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From: "Parlin, Steven" <PARLINS AT culver.org>
To: "'Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion'" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [percy-l] Here's the full article ---
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 16:12:12 -0500

The New Statesman Essay - The tyranny of Nicespeak

Deborah Cameron Monday 5th November 2001

Today, even academics are told how to answer the phone, and every hospital
has a "mission statement". Deborah Cameron on the murder of public English

In 1990 I returned to Britain after two years abroad, and found that I no
longer spoke the language. My difficulty was not with ordinary conversation,
but with public discourse. The rules had changed, and I could not get the
hang of them. I was baffled when a worker at a fast-food outlet handed me a
solitary carton of milk with a cheery: "Enjoy your meal!" I was unsure how
to respond when bank tellers or supermarket checkout staff addressed me by
name, as though I were an intimate friend. I pored uncomprehendingly over
the "charters" that came through my letterbox, pledging the council, the
Inland Revenue and the local GP surgery to the highest standards of
"customer care". It was the same at work. My academic colleagues had adopted
new ways of using English, and while I understood the words themselves, I
had no idea what real-world entities they referred to. What, for instance,
was the mysterious "quality" that we discussed at every meeting? What did
people mean when they spoke earnestly about "aims and objectives" and
"learning outcomes"? I was equally puzzled when I read the "mission
statement" a committee had put together the previous year. This struck me as
a long and convoluted statement of the obvious: we educated undergraduates,
and we strove to do this well. Why was that a "mission", and who needed to
have it spelt out?

Then there were the instructions on how to answer the phone: "X Institute of
Higher Education, Deborah Cameron speaking." At least we were not required
to append chirpily: "How may I help you?'' But it seemed strange that
instructions had been issued at all, and stranger still that they were
generally obeyed. Only a few years before, administrators who took it upon
themselves to prescribe a standard phone salutation to academics would have
been derided as ignorant petty tyrants.

The changes I was so conscious of had actually begun some time before I went
away. I had dismissed them as passing fads. I returned, however, to what had
become a revolution in public language. The likes of my colleagues no longer
thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated
thoughts originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become
native speakers. Today, this language pervades both the public and private
sectors, and much of the working population is fluent in it. We may joke (as
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, does) about the cliched
absurdity of mission statements and standardised phone greetings, but we
find it hard to remember a time when these were not cliches - when we
reacted to them with genuine incomprehension, and sometimes with genuine
outrage.

Cultural critics had little to say about the revolution. Many were caught up
in a far noisier debate, as advocates or opponents of "political
correctness". Arguments raged about the linguistic practices of a radical
fringe; Orwell's Newspeak was invoked to portray feminist councillors and
anti-racist teachers as the new thought police. Meanwhile, with far less
fanfare (and almost no sustained critical analysis), mainstream public
English suffered a corporate takeover.

I use the phrase "corporate takeover" because the new public language was
shaped by ideas and practices that originated in the business world. The
"mission statement" - and its shorter, pithier relative the "vision
statement" - was popularised by management gurus such as Tom Peters, who
noted that successful or "excellent" companies had a clear definition of
their core goals and values, which they communicated explicitly to every
employee. Most such statements do not refer explicitly to the real core goal
of any capitalist enterprise: "Our mission is to make the largest possible
profit for our shareholders." Nor, on the whole, do they allude directly to
whatever it is that the company actually does. The journalist Dorothy
Grace-Elder once reported on a visit to a Glasgow sanitary-ware factory,
during which the workers were asked if they knew the company's mission;
after a moment of puzzled silence, one finally replied: "Wur mission's tae
make lavvies." Old-style manufacturing industries did not need mission
statements. The mission statement belongs to an era in which the main
purpose of many companies is not making but branding things; the language in
which a company represents itself to the world is part of its brand-image.

