Newspapers do strange things with English. A few years ago, the New York Times reported that two men whose boat had capsized ‘treaded water’ for two hours. I runned immediately to a friend who works there and throwed down the copy. ‘Who writed this rubbish?’
But then, in October another Times headline winned the prize when it goed on to declare, ‘The outer limits of optimism; how AOL’s sunny forecasts outshined the gloomy facts.’ I canned hardly believe my eyes. Excuse me, but the past tense of shine issed shone when I goed to school. I ammed so bemused at the paper’s obvious revulsion for what grammarians call ‘strong’ English verbs that I almost overlooked the gloomy tale of woe involved.
This from a paper so politically correct it once declared a company to be in the ‘African-American’ because the computer flagged ‘black’ as too sensitive – perhaps a ‘strong’ adjective. The Nation magazine a few years ago ran a review of a book about riots in 18th century London, pointing out the prominent role played by African-Americans in the mobs. Well I suppose they would have been prominent, with their time machines and all. Maybe that was what the Reverend Al Sharpton was up to when he went to London in the late 1990s and reported on his return about the interesting discussions he had had with the African-American brothers in England.
I wrote to the Nation editor at the time, saying that I was eagerly awaiting a review of the director’s cut of Battleship Potemkin, a narrative of the mutiny in the Imperial Russian African-American Sea fleet. Never heard back.
Only this morning I got a letter from the United Negro College Fund, with appeals to support its work from prominent members of the National Association of Colored People, the Congressional Black Caucus, and other prominent African Americans – not to be confused with those who are Afro-Caribbean or of Afro-Carribbean descent like Colin Powell or Harry Belafonte. And of course, none of them is to be confused with the fans of Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott, who have probably made reference to ‘you people’ in their politer moments.
Euphemisms can ruin a language. My journalist friends in London frequent a Hungarian restaurant, the Gay Hussar, which when it was founded half a century ago referred to an especially randy heterosexual military type. Then ‘homosexual’ was deemed to be too clinical and possibly derogatory so the word ‘gay’ was misappropriated and thus gave new meaning to the old phrase ‘gay abandon’. Then some gays proudly decided that they were not ‘gay’ but ‘queer’.
Now anti-euphemism is at work and it is every bit as bad as the real thing. At a Human Rights Watch dinner a perplexed audience heard the phrase ‘men who have sex with men.’ Since it declares outright what they do, it can hardly be described as a euphemism.
Inquiring minds want to know, so I taxed the Human Rights Watch staff with this linguistic anomaly. In the infinite taxonomy of sexual relations, they wanted to include men who do not adopt a gay lifestyle, and may even be married, but still have sex with other men. Didn’t that make those men bisexual? Apparently not. It’s a lifestyle description.
‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ Juliet declared swooningly about Romeo and his Capulet surname. And we all know what happened to them both! If roses were called dung-cabbages, not many swains would be buying them for St. Valentine’s day.
Which brings us to the perversions and barbarities of Wall Street and its aversion to strong language. Market perform, hold, outperform, peer perform market overweight, reduce, underweight, neutral, hold, maintain. Have you ever seen such a compost heap full of blossoming dung-cabbages in your life?
And whose tender feelings are being preserved by these various euphemisms? Only the stock issuing companies and the merchant banks who want to cozen ordinary investors out of what Enron and WorldCom have left of their pensions!
It is clearly time for the SEC to follow up on its plain English initiative and make the banks and brokers pay in kind as well as in cash for their sins during the bubble.com and Enron eras. We need a plain way of saying ‘sell’ or ‘buy’ or ‘well if I were you I wouldn’t’.
We also need colorfully malodorous ways of describing the half of all shares that mathematically have to be below average – maybe ‘pustular’ or ‘gangrenous’ or ‘stock to be cut out of your portfolio prontissimo’. Speculator is ready to do his public duty and work on the list of suitably strong verbs and adjectives if the call comes. Ask not what the SEC can do for you – ask what you can do for the SEC!
The Speculator
