woobiquity

xcii. The mythology of the everday

Last week I attended a web editing workshop run by The Writer, a London-based group that is doing more than any other to inject some signs of life into the way businesses communicate. One of the tasks was to cast an everyday struggle as mythology. This should ring familiar to anyone who's ever tried to publish anything decent from within a corporation.

Communicus is the godess of content, charged with illuminating ideas, words and images. Her staff is a red pen. She uses a potent whisper to guide inquisitive writers, editors and illustrators, showing them The Way.

Her enemy is the evil Babble, who shouts endless cliches and acronyms, attempting to drown out Communicus' wisdom. If that fails, he has a zapper - an electric jolt - which he uses to punish clear and bold ideas before they can reach the page, ultimately dulling his victim's will to do anything but mimic the babble.

But Communicus' pen is mighty, and she battles Babble with it. With her mortals's help, she usually wins.

The Writer runs open workshops fortnightly in London. If you're even remotely involved with words in your professional life, I strongly recommend them.

xci. A war by any other name is just as sweet?

A week ago reports had the White House and Pentagon media-testing alternatives to the “war on terror” phrase that has defined American foreign policy in the post-9/11 age. “The global struggle against violent extremists,” was the new and rather un-catchy catch-phrase rolled out in speeches by Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. military officials.

A hundred armchair linguists rushed into the media breach to applaud the grammatical step in the right direction, pointing out, sometimes smugly, that it’s generally pointless to declare war on a tactic.

But those in the administration who vied for the change in phraseology had apparently overlooked one minor detail: “war on terror” and “global struggle against violent extremists” mean different things.

Which is how President Bush came to make a speech yesterday in which he said “let there be no mistake about it. It’s a war,” making it clear that whatever signals his underlings may have sent out, he had condoned no change in tone –- or tactic.

“Repeat after me, y’all… a war is a war is a war.”

Here’s something to be afraid of: the current leader of the free world could benefit from lessons on linguistic subtlety and precision from Donald Rumsfeld, a man who might have said “words mean nothing unless they mean something about nothing.”

Of course, subtlety doesn’t play all that well in Bush country, while “war on terror” works just fine for rallying the political troops in places like Texas and the Carolinas, places where plenty of people still think Saddam Hussein orchestrated the World Trade Center attacks.

So the so-called “war on terror” persists, never-endingly, because with no particular enemy the search goes on and on. (Yoo-hoo!, a soldier cries.) And one can’t help thinking that it must be hugely ego-boosting to be a “war president”.

xc. Of storm clouds over London

The weekend houseguests left ther London holiday snaps on our hard drive. Many shots of dramatic cloud formations were the spoils of a late-July river cruise along the Thames.

I was going to say how refreshing it is to see London under dark clouds that are exactly that and nothing more, but actually that last shot looks pretty terrifying. Yikes!