When I see a press release that has something like this at the top I think the senders haven’t quite worked out that even smart people who like dictionaries can’t be bothered to decipher what they mean, and might not bother to read further. When you write for an audience as opposed to defending a thesis before academics, try to keep in mind that we’re all busy, distracted and probably in a hurry. In this case, the World Economic Forum forgot:

“A dystopian world, unsafe safeguards and the dark side of connectivity are this year’s major risk cases.”

Here are two sentences that would benefit from an extra word or two to avoid confusion. Writers often take these shortcuts to avoid being pedantic. Fair enough, but it’s better to be clear. See if you can work out the problem; I’ll post my edited versions tomorrow.

from CNN:

The suspect allegedly shot and killed a man who had just withdrawn 200,000 yuan ($31,700) from a bank in Nanjing’s Dongmen Street on January 6 and then fled the scene in a car, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

from the Atlantic:

The average first-time mother is as old as any country in the OECD (30), and the career costs of having a child are sky-high.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Beware who you criticize and for what, for you could be next in line! The last laugh is on me, after poking fun at headline writers who are too rushed to reread what they have written. I just published this: “Thieves caught robbing Nyon train station safe”.

A minute later I happened to reread it on the published page and realized it sounds like they made a safe getaway. Not so! Here’s the corrected version: “Thieves caught robbing safe at Nyon train station” – and they are now behind bars.

A growing number of readers of news are reading fewer and fewer words from articles, with many of them never making it past the headline, so I repeat my argument that getting these right matters.

Which reminds me of one I’ve been chewing over since I read it in the Irish Times and then the BBC the other day, a reference to “the worst recession in memory”.

I’ve been trying to work out whose memory we’re referring to, or if this should have been the more popular “in recent memory” (google that and you’ll start to see what it means to use a clichéd phrase) or perhaps “in living memory” in which case who is the oldest person alive who can share personal memories from the Great Recession of the 30s?

The Guardian had a twist on it, which makes more sense than the others: “Ireland’s love of print can survive the worst of recessions” / This is a small country of 4.5 million but these are people who buy newspapers.

Headlines at newspapers used to be written mainly by young writers starting out in journalism who were given the job as a kind of proving ground. Today, most journalists write their own headlines, and these should be better.

Sometimes we get it wrong, though, first time around.

The knotty business of knowledge, complexity and language

Russell Smith at the Globe & Mail in Canada writes about the many curious aspects of our culture(s) such as “Who would have thought reality TV could spawn so much junk”. His latest, “Complex ideas can’t always be made simple” offers reflections on how well a competition for PhD students in Australia works. The students are given three minutes to crunch down their theses into a kind of elevator pitch for their work, to be presented to an audience of non-specialists, and the best speaker wins $5,000. Most of them are quite impressive, says Smith. See for yourself: the 2011 Three Minute Thesis Competition, September 2011

“This looks like a brilliant and progressive idea,” he writes. “It attacks the ivory tower; it builds bridges between specialists and the intelligent laypeople whose tax dollars fund universities; it encourages the development of teaching and performance skills among people who are going to be teachers for the rest of their lives. Universities have long been criticized for spending too much money on obscure research and not doing enough to teach teaching.”

From the film "10,000 Miles" by Liam Bates and Patrick Caracas, a "Selection" at the Lucerne International Film Festival" October 2011

But it doesn’t always work, he argues, in large part because of the differences between the humanities and the sciences.

He addresses the relationship between complexity and knowledge, one we too often skirt. Smith is talking about the social sciences and the jargon of social theory, explaining that “the idea is generally that we can’t see the ideological and economic structures that we live in unless we change our language – for language is a pillar of that very structure. Furthermore, the veneration of clarity or simplicity is itself an ideological position, one that limits thinkers to conventional thoughts.”

I’m a strong proponent of plain English, particularly in education and the workplace, where jargon and complex language often veil a lack of clear thinking. But a distinction needs to be made by people who push for plain English. Complex ideas often cannot be reduced down to simple ideas, or suffer if they do; plain English is needed because simple and elegant language can help us explore complexity, not annihilate it.

Embracing complexity: an inheritance that doesn’t diminish

If there is one kind of wealth I would like to leave to the next generation it is the ability to seek out complexity, to understand it, to appreciate rather than fear it, and ultimately to be able to express it. I would like them to have this ability whether they apply it to physics, politics or the affairs of the human heart. These are the riches that make us truly human.

