TRAINS are a great place to meet people. Close proximity to a complete stranger for a finite period of time expands the horizons. Thus your correspondent found himself on the 17.02 train from Newcastle to York, iPad on lap, tapping out a post for Johnson last weekend. Sitting in the window seat was a young Edinburgh University student from China, on his way to London. We struck up a conversation.
Flicking through the iPad edition of last week's paper together, we came across the China section and its article about internal resettlement in the north of the country. Midway through the first paragraph, he stumbled. Turning to your correspondent, he asked a simple question. “In China,” he began, “I can understand the English-language newspapers. Why not here?”
It's a tough question. The student spoke very fluent English—in fact, the longest lull in conversation was on your correspondent's behalf, fumbling over an explanation of cliché to a person whose internal dictionary doesn't contain the word. (Perhaps there's a reason we borrowed a French word; the concept may not be universal.) Yet he has a valid point. Newspapers, in Britain at least, converse in a unique gobbledegook with its own name: journalese.
Newspapers rarely, if ever, report the facts in the way you would in conversation. Failing to find an easy explanation to give the Chinese student, your correspondent turned to a working example. “Love rats” infest British newspapers, if not the real world. The same applies to the verb “to knife”; an editor at some point must have decided that simply “stabbing” wasn't emotive enough. And of course the need for drama means mild criticism whispered in corridors become all-out “attacks” when rolled through the printing presses. Anyone who has committed any crime is tarred with the catch-all adjective “sick”, whether stealing sweets from a shop or leaving someone to die in the street. Journalese is part of the ink-stained wretch's tradition (how's that for a cliché?), handed down from section editor to reporter to reader over decades and more.
Journalese extends even to headlines. Can any native English speaker correctly parse "Perch 'Twitter abuse' probe" on the first attempt? Longer headlines online make stories like this clearer, but tabloid formats (and enormous headlines) require extreme concision. No wonder foreigners coming to newspapers with English as a second language have difficulty with our media. Journalists frequently remove all the helpful hints that English has developed over its generations of evolution, such as prepositions and articles, leaving a car crash of nouns and verbs that are impenetrable to our foreign friends.
The journalist's greatest enemy is his or her word count. It always looms large, ticking down like a doomsday clock. So hacks lean heavily on verbal crutches to express complicated issues succinctly. But they are cant and code, baffling to someone who has yet to be inducted into the circle of consumers of mass media. A friend who writes for a national newspaper notes that not all codes are identical: “you write for your audience—broadsheet readers and tabloid readers are often very different.” The Economist wards its writers away from using journalese: the style guide devotes 649 words (almost the length of this post) to examples to avoid—then links to three other entries on similar topics. That doesn't stop the paper's writers from still deploying verboten terms on occasion, though. Hence my fellow traveller's occasional difficulty.
For the best part of an hour your correspondent tried to explain why English language journalism, despite being some of the strongest and oldest in the world, adopts this lingo. We never got to the bottom of the matter; York beckoned. Journalese is a separate dialect, one which requires newcomers to put aside logic and bend the basic rules of grammar. Our press could express itself more clearly. But this strange language, with its own time-honoured rules, has its own function. It is not only concise, but winks at the reader familiar with it. People enjoy belonging to the circle. The philosophy John Reith brought to the founding the BBC applies today, both to print and to broadcast media: as well as informing, good journalism must entertain.
Readers' comments
The Economist welcomes your views. Please stay on topic and be respectful of other readers. Review our comments policy.
Sort:
I am a magazine writer and copy editor and do my utmost to delete all journalese and say it like it is. I also abhor the venom of some comments to online articles. That said, I have to say I am apalled that someone can write for a publication such as The Economist and be "a person whose internal dictionary doesn’t contain the word" cliché. Surely all writers who do not write for rags have to know the word, if only to be able to spot one a mile off so that it can be avoided at all costs?
Hmm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Edinburgh student was the one who didn't know the word "cliché". The writer of this article was the one trying to explain the word to the student.
It's also understandable how people don't know the word "cliché": As I'm typing this reply, the word "cliché" is underlined in red zig-zag lines - this website doesn't recognize the word.
It's not simply a case of journalese. It also has to do with cultural references.
