Dialogue: A plague upon this misuse of language

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

In Europe for hundreds of years the summer often brought with it the plague. Times haven't changed much. My laptop was seriously contaminated last week by a virus of mass destruction. This form of pestilence is transmitted much as was the Black Death by fleas and rodents - narrow shoulders hunched over their poisonous keyboards, peering at VDUs with their too-close-together eyes. Their depravity deprives citizens of time and money most try to spend constructively.

Dante, were he alive and working on the Inferno, would undoubtedly place them well below burglars and common thieves, deep among the flames with thugs and brigands. They are the modern blasphemers.

There, I feel better now.

Londoners all those years ago, if they had horses and the dosh, would ride out of the town into the countryside, understanding not how the disease originated but that it was more readily spread among those living in crowded conditions.

Riding out of town to the beach in my horsepower seemed an attractive option when I realised I was infected, but the blustery weather and a shortage of dosh restrained me.

By staying, I'm bravely facing another epidemic undermining the language of public discourse. It is inappropriatitis and it's slightly less lethal form, unacceptabilitis. Inappropriatitis seemed to reach its peak a few weeks ago when a police officer on a radio news item was speaking of a case where an intruder had found a woman in bed. Did the man assault her, he was asked?

"He touched her inappropriately," was the reply. I wondered how your average intruder would touch a woman frightened out of her wits "appropriately".

One would normally expect this plague to have subsided after such a peak, but no. It's obviously in the water supply at Parliament because MPs can utter hardly a sentence without this symptom of language sickness. Even the Prime Minister, previously rigorous in her choice of simple, direct words, has shown some recent signs of contracting the illness.

To the victims, almost every human thought or act is called "acceptable" or "unacceptable", "appropriate" or "inappropriate". Behind these symptoms is an intellectual fog that softens and blurs all moral and ethical judgments, and blunts facts and opinions. Research shows that politicians are born with a gene that makes them susceptible to infection, but it has recently spread to journalists, previously regarded as relatively immune.

Language sickness can have a devastating effect on one's perception of reality. Last weekend I watched the most inept display of rugby by an All Black team since a test against the Lions in 1971.

Andrew Mehrtens decided early in the match to see if the Argentina fullback and wingers could catch the ball when he kicked it to them. They did, almost flawlessly. So - as though entranced by their skill - he insisted on giving them chances to demonstrate it.

The Argentines tried similar tactics against the All Blacks and they dropped the ball almost without exception, even behind their own line. One of the All Black backs looked uncannily like a Groucho Marx movie called Rugby Soup.

Afterwards, the Argentinians - having very unluckily lost the match in which they showed vastly superior ball skills - were accused of playing negative or spoiling rugby. The All Blacks were mildly praised by the team supporters and sports journalists (who so often appear to be supporters too) for not panicking, and mildly criticised for "mistakes". There was even a hint that the poor dears wanted to get home at the end of an arduous season.

Now, among the most basic of rugby skills is catching the ball, throwing a level pass just in front of your team-mate, and concentrating on taking a pass when one is likely to come your way. I have seen schoolboy teams supremely adept at these skills that the All Blacks have had difficulty mastering all season.

But the clincher came when Anton Oliver - probably fresh from a political philosophy course at Otago University - said the All Blacks needed to take "personal responsibility" for the ball. They didn't drop the bloody thing, they just didn't take personal responsibility for it.

Deluded by wet-bus-ticket language like that, the All Blacks will never develop any of the mental toughness and determination that characterised the play of their forebears. Oliver should have apologised to the supporters for the serious lapse in player skills, and promised to pay serious attention to rectifying these problems before next season.

Many of us would sooner see the team go down playing with competence and guts against a better side than win in such slovenly style as they did last Saturday. Unless Mitchell and Oliver and company tell the players about the world in simple, accurate words, they will one day soon come apart at the seams as they did in the last World Cup.

Accurate and forthright speech has a conditioning effect on how we perceive the world and, consequently, on behaviour. Maybe they should get rid of the sports psychologist and hire a semanticist, a spade-is-a-spade specialist.