon.”
What’s the point of this? The NewsHour called it “an abbreviated language unique to time-pressed television correspondents,” and others point to the need to shoehorn as many stories as possible into a brief space. But a sense of urgency is not exactly what comes to mind when you watch the cable news shows, which seem so hard-put to fill those endless hours that they’re driven to recycle an endless stream of trivia every half-hour: “Zsa Zsa Gabor no longer breathing with a respirator” . . . “Ozzie and Sharon getting ready to say ‘I do’ all over again” . . . “J-Lo firing her hairdresser after an Oscar flap.” And for shoehorning purposes, the new syntax doesn’t actually save any time—sometimes, in fact, it makes sentences longer. “Bush met with Putin” is one syllable shorter than “Bush meeting with Putin.”
Broadcasters don’t seem to realize how bizarre the new style sounds. Fox newscaster Shepherd Smith called it “people speak” and explained, “It’s about how would I tell this story if I were telling it to a friend on a street corner.” But that must be a pretty exotic intersection, if Smith’s homeys are saying things like “My car in the shop. The brakes needing relining.”
Michael Kinsley suggested that the new style is drawn from the conventions of newspaper headlines. But Inglish is actually the exact opposite of headlinese. For one thing, it doesn’t omit pronouns and articles the way headlines do. If a flasher shows up at a presidential dinner, the next day’s paper reports it as “Man Exposes Self at White House.” On the news stations, that comes out as “A man exposing himself at the White House,” which is a rather different take on the affair.
More important, headlines don’t omit tenses so much as adapt them to the singular point of view of the daily news. “Buffett Buys Ad Companies” refers to an event that happened yesterday, “Buffett Bought Ad Companies” to a past event that came to light yesterday, and “Buffett to Buy Ad Companies” to a future event that was announced yesterday. That daily reference point is absent on the all-news shows, where those headlines all reduce to a tenseless “Buffett Buying Omnicom.”
There’s a logic to this. “The news of the day” is a notion ill-suited to news networks with peripatetic anchor desks that broadcast around the clock, adding and deleting items like top—40 stations with a high-turnover playlist. “Here now the news”—that isn’t something you’re likely to hear on CNN or Fox. Without a “here” and “now” there can’t be “the news,” measuring out daily life.
“After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast,” Thoreau wrote sarcastically in 1854, about the time people began to use the phrase “the news” to refer to the bundle of information that’s dumped on the public’s doorstep on a daily basis. That ritual of daily news consumption was a “mass ceremony,” as the political scientist Benedict Anderson described it, which shaped the sense of community essential to national consciousness.
But “the news of the day” was never more than a convenient fiction, and one that the all-news broadcasters and the Internet have made it increasingly hard to sustain. So the slogans and catch-phrases change. Traditional purveyors of news referred to their product with the definite article: “All the news that’s fit to print,” “Here now the news.” But in the slogans of the all-news outlets, the article is conspicuously absent, which reduces news to a kind of yard goods: “All news all the time”; “News at your speed”; “News when you want it.”
News becoming a lot more like life, just one damn thing after another.
Roil Pain
A journalist friend asked me if I had noticed that the verb roil was becoming more common in the newspapers. Not surprisingly, as soon as she pointed it out I started noticing it all over the place. On one day in May of 2002, there were stories in The New York Times mentioning the factors that were roiling the British rail system and the roiling political context of the game of soccer. And the same day’s San Francisco Chronicle had a story about anti-government protests that were roiling the eastern region of Algeria and a business page reference to the roiling electricity market, not to mention a headline describing Eminem as the Roiling Rapper.
There’s nothing new about roil—it has been around since Shakespeare’s time as a slightly recondite synonym for “churn up” or “perturb.” But when I did a search in a collection of major newspapers, it turned out the verb is more than nine times as frequent now as it was twenty years ago, even when you correct for the changing size of the database—in fact it’s up 30 percent in just the last year. That’s a remarkable pop, all the more since there’s no external reason for it—it isn’t as if the world is nine times more turbulent than it was in 1982. But then roil was tailor-made for recycling as a newspaper vogue word—a bit recherché and poetic, but not so obscure that readers can’t pick up a general sense of disruption. It’s a particular favorite of headline writers—not surprising, given that it only has four letters, two of them skinny ones. “Migrant Pickers Roil Watermelon Capital,” “Anger and Isolation Roil Israeli Arabs,” or “Greenspan Remarks Roil Markets”—the stock markets alone account for about 15 percent of all the roilees in the press. But reporters use the verb in all sorts of stories, and in all sorts of ways. Sometimes roil seems to be a synonym for rile or roll, or even reel, as in “The mind roils.” But then, a certain murkiness of meaning seems just about right for roil.