I was speaking to French friend a while back, who told me that he was often left scratching his head when he reads The Economist. The reason? The punning headlines, cryptic captions, the vast cultural hinterland that he has know knowledge of.
If, like me, he'd watched British TV for the last several decades, read the newspapers, was familiar with popular slang, turns of phrases and latest media tropes, he'd have no difficulty. But then he wouldn't be French - he'd be British.
It cuts both ways, of course. A Brit reading a French magazine would similarly confused by references to 'la mouche du coche' (from a story by Lafontaine), Bérézina (after the defeat during Napoleon's Russian campaign) or by deliberate highbrow/lowbrow expressions used for stylistic effect.
The Chinese student can understand the English-language dailies because they use clear, precise, plain English, devoid of arcane cultural references or slang. But in real life, no English speaker does that - unless they're speaking to a foreigner.
Which brings us back to where we started…
Know knowledge --> no knowledge.
Turns of phrases --> turns of phrase.
Type in haste, repent at leisure.
As a Taiwanese who speaks Chinese, I can assure you we have the concept of cliché, at least in Taiwanese culture, which is a little different from the mainland's.
A turbulent and narcissistic, but not exclusively British, pig's breakfast.
Just the facts, ma'am.
I am from Pakistan in Edinburgh at the moment. I see eye to eye with this Chinese friend but as far as I am concerned I take it as a challenge to decipher the meaning of such 'gibberish or hocus-pocus'. At times I have to read it and then re-read and again for the third time with different intonation to understand what is that it wants to say. So for me personally it is OK!
As an American I can understand The Guardian just fine. But a UK tabloid like The Daily Mail? Forget it. What an atrocious rag, full of misspellings, redundancies and, of course, impenetrable clichés.
I had my own journey with local newspapers after moving to the United States.
I could speak English very well, but I had to learn it all over again, in some way.
There are cultural references and contexts that someone who did not grew up and lived in America could easily miss.
If you lack these references even if you understand the article you'd still be unable to fully appreciate the text.
I have noticed also that some of my American friends who read only tabloids have true difficulties reading The New York Times. It is their language after all, but it is not their cultural context.
My writing skill in English remain problematic but my comprehension and especially the appreciation of quality writing in books and periodicals has evolved immensely.
I doubt that I have met any newspaper editor in my beginnings in America. I would have been flattered had he/she questioned the American journalese, based only on my impression. Today, I believe that it would have been a mistake. I was the problem not the American journalese.
The Edinburgh Evening Times once carried a front-page leader on the, then, threat to Edinburgh's Sick Children's Hospital being partially sold to housing developers (I think it was). Extreme concision reduced the headline to, "Sick Kids to be Cut In Half". A grim laugh for the locals. Not so for visitors, perhaps?
This kind of thing is not difficult only for foreigners. There are distinct journalese dialects inside the same language, of course.
I once watched a focus group discussion about a newspaper. The editors wanted to know why lower-income readers wouldn't buy their paper.
The group gave a direct, unanimous answer: we can't understand it well — it is not written for us.
The paper was written in the same language as every paper in the country. But it was not their "flavor" of the language. Simple as that.
Oh, so journalists' argot is now called "journalese"... fancy that...
The English just love forming clubs that exclude others. It gives them a sense of superiority and 'specialness' - particularly as Britain declines relatively to be a middle-ranking world power. These clubs may be as large as the readership of a publication. Ironically these clubs, with their own knowing use of language quirks and idioms, convey the impression of adhering to notions of openness, inclusiveness, tolerance and fair-mindeness, but the intention - and what is actually achieved - is precisely the opposite.
Cultural allusions are unavoidable for interesting prose, innit. Part of the entertainment is working out some of the references or even looking them up.
While much of British culture is backward-looking and nostalgic that usually involves the choice of subject matter rather than the style. Even if the readership of The Economist is global, the language in which it is written is English. Fashionable notions of a global elite aside this means most Economist journalists, with some notable exceptions, writing in their mother tongue.
Great post. Thoughtful, relevant, useful, IMO ("IMO" = recently learned bloggerese).