I’m heading off now to the Lucerne International Film Festival to represent my son’s film, “10,000 Miles“, about traveling from Lhasa in Tibet to Shanghai with three other young men (and about young people there). It is a Selection at the festival (he’s in China and can’t make it). I asked him to send me questions and answers for the FAQ session that is scheduled after the film’s European premiere tonight.

Most are about the technical aspects of the film or details about their travels. I’m particularly happy about the last one, which leaves us with the idea that these travels are the start of a much longer voyage, for all of us.

Liam, who is fluent in Mandarin, has traveled extensively in Tibet, on several occasions.

Q: What do you think about the Tibet-China issue?

A: It is far too complicated to answer in a couple short questions and I woud avoid doing this because it is one of the issues that people most love to jump to conclusions about. To really understand it takes knowing a lot of history, languages and culture; it isn’t as simple a topic as it is often made out to be.

Film’s trailer, posted by the festival

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I didn’t know that a cougar is an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man, but now I do, thanks to the new Concise Oxford Dictionary, which keeps us up to date on the language we’re using. Clearly, I lead a dull life, as I haven’t needed to use “sextings”, either (nothing to do with people over 60, like sexagenarians).

CNN sent me scurrying to the OUP (Oxford University Press) blog post on the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary to see what other gems we’ve recently invented. The Concise Oxford is celebrating its 100th birthday with the new edition.

Even better than finding new words was my discovery of the pleasure of the Oxford Words Blog itself, where I’ve just learned that the word “riot” meant an extravagent lifestyle during its first 100 years, which makes me wonder what “retweet” will mean in 2711.

And then there’s Italy’s contributions to our food vocabulary. And I’m sure the list of phobias will come in handy one of these days, maybe when I have to write about my fear of them. Palms are getting sweaty as a I write, the shakes are coming over me. Oh no! It’s phobophobia, I think!

I really enjoyed most of, let’s say the first 76 percent of, Michael Agger’s Slate post on how to write faster. I’m a fast writer and never quite know how to answer people who ask for tips on this; improve your typing skills? sounds a bit feeble. He has some good points, has done some interesting research. As I continued to read, faster and faster, I realized he’s done one thing I counsel other writers to avoid: stop writing for the web as you would for print, and the best way to do that is to write shorter, so people read to the end. I nearly did.

I wanted to ask him how long it took him to write the post, but all the Slate options for leaving comments require me to give my address books and half my life to Google or Twitter or other places where I hang out online, and I like my privacy and that of my friends too much for that.

Linking the right to comment to a swap whereby the other party gets to post on your pages is one of my pet peeves with social media because I see too much rubbish on some people’s FB or Twitter pages as a result. Writing faster runs parallel to speeding up time spent looking at stuff you really don’t care about.

And while we’re on pet peeves related to writers, I do wish manic writers would stop invading every networking site they can find, with crazy numbers of posts. Ever met someone at a party you couldn’t get away from, who just couldn’t stop talking, and seemed to think everything they had to say was of interest? Hmmm, they’ve moved to the online party.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – NoViolet Bulawayo is the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, which the BBC refers to “as Africa’s leading literary award”. She won the award, announced Monday evening 11 July, for her short story, “Hitting Budapest”, about a group of shantytown children who steal guava fruit from a wealthier part of town.

Bulawayo is from Zimbabwe, recently completed a master of fine arts at Cornell University in the US, where she now teaches English and writes.

The chairman of the jury, Hisham Matar, says, “The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language.”

The story was published in The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 – Nov/Dec 2010.

Complete press release, interview with The Zimbabwean, UK

NoViolet Bulawayo web site and blog

I think this is not a word, but who wants to argue with the US Senate Finance Committee chairman? Will Scrabble let you use it? “Irrebuttably” is the gem, and I can see how a senator might like the concept that his arguments are so sound they are irrebuttable. But do we need a new word when another one exists, that seems to work well: irrefutable arguments.

Here is his sentence, circa 1998:

“Any individual with a net worth of $500,000 or more (adjusted for inflation) on the date of expatriation or who has an average annual net income tax liability for the five years preceding expatriation of $100,000 or more (adjusted for inflation) is irrebuttably presumed to have expatriated for tax-motivated reasons (except as discussed below), and thereby is subject to tax under section 877 regardless of actual intent.”