As part of the marketising process that began during the Thatcher era and
has continued to the present day, British public sector institutions were
also encouraged to view themselves as brands, and to use language similarly,
for purposes of self-promotion rather than public information. Nobody needs
to be told what universities, schools and hospitals do, but they all have
mission and vision statements now, most of them comprising platitudes such
as "serving the community" and "pursuing excellence". These slogans are as
meaningless as the old mottos on schoolchildren's blazers: "Pietas" or
"Manners Makyth Man". That they are written in modern English only
emphasises their vacuity: as a friend of mine observed when asked to speak
at a conference on "pursuing excellence in facilities management": "Who the
hell would pursue second-rateness?"

The branding of language does not stop with the mission statement. One of
the things I found most disconcerting on my return home was the
proliferation of formulaic and scripted exchanges in the service industries
- the standard phone salutations delivered with standard perky intonation;
the replacement of traditional British courtesies by Americanisms such as
"How may I help you?"; the exhortations to "Enjoy your meal" (uttered
whether or not they made sense in a given context). This way of speaking did
not evolve naturally; it reflected the corporation's growing desire to
regulate and control the language that its representatives used. The idea
was to subordinate the personality of the individual speaker to a centrally
designed corporate voice. Only if everyone in an organisation said the same
thing in the same way could customers receive what one company's
how-to-answer-the-phone manual called "a consistent experience of the
brand".

An extreme instance made news earlier this year: a call-centre in Bangalore,
serving US customers, required its employees to conceal their "offshore"
location by impersonating Americans. Operators not only perfected their
Midwestern accents; they invented American names, and personal histories to
go with them, and watched episodes of Friends to keep their colloquialisms
current. But you don't have to go to India to find workers adopting
prescribed forms of language at odds both with their ordinary ways of
speaking and with what they think of as their "real" identities or
personalities. All over Britain, in call-centres and supermarkets, airlines
and insurance companies, workers are being instructed in every nuance of
verbal performance: what words to say, where to pause, what emotions to
project using pitch, stress and tone. In call-centres, hi-tech surveillance
makes it possible to enforce these demands consistently. In supermarkets,
employees know that the customer they fail to greet with the prescribed open
gaze and ready smile could be a "mystery shopper" employed by the company to
make spot checks on their customer service skills.

The commonest instruction given to service workers is: "Smile when you say
that." Let customers know what a great company you work for, and how happy
you are to be serving them on its behalf. For public sector professionals,
the pressure takes a different form. Despite the telephone answering
instructions I quoted, professionals do not usually have to perform someone
else's script. Instead, they have to produce their own propaganda, using a
language imposed from above by the government agencies that allocate their
funds.

This was what was going on in the discussions of "quality" that mystified me
in 1990. The government, trying to improve the accountability of publicly
funded bodies, had set up agencies to measure the quality of university
teaching. What was evaluated, however, was not what happened in lecture
halls, labs and seminar rooms. Primarily, it was (and still is) a linguistic
artefact: the "self-assessment document" in which departments define their
mission and evaluate the quality of the education they provide. In theory,
this is an exercise in critical self-reflection; in practice, departments
are playing a zero-sum game, competing with others for finite and inadequate
resources. If they do not claim to be "excellent", they will inevitably come
out losers. That is why British academics, just like managers in
corporations, have become fluent in promotional jargon, accentuating the
positive even if that means being economical with the truth.

Self-assessment documents do not say, for instance, that large classes and
overdependence on casualised teaching staff are compromising standards.
Instead, they say things like: "The challenge of teaching larger classes has
been addressed through rolling programmes of staff development; standards
are monitored through robust quality assurance procedures, in the context of
an institution-wide commitment to continuous improvement." This is an
invented example, but I assure you that it is not (quite) a parody. Like the
political discourse criticised by Orwell in "Politics and the English
Language", it takes a series of buzz-phrases ("the challenge of X". "rolling
programme", "staff development", "quality assurance", "continuous
improvement") and uses the verbal glue of vagueness and abstraction ("has
been addressed", "in the context of") to stick them together in the manner
of a prefabricated hen house. The resulting sentence contains hardly any
information, but that is not its point. The point is to demonstrate to the
Quality Assurance Agency that the university speaks the approved
managerialist language, which in turn signifies its commitment to the values
embodied in that language. The English literature scholar Peter Womack has
likened academics writing this sort of prose to Winston Smith in 1984,
composing his features into the required "expression of quiet optimism" as
he turns to face the telescreen.