Some thoughts:
* I share correspondent’s example of “cliché” as a word untranslatable into Chinese. I have been working on it for 1+ decade and still have not come up with anything satisfactory. The difficulty in the translation lies not in the concept which is easily stated in a couple of sentences. The difficulty lies in coining a short and easy term using no more than two characters that would capture the full meaning of the word. It is indeed very hard
* TE is not an easy paper to read for non-native English speaking Asians, Chinese or otherwise. Again this is IMO only and a gross generalization; there are of course exceptions. The reason for this linguistic hardship is language is seldom just words one learns by reading and listening. There is an entire culture, in front, behind, underneath, to the R. to the L, associated with words. Overhead too. Asian and Western cultures are far apart. The words in their respective languages have defined meanings in their receptive dictionaries. But the words also have meanings not defined in the dictionaries. The meanings are usually connotational, and the connotations are always a function of contexts. These connotations are next to impossible to define, in or outside a dictionary. They can only be “lived” and “felt”. One “lives” a language to truly “know” a language. I think if a language is a corporeal body, one gets to know it best by knowing it in the Biblical sense.
* Returning to the dialects spoken in journalism, the TE dialect, IMO, is, on a continuum of narrow to wide bandwidth, closer to the extreme end of “narrow” than “wide”. TE reads like it has its own journalistic culture. Even its commenters on its multitudinous blogs, by and large share a TE culture. In saying this, I am neither complimenting nor denigrating what I see. I am merely saying the TE dialect is closer to a type of “club speak” than say, the dialects spoken by NYT or WSJ. I am guessing perhaps the origin of this “club speak” is TE is a British paper. Britain is historically (I stress “historically”) the home of imperialist assumptions rather than democratic assumptions. As such there is generally a tendency in the paper to assume its readers have a “colonized” mind. Lest this is too provocative a statement, I will phrase and say it in a different way: There is generally a tendency to assume readers are more dumb than they are. The assumption trickles down to the way TE talks. To the extent some, though by no means all , of its journalists, from wherever recruited, appear eager to adopt a “talking down” style. Oddly enough, the most democratic, unclublike journalism dialect is spoken by BBC, another British institution. Again, this observation is IMO only. BBC, to me, represents a brand of journalism that has evolved to its fullest sexiest potential. It exudes the dignified self-assurance of a Sean Connery, Michael Cane, Judy Dench, Helen Mirren at their best. No teeny-bopper so desperate to impress he drowns his hair in florescent green mousse but forgot to clean his teeth.
* Last but not least, journalism or un-journalism, I think the mark of all good writing is clarity. This Johnson post, for instance, IMO, is clear. Clear means not ambiguous. Clear means the writer knows what he/she wants to say and say it without mousse or brown teeth. I think if or when members of the same club cannot figure out what is being said, the problem may not be dialect. Dialectic maybe. But not dialect.
Very good, @ashbird, especially your first two points.
As to the assumption that readers are more dumb than they are, I guess it does not bother me that much — TE has their views on everything, I have mine on a few things, and it is fun to "argue" over our disagreements (which are many) every week.
But then, maybe it is because I'm used to Brazilian newspapers and magazines, which do not simply treat you as if you are dumber than you really are — they assume their readers are total morons, whose minds are blank slates waiting for their words of wisdom to learn what to think and do on each and every subject.
Thank you for your kind reply. I am very happy to receive your feedback.
Obviously I enjoy reading TE. Or I wouldn't be posting comments regularly. What I said about their assumption was my way of explaining something I had observed about the paper. It was not intended to be denigrating. In any case, what I said represents a subjective opinion. I could be wrong.
TE has many smart readers. Sometimes it is an education itself reading what they write. Other times the comments are so witty and funny they are really enjoyable to read.
@perguntador,
Sorry, I accidentally hit Post before I finished.
Where I live there is a local Chinese television station. A program they put up every evening matches the Brazilian newspaper or magazine you describe. It is very popular.
I think Sherbrooke makes a good point about grammatical structures, and of course it is true as many comments have pointed out, that almost any written sub-genre has its own style. That said, I do agree that british newspapers are quite an unusual case in that they often combine simple sentence structures with archaic and little used adjectives, verbs and phrases, making them quite difficult to follow even where people have a good general understanding of grammar and vocab.