It turns out that this is a legal term, and is generally used only in a legal context, but perhaps we could extend its shelf life by adopting it for parental decisions about staying out later (irrebuttably decided . . .) or apartment building laundry policies (it is irrebuttably clear that after 10pm . . .).

Irrebuttable means incapable of being rebutted. Irrefutable may be a synonym, most often couple with the word “evidence”, but it has a gentler feel, doesn’t seem quite the verbal equivalent of a blunt object.

This might explain why Webster’s online dictionary says this: “irrebuttably – Virtually never used adverbial inflection of the rarely used adjective irrebuttable.”

Leave it to the US Senate Finance Committee to find it useful.

(video, The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks) If you’re reading this, you’re probably a word lover like me. We’re an odd bunch, people who get a thrill from dictionaries. Most of us enjoy new words, but many of us, I suspect, have shifted to looking up definitions online more often than in the fat old tomes that were once our only option.

I find myself slightly annoyed, therefore, with Dr Oliver Sacks because in one book alone, he’s given me far too many words to look up. I curl up in fat chairs or my bed to read books like his, extraordinary tales of the neurological oddities people live with on this planet, and I don’t want to turn to a computer screen while I’m doing this. Generally, I can remember two or three words that I don’t know and look them up later, but his latest book, which I’ve just finished, had a word new to me on virtually every page. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much.

The writer’s dilemma: when to use less common words

It raises the old question a student once asked me, “What’s the point of using words people don’t know?” His argument was that the writer was stupid to expect people to look up words when there was a perfectly serviceable batch of easier, more widely used words out there. My argument, as you’ve probably guessed, was that we have a bigger pool of words to allow us to be more precise, more elegant, to better communicate, and that the intelligent reader will hold up his or her end of the bargain and learn new words.

Dear Dr Sacks, I felt a little like my student, annoyed with you while reading The Mind’s Eye, a book I otherwise found wonderful. I have an 18-year-old daughter who has never spoken, but who communicates, and I’ve gained insights from this book that will help me help her. But I had to ignore some words to stay focused.

Writing is a bit like cooking: it’s more interesting if we use spices, but they need  to be balanced. I made a soup last week with several wonderful herbs, a good blend I think, but at the last minute I threw in far too many peppercorns. I had to really work, while eating that soup, to find the oregano and thyme and other flavours lurking under those mad little black balls scooting around in the broth.

In fairness to Sacks, who came to my attention with his wonderful “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, many of these words are probably familiar to the medical world. One way writers can handle specialty-specific words is to make their meaning clear in the sentence, which Sacks often does admirably, particularly in the first part of the book. Example: “Mimesis, the deliberate and conscious representation of scenes, thoughts, feelings, intentions and so on, by mime and action, seems to be a specifically human achievement, like language (and perhaps music).”

The danger to the writer is that the text will stop flowing, weighted down by definitions.

If the story is strong enough, we’re pulled along by it and don’t realize the dictionary work is being done for us by the writer: “Yet he was surprised to find, as a nurse reminded him, that he could still write, even though he could not read; the medical term, she said, was ‘alexia sine agraphia.’ Howard was incredulous—surely reading and writing went together; how could he lose one but not the other?”

Sacks seems, as the book progresses, to be pulled more sharply into his subject matter, almost appearing to forget the reader at times in his haste to better understand his own subject matter. There is a good explanation for this, and in the end I forgive him his bonanza of big words. Oliver Sacks has eye cancer and has lost vision on one side, so when he explores the difficult world of his patients, he now includes himself.

There is a level of intimacy here that was not in his previous books, and we discover a writer whose vocabulary is far richer than most people’s.

I had to look up one word in these sentences, but it was worth the trouble because I learned something I didn’t know, and this is why I read. “As early as three months, infants are learning to narrow their model of ‘faces’ to those they are frequently exposed to,” writes Sacks, referring to research by Olivier Pascalis . “The implications of this work for humans are profound. To a Chinese baby brought up in his own ethnic environment, Caucasian faces may all, relatively, ‘look the same’, and vice versa. One prosopagnosic acquaintance, born and raised in China, went to Oxford as a student and has lived for decades in the United States. Nonethless, he tells me, ‘European faces are the most difficult—they all look the same to me.’”

I love concise writing. So the idea of the new Ted books, from the people who do the amazing Ted conferences, has great appeal. The starting point is excellent: ideas worth spreading. And the length of the books is just right, at under 20,000 words, for what they describe as “long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.” I wish them well, while I debate which one to try first.