The harm that bad English does

The harm that bad English does

by

Sharad Bailur

“Is it?”, was the first “stylish” expression that I heard from a boxwalla working for ICI the chemical multinational giant, some time in the late fifties. He meant, “Did you?” or “Is that so?” I was young then. Young enough to think that anything spoken by anyone in authority, someone who was so visibly in control, was correct. “Is it?” as a form of cure-all formed part of the multinational boxwalla lexicon for over two decades and seems to have died some sort of an unsung death about two decades ago. I still hear it rarely, but more and more among the elderly.

Our inability to understand the full nuances of a phrase in English, of course, comes of thinking in our own language and then trying as hard as possible to translate it into educated English. That, at least, is understandable. What is not understandable is carelessness about correct meanings. It is quite the thing in Mumbai for an invitation to be delivered for the inauguration of something, “at the hands of”, some body. The fact that “at the hands of” has derogatory connotations is something that the ordinary Marathi speaker finds incomprehensible. I once told a colleague that only murders got committed “at the hands of” someone. Similarly some time ago an official note sent up to the top management of my organisation referred to the “enormity of the task”. It took some persuading to explain to everyone right up to the top that “enormity” meant gross wickedness, not magnitude or enormousness.

This has resulted in major disasters, not just among the ordinary people but in matters of national importance like India’s foreign policy and even in the controlling of law and order. When the British left India they had clearly stated that British India recognises Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. A suzerain is a state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous. In other words while British India recognised that China had some control over Tibet, Tibet would be recognised as being internally autonomous. Some uneducated idiot in the Foreign Office confused “suzerainty” with, “sovereignty”, and in 1951 the Foreign Office announced that India recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. This meant that Tibet was recognised by India as Chinese territory. Any hope of having Tibet as a buffer state between ourselves and China evaporated with just this one misinterpretation of English, to the benefit of the Chinese.

Today the “K” word is Kashmir. People are trained in Pakistan in training camps with the sole purpose of causing murder and mayhem after crossing over into Indian Kashmir. They have been responsible for a long running battle with the Indian police and the army but it is not just the Indian army or the police that are the targets of these animals. It is the local people of Kashmir. Indian newspapers revel in calling such people, ”Militants”. A militant is a person who militates or rebels against the established order. It would be correct to describe a local Kashmiri as a militant if he does not like India and Indians and rebels. A person who sneaks in from across the border to commit mass murder in India should not be given this spuriously benign face. He is a terrorist, plain and simple. By describing such people as militants, India is actually playing into the hands of Pakistan which gratefully accepts such descriptions, since it meets very well with the stand that it takes. At the recent talks Pakistan bucked like a bronco when the Indian side described what was happening as “cross border terrorism”. For the first time someone in the Foreign Office had understood the significance of using wrong language and the harm it can do, and had come out with a correct, if blunt, term for the phenomenon.

Much the same sort of short shrift is given to other less important but nevertheless difficult problems. Veerappan is a brigand, a dacoit and a murderer. He has been responsible for killing more than seventeen people. Some half literate newspaper hack called him a ”sandalwood smuggler”. The epithet stuck, if only because other reporters had neither the education nor the application to find out if that was all Veerappan was. The fact that he had a much more malign face than that of a mere sandal wood smuggler was lost in a cacophony of misleading, almost eulogistic, description of Veerappan as some sort of modern Robin Hood.

This sort of wrong description does not apply only to humans. Large multinationals sell “ice cream” that isn’t ice cream. It is made of vegetable oil, water and emulsifying agents. Luckily, it is not harmful. When pressed, they are careful enough, for fear of the law, to call it “frozen dessert” or “non-dairy ice cream”. In Europe the same thing is kept under separate storage and is called Mellorine, not ice cream. Here, people, who don’t know better, are paying the prices they would for real ice cream and eating stuff made of vegetable oil, and they are not aware of the fact that they are being cheated simply because they do not know the difference between “frozen dessert” and ice cream. When I pointed this out to Dr. Kurien, he was the first to instruct the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation to insist on giving Amul ice cream the slogan, “Real milk. Real ice cream”, to distinguish it from the imitation.

North India is facing an epidemic of adulterated milk being sold to unsuspecting housewives. Testing for fat, which is the normal way to test milk, does not work. This concoction of vegetable oil, detergent powder, urea, chalk or poster paint and dirty water goes by the facile name, ”synthetic milk”. Synthetic milk is nothing but poison because the titanium dioxide in the poster paint is carcinogenic. The bacteria contaminated water often results in enteric infections. The description, “Synthetic milk”, gives to this concoction a spuriously benign face and benefits those who make it. We should, I suppose, thank our stars that it is not called “non-dairy milk”. It would have been, if it had the benefit of multinational clout behind it.

Much of the problem of misnomers and mis-descriptions comes from two separate phenomena. The first is an inadequate education. There is constant pressure on children to do well in school but no pressure is greater than for them to do well in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Almost unanimously, all parents wish that their children should become engineers or doctors. Therefore while attention is given to the child’s prowess in Mathematics and Science there is no pressure to learn how to write well, especially in English, partly also because the parents themselves are uncomfortable in the language. Those schools that have English as their medium of instruction develop in children the ability to speak fairly fluently, but their ability to write is, at best, barely passable. Second, those who do really well are invariably those in the Science stream and therefore get into colleges offering professional courses. Those who opt for the Arts are almost always second-raters. Their prowess at English is probably worse than those who do Science. It is these students who finally drift into journalism. There are exceptions, of course, but this is more or less what happens. For example, I was a second-rater. If I had not gone into banking I would have become a journalist. Today, I do Corporate Communications. Near enough.

Third, reading and the spirit of curiosity does not come easily to Indian students, used as they are to rote learning. And with the advent of television even those who would normally have developed the habit tend to become couch potatoes and watch faces and bodies on the screen jigging up and down like so many marionettes. The absence of television did a lot for earlier generations to encourage a habit of reading. Reading by itself improves the writing of any language. If the reading is extensive in range it makes for broad frames of reference and better general knowledge. The absence of the reading habit is what these former students take into their journalistic careers. Combined with mental laziness this leads to journalese of a peculiar sort. For example, we have this trite illiterate headline every year after a heavy downpour: “City limps back to normalcy”. (Why not just plain “normal”? Nobody knows.) The same headline every year. It is often the result of the desk editor being too lazy to invent another headline. It can also be that he genuinely does not know better. But much worse, it could be that he couldn’t care less.

It is this factor, of infirm understanding of English, that is really responsible for mis-description and the wrong use of words that make for meanings widely different from those that should actually be used. The only way this can be improved upon is for newspapers to employ people who are not merely able to write but those who write well. If seniors among the editorial staff take it upon themselves to instil into their juniors a certain habit of merely wishing to write better, they automatically will over time. The willingness to learn to craft sentences and take pride in writing ability comes much later, but this, at least, will be a beginning.

Some thirty years ago I was appalled to see a first edit by the celebrated Shyamlal in the Times of India that began with, “Who do they think they are kidding?” Today, “more better”, commonly finds place in its second edits. It appears that we shall have to be satisfied with being condemned to many more years of, “Limping back to normalcy”.