Fresh Air Commentary, June 3, 2002
You don’t hear roil a lot in everyday conversation. It isn’t really a word of American English at all—it belongs to the patois of that exotic alter-America that we read about in the newspapers, a world populated by strongmen, fugitive financiers, and troubled teens, where ire is always being fueled until violence flares, spawning hatred and stirring fears until hopes are dashed. The Associated Press’s Jack Cappon once imagined how it would sound if ordinary people actually used journalese in their conversation over the backyard fence:
“Joe, my concern has been escalating for weeks. What’s triggering our area youths, who keep sparking confrontations?”
“Well, Bill, they certainly shattered the stillness of this affluent neighborhood with their drug-related pre-dawn rampage.”
This is a venerable dialect. It has been around ever since the mass circulation penny newspapers first appeared around a hundred and fifty years ago—the garish, sensational dailies that Dickens satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit under names like The Sewer, The Stabber, and The New York Rowdy Journal. Granted, the language of the press has gotten more sedate in recent times, now that most of the tabloids have folded and reporters have taken to drinking Chardonnay and cosmopolitans. Yet modern newspaper diction still evokes the
language of the theatrical melodramas that became popular around the same time as the penny press. It’s a tone that disappeared from serious fiction around the 1920s—you don’t even hear it much in hard-boiled detective stories nowadays. In fact the only place other than newspapers where you routinely run into verbs like roil is in gothic romances and especially pornography, where synonyms for “churn” are always in high demand.
Editors are always deploring the excesses of journalese, but for every embellishment they manage to discourage, three new ones spring up in its place. Along with the spectacular growth of roil, for example, the last twenty years have seen sevenfold increases in the use of ratchet and slated: “As tensions ratchet, new peace talks are slated for next month.”
Reporters tell you that they choose words like roil and ratchet because they were taught in journalism classes that they should try to use action words. Saying that the mayor’s decision roiled voters feels more vivid than merely saying that the decision troubled them—it makes it sound as if something has actually taken place since the last edition went to press. The facts may be the same one way or the other, but then journalists know that what sells papers isn’t facts but stories—the more dramatic and sanguinary, the better. As a newspaper maxim has it, “If it bleeds, it leads.” You can’t affect what happened at the city council meeting last night, but you can at least describe it in the same language you’d use to summarize the plot of an Indiana Jones movie—“Embattled Mayor Rips Foes as Deadline Looms.” That headline could appear as easily in The New York Times as in the New York Rowdy Journal; it’s just the way the press makes the world sound newsworthy. Melodrama and news were born at the same moment, and they’ve been talking in the same voice ever since.
Business Cycles
For Love or Money
There are few things as dogged as a business writer with a metaphor between his jaws. Here’s how Business Week described the recent announcement of a merger between two cruise ship lines:
The path to the altar is strewn with crushed hearts. . . . But no broken engagement between companies has proved quite so stunning as the one that befell Royal Caribbean International.
It stood ready to seal a merger with P&O Princess Cruises before a congregation of investors. But then, rival suitor Carnival Cruise Lines swung in. . . . Now, P&O Princess has kissed off Royal Caribbean and is betrothed to Carnival.
That’s typical of the way mergers and acquisitions are described nowadays, with a quiverful of words borrowed from the old language of courtship. In fact, the business pages are about the only place this language appears in this day and age. The other day I looked up the first fifty hits for the word suitor from a Nexis database of major newspapers. Forty-eight of them involved business deals of one sort or another. One other came from the plot summary of a movie about King Arthur, and the last was from a palace gossip story about the rivals for Princess Di’s affections after her separation. Suitor isn’t a word that pops up a lot on Sex and the City.
Fresh Air Commentary, December 10, 2002
Or take woo. You read about companies wooing investors, politicians wooing voters, and teams wooing fans. But lovers rarely talk about wooing anymore, except in fits of coyness or nostalgia—“You don’t suppose you could woo me a little first?”
That language has been in decline for a long time. Courting was already on the way out by the late nineteenth century, when people began to feel that the rituals of courtship were impediments to “candor,” a favorite word of the romance writers of the period. Anthony Trollope only put courting into the mouths of his lower-middle-class and lower-class characters, and within a few years it had become the stuff of rustic comedy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, people were taking up the new slang word dating, with its modern egalitarian syntax. Only men could be suitors or go courting, but women could date men as easily as the other way round.
Yet the language still feels right to describe corporate couplings, even if the rest of us have moved on from courtly love to Courtney Love. As that root court- reminds us, the vocabulary of courtship has always been drawn from the language of politics and influence, ever since it was cooked up by twelfth-century nobles and troubadours. And the words of courtship have always been charged with double meanings of power and sex. The verb court means both to pay amorous attention and to try to gain favor with someone. For that matter, favor has the same ambiguity between the meaning “good graces” and its sexual sense—what people used to describe delicately as “the last favor,” as in “she granted him the last favor.” And until recent times, a “suitor” could be either a lover or a legal petitioner.
