It's only words...

Imprecise language

There’s never a time when, on review, I’m not thinking: “I could’ve put that better”. Often, after a short time, the more precise, clearer alternative’s obvious. Equally often, there’s no clear, elegant solution, just a nagging feeling that there has to be a better way of expressing things.

Beckett, asked about the meaning of Waiting for Godot, tersely answered: “it means what it says”. There’s someone confident that they’ve got things as right as it is possible to do so.

Sometimes, there is a need for precision. My favourite example is at the head of a turntable ladder. Not under any pressure, in broad daylight, and “up a bit, left a bit” may seem sufficiently accurate. Three o’clock in the morning, concealed from the operator by smoke and darkness, and needing to avoid a good roasting and dodge having your head crushed against a concrete lintel, and you appreciate the need to get things spot on. Luckily, there’s only six things the kit can do, and the meaning of the words used, I think, is self-evident:

Train left.

Train right.

That’s the left a bit, right a bit out of the way. Up and down is more complicated, because both the length of the ladder and the angle it’s at are variable.

Extend, and house: these mean just that. Extend the ladder further, or pull the sections in.

Elevate, depress. When you want the angle changed, towards the vertical or the horizontal.

Before getting shot off into the unknown, you need to be armed with the correct vocabulary. Back in the everyday world, ‘just bung us out here’ is enough to get the cab driver to drop you off where you want to go.

There was a lot of bitching and moaning in the media last week about the quality of writing published on line, with too many making the assumption that it was a black and white distinction between professors of linguistics wielding quills and bottles of ink, and everyone else using a keyboard to churn out text-speak. Twitter came in for some severe criticism, and it is the place to go if you want to instantly find muddled their, they’re, and theres, but there’s good discipline in the 140 character limit. Even more so when you have time to play the exactly 140 characters game, even though I regularly cheat by omitting a final full stop.

Every morning a Radio 4 interview will feature a politician strangling the language to avoid an honest answer that will show him or her or their party or colleagues in a bad light. Words. The thick fog of language, the means by which people avoid communicating with each other.