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Deseret News Archives,
Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Corporate-speak draining language
By Jack Anderson and Douglas Cohn with correspondent-at-large
Lee Cullum
WASHINGTON -- There is no better key to a culture than language. The lilting poetry of everything uttered
in Ireland, for instance, shows a depth of spirit that punishing hardship never could obliterate. The directness of New Yorkers
places a high premium on honesty, and the indirectness of the French on privacy. The elaborate courtesy of the American South
indicates a sense of form and consideration that sometimes overrides the true intention underneath. Also, it's possible to
make extravagant offers in the South, because people can be counted on not to accept. They, too, are governed by what Thomas
Mann called "the discipline and energy of good manners."
But something disturbing is happening in the way Americans talk
about each other. They seem determined to drain the language of its essential juices and to rob people of importance. The
most egregious example is in the field of medicine. How did doctors come to be called
"health-care providers"? It's a shocking and insulting dismissal of years of training and reservoirs of authority
that patients need to confer upon their physicians.
It all grew out of the managed-care movement and a deliberate effort to undermine doctors in order to pay them less and impose
upon them more. Patients were denied the dignity of the medical practice they had known, and doctors were hounded into other
lines of work because that's what their profession, once respected, had become -- a line of work.
The same thing is happening now to writers. When Time-Warner merged with AOL,
suddenly the scribes became not authors, journalists or playwrights, but "content providers."
Universities have become so obsessed with paying their bills and pleasing
their benefactors that many of them now refer to their students as "customers."
The oddest of all is the designation of
prostitutes as "sex workers." This vocabulary flows from the wish of feminists to treat all women with courtesy and to point
out that many sell their bodies out of sheer desperation to support children and keep themselves alive. It's a worthy sentiment,
but should language really try to change the degradation of such circumstances? What is happening in all these cases (except,
of course, the last) is an ascendancy of corporate/entrepreneurial culture that is rendering everything else secondary and
subject to revision. Especially under attack are the professions. Lawyers are among the few to be spared, but they may well
be next. Too many are surrendering too quickly, not understanding that their expertise, their creativity, their insight, clear
and undiluted, are critical to the success of the whole -- business included.
United Feature Syndicate
2000
Deseret News Publishing Co.
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