Managing language is a booming business, supporting legions of consultants
whose expertise may consist of having once read a book about transactional
analysis or neurolinguistic programming. One big corporation advertises that
its employees are trained in "expanded listening": they have learnt that
listening is a "four-stage process" and that most people listen at a "25 per
cent level of efficiency". (So far as I know, no reputable psycholinguistic
research supports either claim.) The New York Times recently reported that
computer help-desk workers are being trained to diagnose not the technical
problem a caller wants help with, but the caller's personality type. If the
worker uses a language (pseudo-) scientifically designed for the caller's
personality, the interaction will be judged successful, whether or not the
computer problem is solved.

In politics, too, there is a growing faith in the power of managed language
to transform less tractable realities. In the spring of 1999, New York
police officers shot and killed an unarmed Gambian named Amadou Diallo; they
claimed to have mistaken him for a dangerous armed criminal. More than 1,000
people were arrested in the protests that ensued. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and
his police chief, Howard Safir, responded by handing out pocket-sized cards
that reminded police officers to speak politely to members of the public: to
address them as "sir" and "ma'am", and say "good morning", "please" and
"thank you". Faced with a serious political problem, Giuliani - not, as we
have seen in recent weeks, a stupid or insensitive man - resorted to the
premise of corporate customer care: say the right words, speak nicely and
all will be forgiven.

Such examples suggest that we need to move beyond George Orwell's
mid-20th-century analysis of what ails our public language. Orwell's main
concern was the ideologically motivated use of words to conceal the truth;
the remedy he proposed was plain English, a prose style as clear and
transparent as glass. The problem with today's public language, however, is
not so much that it represents reality inaccurately or dishonestly, but that
it does not set out to be a representation of anything at all. When
organisations proclaim they are "pursuing excellence", or when they write
scripts for their employees to parrot, they want us not to believe the
words, but to applaud the sentiments behind them. Their claims are not
primarily "veracity claims" ("what I am telling you is a fact"), but
"sincerity claims" ("what I am telling you comes from the heart").

Orwell's antidote to Newspeak - plain English - was intended to expose
statements of dubious veracity: he reasoned that if we stripped away the
obfuscation and understood what was being asserted, we would expose the
lies. But dubious claims of sincerity cannot be exposed in the same way.
"Nicespeak" is dishonest in a different way from Newspeak, and plain English
is less effective as a critical response to it. Indeed, Orwell's
prescription has been co-opted by the other side: no one knows better than a
corporate PR-person or political spin-doctor the value of plain language for
creating ersatz intimacy and simulating sincere concern.

If fake sincerity does not respond to the bracing tonic of Orwellian
plainness, perhaps we should try the homeopathic approach: irony. This is
the technique of anti-corporate "culture jammers": take our adversaries'
language and turn it against them by inflecting it with a different or
opposite meaning. ("Just Do It," the anti-sweatshop campaigners tell Nike -
meaning: "Pay your workers a living wage.") Admittedly, the ironist has a
challenging task in a world where a notice can announce in all seriousness:
"In order to better serve you, we are closed this afternoon." But if our
mission is to expose the emptiness behind the painted smile of Nicespeak,
irony and satire may be our most effective weapons: suitably postmodern
remedies for a postmodern linguistic disease.

Deborah Cameron is professor of languages at the Institute of Education,
University of London, and the author of Good to Talk: living and working in
a communication culture (Sage, £16.99)

© The Author © New Statesman Ltd. 2001. All rights reserved. Please contact
the publisher.
The New Statesman is registered as a newspaper in the UK and the USA
>From cstuartchapman AT yahoo.com Wed Mar 5 00:50:13 2003
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I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby
Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses
the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.

