words are clumsy mechanisms for conveying messages.
Sometimes, yes. When they are, it is frequently by design. The language of lawyers, bureaucrats, and some other professions is intended to be incomprehensible to the layman and to leave loopholes for various contingencies, not to clearly communicate a message. The social sciences, in a bid to supplant religion as the opiate of the masses, have seen the use of incomprehensible jargons in description of perfectly ordinary phenomena. There is method behind this madness. It is hard to pretend to be a priestly caste if people understand you.
There is very little that cannot be said in plain English. If you cannot understand what is being said, there's a good chance that you're not supposed to. Especially if the person doing the saying is wearing a suit.
"Plain talk" by the grammatically uneducated is, of course, another story altogether, and it frequently communicates a message every bit as clearly as proper English would. Despite irregularities, I prefer the speech of the rural poor or the inner-city street folk to that of lawyers or sociologists. At least they say what they mean, not what they want you to think they mean. |