That said, the same is often true of english spoken by natives, when I spent a year as a masters student at an english university with a high proportion of foreign students, I did learn over time to adapt the way I spoke to eliminate certain turns of phrase that are easily understood by native speakers of any educational level but obscure to even the most highly trained non-native speakers. I guess it illustrates the difference between learning a language by imitation over a long period of time, and learning it through teaching in a classroom setting.
Every field has its own specialized vocabulary.
You need to know about 2500 words for basic comprehension to read a local newspaper.
More advanced publications require a larger vocabulary of 5000 words.
A specialized journal uses an additional several thousand words to allow understanding, whether Economics, Maths or Astrophysics.
A local newspaper is a local. And many words are specialized to place and culture: Charing Cross Central Point, Old Bailey, and St Pancras Tube have less meaning to a person from Rio.
And a Chinese Newspaper in English has specific place and event references that are indecipherable to a Belgian traveler.
You have to learn the local lingo and then it gets easier.
Learning curves apply and time must be paid.
---- (mistakenly entered comment on another article in this box)
Oh, I beg to disagree.
Most of the English newspapers edited by non-English speaking staff have one thing in common: they tend to copy semantic structures from the mother tongue into English. I.e. sentences are not re-written from scratch; they are largely translated.
You can see Russian newspapers using the common semantic analogues from Russian, French - from French, so, I guess, the same applies to Chinese.
Hence, to be frank, it's not the word count or slang; in fact, English newspapers are on the easy side of understanding. It's the mastery of the language.
Perfectly said.
I caught (and appreciated) the wink in the use of "your correspondent" instead of "I" in a piece about the peculiar language of journalism.
Yes, your reader knows it's a style thing at The Economist.
This was an interesting read! Thanks!
I know how that Chinese student felt, because I had a similar experience while living in the Philippines. Since I never learned Tagalog, I relied on the many mainstream English language newspapers available in the early-1990s. They had the annoying habit of beginning an article in English, then inserting patches of Tagalog throughout, especially when quoting government officials, witnesses to crime, etc. I see here that that quirky style continues to this day:
http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/opinion/editorials/20598-ph-on-rock...
Elsewhere, there were regular - and sometimes very quaint - examples of 'Filipino-English'. I would regularly read of sex offenders found guilty of 'mashing breasts' and sentenced to 12 months in prison. And the UK, Australian, or US headline "Lawmakers Consider New Bill" was rendered something like "Solons Mull New Pitch" (!?!?!).
It took some getting used to, but I considered myself fluent after about a month. You're right; journalese is a separate dialect, and one doesn't necessarily have to be a foreigner to be confused (or amused) by it.
As an Australian I have never encountered the word 'solons' meaning 'lawmakers'.The word 'pitch' referred to is mostly American usage.
As an Australian I have never encountered the word 'solons' meaning 'lawmakers'.The word 'pitch' referred to is mostly American usage.
From what I understood "solons" was the Filipino language translation of "lawmakers"
From what I understood "solons" was the Filipino language word for "lawmakers"
It is? Er? I'm an American and hardly ever hear of a new law being called a "Pitch". Maybe "pitch new law" could be called American usage, but I think "Pitch" in this context is a Filipino one; we do have "Pitch" as a noun, btw, just not as "a law".
Anyone studying Chinese will hit this problem as well. The materials written for language learners and the stuff written in the real news is very different. The oft repeated phrase, "you need 3000 characters to read a newspaper," is not actually true. You need far more, because the missing words are invariably important.
For example, an article on the Economist like this one, might contain 700 different words, but the vocabulary needed to read it is going to be far higher.
It's demoralizing for language learners when they realize that the textbook examples of a news story or newspaper article do not prepare a person to encounter the real thing.
Quite true NC; your last sentence perfectly captures my experience as a language student in Japan many years ago.
NC,
Totally second what you said.
This reminds me of my experiance with shakesperian verse, when I was a little kid it sounded like giberish to me, by the time I was 15 after hearing countless exerpts of it and reading Romeo & Juliet, and Mcbeth, I could understand it, now I feal I understand it almost fluently,