C. Stuart Chapman, Ph.D.

---------------------------------
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I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of
Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine,
it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.
 
C. Stuart Chapman, Ph.D. <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? 
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>From JHForest AT cs.com Wed Mar 5 06:35:39 2003
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From: JHForest AT cs.com
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In a message dated 3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time,
cstuartchapman AT yahoo.com writes:

> I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby
> Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it
> uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.

Congratulations!

Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN?

Jim Forest
* * *
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
Jim's e-mail: <jhforest AT cs.com>
Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier AT cs.com>
tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
* * *

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<HTML>In a message dated 3/5/20=
03 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman AT yahoo.com writes:
 
 <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=3DCITE style=3D"BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-=
LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">I thought that you Percyite=
s would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Fo=
ote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspond=
ence heavily.</BLOCKQUOTE>
 
 Congratulations!
 
 Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? IS=
BN?
 
 Jim Forest
 * * *
 Jim & Nancy Forest
 Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
 Jim's e-mail: <jhforest AT cs.com>
 Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier AT cs.com>
 tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
 Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
 Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
 * * *</HTML>

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Sorry about the lack of details. The book is being published by the
University Press of Mississippi. ISBN: 1578063590.
The book spells out some of the themes of Foote (and Percy) that I've
mentioned in some earlier postings here. Am also trying to get Jay Tolson to
review a copy.
Even though I mainly lurk, I enjoy very much this board.

All the best,
Stuart
JHForest AT cs.com wrote:In a message dated 3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe
Standard Time, cstuartchapman AT yahoo.com writes:

I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby
Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses
the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.

Congratulations!

Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN?

Jim Forest
* * *
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
Jim's e-mail: <jhforest AT cs.com>
Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier AT cs.com>
tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
* * *

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
--0-1473203276-1046866542=:2727
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

Sorry about the lack of details. The book is being published by the
University Press of Mississippi. ISBN: 1578063590.
The book spells out some of the themes of Foote (and Percy) that I've
mentioned in some earlier postings here. Am also trying to get Jay
Tolson to review a copy.
Even though I mainly lurk, I enjoy very much this board.
 
All the best,
Stuart
 JHForest AT cs.com wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff
2px solid">In a message dated
3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman AT yahoo.com writes:
 
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff
2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px" TYPE="CITE">I thought that you Percyites would
like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A
Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence
heavily.</BLOCKQUOTE> Congratulations! Just a few
details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN? Jim
Forest * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811
GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's e-mail: <jhforest AT cs.com>
 Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier AT cs.com> tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 /
fax: (+31-72) 515-4180 Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site:
http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site:
http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm * * *
</BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? 
<a
href="http://rd.yahoo.com/finance/mailtagline/*http://taxes.yahoo.com/";>Yahoo!
Tax Center</a> - forms, calculators, tips, and more
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Subject: [percy-l] "...to the gas chamber..."
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I wasn't sure if it was Percy who had originally said this, or Percy quoting
Flannery O'Connor or someone else. I recently came across it in "Signposts
in a Strange Land" in the epilogue "An Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy" --
last line (p. 396, Picador).

Am I correct in assuming this is a "Percy original" and this is the first
time the phrase had been said? Or is he referring to another use of the
phrase?

By the way, I just finished Tolson's biography of Percy ("Pilgrim in the
Ruins") and I thought it was fantastic.

Karey

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<DIV>I wasn't sure if it was Percy who had =
originally=20
said this, or Percy quoting Flannery O'Connor or =
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recently came across it in "Signposts in a Strange Land" in the epilogue =
"An=20
Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy" -- last line (p. 396, Picador). =20
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<DIV>Am I correct in assuming this is a =
"Percy original"=20
and this is the first time the phrase had been said?  Or is he =
referring to=20
another use of the phrase?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>By the way, I just finished Tolson's =
biography of=20
Percy ("Pilgrim in the Ruins") and I thought it was =
fantastic. =20
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<DIV>Karey</DIV>
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[percy-l] Here's the full article ---, Parlin, Steven, 02/22/2003