Raymond Zhou

Platitude overload depreciates language

By Raymond zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-04-01 06:24

Language clarifies, but when used rigidly, it often conceals and confounds.

A street slogan in a northeastern city has sparked a debate, proving that public mentality is so entrenched on linguistic matters that even a little toying is met with a wall of frowns.

The slogan that recently appeared in Shenyang of Liaoning Province is intended to discourage unlicensed drivers. Under normal circumstances, one might see a call such as "Severely punish unlicensed driving," or some variation of it.

The poster in question borrowed a line from the popular movie "A World Without Thieves" and twisted it into, "I detest unlicensed driving because it does not have any technical difficulty in it."

Some people just don't have a sense of humour. They have dissected the "technical difficulty" part without understanding that the catchphrase has a life of its own ever since the movie premiered more than a year ago.

That's the biggest strength of Feng Xiao-gang's films, which are always able to create simple but memorable lines that eventually work into everyday conversations.

But for the most part, we live in a world of clichs.

If you read a Chinese newspaper, there are word combinations that are more inseparable than conjoined twins. Look no further than "warmly welcome" or "actively participate."

Is there such a thing as a lukewarm welcome? If there is, it doesn't seem to exist in China. From what I've experienced, "warmly welcome" usually refers to a reception that is ceremonious and utterly lacking in spontaneity or warmth. It would be more accurate to use "routinely welcome" instead.

"Study hard" is the literal translation of another Chinese banality that has dogged us for decades. How hard counts as "hard"? Reading 400 pages a day? In the ancient times, we had expressive descriptions such as the one for the student who hanged his hair around a girder so he wouldn't doze off while poring over Confucius. That is how vivacious the Chinese language used to be.

When words are used indiscriminately or simply overused, they lose their vitality. I remember in the 1970s every store in China had a maxim of top-10 things to adhere to and it always included, "Be nice to customers." But in that age of scarcity, sales people wore a customary look of disdain on their faces. There was not even a hint of contrast or black humour. The to-do words on the poster had been sapped of their dictionary-sanctioned meanings.

Nothing dulls a language faster than an overload of platitudes. There are many culprits: Bureaucrats who stick to a small set of officialese and hammer it into public sub-consciousness, business executives who pick up fancy terms from MBA programmes and couch a plain "You're fired" in resource management jargon, and scholars who insist on rejecting new coinages because they were created by teenagers.

The same is true everywhere. I once was enamoured with US presidential speeches. Penned by writers like Peggy Noonon, they seemed to be fresh and devoid of triteness.

Then I noticed the words "hero" and "coward." American politicians have a penchant to call victims "heroes." If you are caught by the enemy and beaten up, you are hailed as a "hero," and if you blow up a building and kill yourself and 1,000 innocent people, you are a "coward."

I wonder who first used "coward" in this context. Is it because your enemy would call him a "hero" so you'd have to use the antonym? A "suicide killer" might be a "merciless desperado" but he is definitely not weak or faint-hearted, which are synonymous with cowardly.I believe the first user of "hero" or "coward" in this sense was a genius. He bent the dictionary definition and achieved rhetorical effect. Then the US presidents imitated him, creating a semantic paradox.

The writer of the Shenyang poster instinctively knew that "severely punish" would be as good as invisible. So, he opted for an "it" phrase. If anything, he was not innovative enough. He should have invented his own axiom, and then he'll become a linguistic hero.

E-mail: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/01/2006 page4)