Those ambiguities are summed up in the underlying plea of all courtly attentions: Be mine. That’s what makes the language a natural fit for the corporate world, the only place left where you can realize your dynastic ambitions by getting someone to change their name to yours. The super-mergers that have built today’s corporate giants recall the intricate maneuverings of an age when Catherine of Braganza could arrive in England for her marriage to Charles II with a trousseau bulging with two million crowns and large chunks of India and Morocco.
Even more to the point, the language of courtship has always involved a certain charade of power, as the suitor abases himself in order to gain the upper hand. Samuel Richardson observed that the gallantries always came down to the same message: “I am now, dear Madam, yr humble Servant: Pray be so good as to let me be yr Master.” That’s a fair paraphrase of the blandishments that companies like Tyco and WorldCom dangled before the companies they were acquiring, and in the end the stockholders wound up in pretty much the same compromised position as Richardson’s Clarissa did.
If there’s travesty here, it isn’t because corporate CEO’s are any more devious or rapacious than the courtiers they replaced, but because they’re immeasurably more banal. The ardent avowals of courtly love may have been disingenuous, but that’s something poetry can be grateful for. Whereas the romance of the modern boardroom is pretty prosaic stuff, in every sense of the term. Imagine what Sidney or Marlowe would have had to come up with if they’d been corporate publicists spinning their companies’ takeover bids:
Come merge with us, and we shall seize
A thousand win-win synergies.
The Triumph of Capitalism
In the wake of the Enron collapse, Bush administration officials were congratulating themselves for doing nothing to avert the collapse, and indeed were describing it as a vindication of the free market system. The Administration’s economic advisor Larry Lindsey called the debacle a “tribute to American capitalism” and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill made the point even more fulsomely. “Companies come and go,” he said. “Part of the genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they get to pay the consequence or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions. That’s the way the system works.”
As even Business Week and Fortune pointed out, it wasn’t exactly the moment for bromides about the genius of capitalism—particularly since the people who had made the bad decisions at Enron weren’t the ones who were paying most of the consequences. But Lindsay and O’Neill didn’t intend to sound callous. If anything, their remarks showed just how reflexive this sort of rhetoric has become among free-market zealots. It’s not just the way they greet each corporate collapse as a triumph of capitalism, but the fact that they mention capitalism at all. Fifteen or twenty years ago, free-market partisans would have been more likely to say, “that’s how our free enterprise system works.”
Fresh Air Commentary, February 5, 2002
Capitalism has never been a dirty word, exactly. But it has always had a polemical tone, ever since it was given its modern sense by socialist writers in the mid-nineteenth century. The phrase “free enterprise” was invented by economists about a hundred years ago in order to dispel the noxious images that had grown up around capitalism—bloated plutocrats, workers bent over their machines, strikebreakers, and the rest. “F
ree enterprise” wears its ideology on its sleeve. It suggests a connection between political freedom and the right to go about your business without the meddlesome interference of bureaucrats (another word that acquired its pejorative sense around that time). And in place of predatory monopolists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller who were giving capitalism a bad name, “free enterprise” conjures up the plucky young entrepreneurs of the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger.
For most of the twentieth century, “free enterprise” was the homey, chamber-of-commerce name for capitalism. There’s a chair of free enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin, a Center for Free Enterprise at the University of South Florida, a Dr Pepper Free Enterprise Institute in Waco, Texas, and a Free Enterprise Leadership Conference held every year by the Jesse Helms center in Wingate, North Carolina. And the word capitalism doesn’t appear at all in the Web pages of the Horatio Alger Society, a group that honored Kenneth Lay a couple of years ago for, as they put it, “helping young people to . . . value the opportunities presented by America’s free enterprise system.”
Still, capitalism has always had some defenders who weren’t reticent about calling it by its given name, particularly the disciples of Ayn Rand and of libertarian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek, and Milton Friedman. They tend to be people who come to the defense of capitalism with something more like religious zeal.
You could hear some of that in the profession of faith that Kenneth Lay made to an interviewer a while ago: “I believe in God and I believe in free markets,” he said, and went on to suggest that Jesus would have agreed with him. Needless to say, that level of enthusiasm changes the tone of the discussion. When people extol the virtues of free enterprise, they usually invoke the rising standard of living and the inventions it spawns. When they talk about the virtues of capitalism they’re more likely to go on about the moral values of individualism and the freedom to fail that capitalism provides—the lesson that both O’Neill and Lindsay were quick to read in the Enron disaster. It’s a little scrap of bombast you can trace directly back to Ayn Rand’s turgid philosophizing—the notion that capitalism is never so glorious as when it’s strewing the ground with bodies. (Free-market zealots also like to use Schumpeter’s description of capitalism as “creative destruction,” though they usually neglect to mention Schumpeter’s conclusion that capitalism would wind up by destroying itself.)