Modern Duckspeak
In 1984, George Orwell used Duckspeak to describe the stale, ritualistic official language of the Big Brother state – language deliberately emptied of meaning, used to show the loyalty of the speaker or writer to the ruling ideology.
Today Duckspeak is back again – cliché-led, jargon-driven – and with the same purpose, not to communicate but to identify where the speaker belongs.
Duckspeak comes partly from new professions and disciplines – economics, management science, sociology, anthropology, marketing and the nurture of "customer relationships", myriad forms of psychology and psychiatry, pullulating theories of literary and aesthetic criticism. Like mediaeval alchemists and astrologers they establish their own jargon, and for the same reason – to identify their own practitioners and lay claim to special and valuable knowledge. (If Jesus Christ had had a proper sociological qualification He might have said "Blessed are the socially excluded for they shall no longer be marginalized.")
However, the greatest creator of Duckspeak is modern government, not only ministers, but officials at every level and of course spin doctors.
Their Duckspeak has much in common with everyday cliché: its facts are always cold, but its heads are invariably cool and its looks at any phenomenon are always long and hard. Its answers are never easy, its decisions always tough or even painful. Duckspeak measures or policies are always taken right across the board and they are never launched singly but in a whole raft. However, the Duckspeaker must remember that initiatives are never launched, but piloted, although even with the most daring pilot the ceiling of ambition for any initiative is a step change or a quantum leap.
However, where cliché shows merely the absence of thought, modern Duckspeak has a real purpose, sorry, a focused objective. It is essentially the same as Big Brother’s – to identify the speaker and the audience as loyalists.
If the speaker or writer can use Duckspeak without hestitation or embarrassment and the listener or reader can take it without twitching or reaching for a revolver, they are believers in the true faith.
Much modern Duckspeak is Eurobabble, the kind of language which established such wonders as the European "sheepmeat regime" and which if we are not careful will be entrenched in the new EU constitution. The draft put out by ex-President Giscard is full of it. Article 14 is a honey: it stipulates that the single institutional structure of the Union "shall ensure the consistency and continuity of the policies and activities carried out in order to attain the Union’s objectives – activities both in the areas of competence allocated wholly or partly to the Union and in those areas in which competence belongs to the Member States and is jointly exercised by them." (The EU uses the word "competence" frequently although its citizens tend to be more worried about its incompetence.)
Defenders of Eurobabble blame it on the translators, but this is unfair: it loses a lot in the original. However, we do not need to import official drivel from the EU when we are perfectly capable of manufacturing it for ourselves.
The daily output of official drivel includes mouthfuls such as "quality champions," "benchmarking" and "citizen-focused services" (which can be sung to the tune of Here We Go Gathering Nuts In May). It talks of targets being delivered, although the only place anyone can really deliver a target is an archery contest. It is very fond of strategic partnerships or frameworks or even visions to drive joined-up multi-agency cross-cutting outcomes of which all stakeholders can take ownership.
Some ministers and officials hold out against Duckspeak and persist in talking and writing intelligibly and colourfully. They are sent to Room 101, for special sessions with John Birt. I have a special theory about Birt’s role. His official title as a "blue sky thinker" (another piece of Duckspeak) is only a front. He is actually head of the government’s language police. Birt came to the BBC, an organization with a worldwide reputation for English, and left it with a worldwide reputation for managerial cant. He now has the same job for government – a mission to obscure… [If Birt had been around in 1940 he might have replaced Churchill’s commitment to fighting on the beaches with a rallying call that "There is no template of diminution or dysfunction. We shall continue in our strategic policy framework until we have delivered all of our objectives going forward in all of our chosen operational theatres, in both overseas and domestic locations: we shall achieve our mission and reject any sub-optimal outcome".]
Needless to say, I have no hard evidence to support the Birt theory, and in any case no single individual or party or government could have produced the present quality of Duckspeak on their own, even with the help of the EU. It has been going on for years – Mrs Thatcher’s government produced plenty of Duckspeak and if in some weird parallel universe Mr Duncan-Smith came to power his government would do its own quiet quacking.
But it is New Labour which now must take responsibility for the phenomenon. It does have a terrible weakness for buzzwords, shibboleths and mouthfuls of soap. Each week provides a new supply. New Labour’s Duckspeak carries big risks. It helps create not only political apathy but political apathexy – boredom mixed with rage. It helps convince people that all government is an irrelevant alien phenomenon, which exists only for the benefit of its practitioners.
Government, professions and managers of all kinds may be addicted to Duckspeak but we as citizens can resist it. We can send back letters and documents in Duckspeak to their originators and demand proper ones in their place. We can interrupt Duckspeakers in mid-flow, or better still, expose them to other listeners. ("I am so grateful to the speaker for his commitment to quality outcomes. We were worried that he might settle for any old outcome, but with the assurance of quality outcomes we can deliver joined-up planning for the future, which, as he so rightly reminded us, lies ahead.")
Best of all, if any of us receives a bill for anything accompanied by Duckspeak we can refuse to pay it.
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