Don't Compromise!

In a world where levels of competitiveness are ever-rising under a veneer of good manners and ‘professional conduct’, you might expect the main problem with praise to be its faintness – a reluctance to offer any remark that might be seen as even potentially flattering. Keeping an ear open as you make your way through life, what you might hear just as frequently is actually false praise – the over-inflated language of PR speak where nothing is ever as simply fit for purpose as to be ‘adequate’. (Used selectively, of course, ‘adequate’ can be one of the most damning words in the language, but my focus here is on carelessly rather than precisely deployed language.)

A lot of office commentary is nothing more than the passing slang of the day: I’ve never shared office space with a fairy tale grandmother or a serial killer, but I’ve heard the word ‘wicked’ drift past as comment from one colleague to another more often than I’ve had drinkable coffee.

Contemporary television programmes like The Apprentice and Masterchef attract widespread mirth for the endless ra-ra-ing: everyone is always giving at least 130% and every other plateful is ‘exceptional’. But non-slang superlatives – ‘outstanding’, ‘unbeatable’, ‘brilliant’ and their like – get casually bandied about just as often as ‘street’ slang in our offices. Reality TV can afford to be a living oxymoron – its ultimate purpose is to provide light entertainment, not to enhance or even merely supplement reality: but reality itself? Does anyone benefit from being less realistic about life?

(A quotation too good to leave out here, as an aside. If you want an example of the perils of wanton self-promotion, I offer you novelist Jeanette Winterson:

No one working in the English language now comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words.”

Words, possibly: but modesty and Ms Winterson appear to be barely acquainted.)

I realise I may be sounding a little like Lynn Truss here. (For the amusement of those who can’t resist the temptation to pun, I’ll try to be brief so that I can eat, shoot and leave …) Language must grow and change and move on: like every other aspect of human life, it must adapt.

But language and the way we use it does matter. It’s at the heart of communication: in a world where more communication happens by email, phone or text, it matters more – our words are less often accompanied by our expressions or body language than they used to be. And our relationships are critically dependant on how we communicate. Wittengenstein undoubted had a finer mind than me, but even he was moved to observe:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Yet another quote might be more pertinent to the implications of allowing language to be devalued:

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”

Devalue the word or undermine its meaning and we change the note. And if we want to communicate effectively, surely we want to strike the right chord, not just any chord?

In the famous story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the costumiers were swindlers and the Emperor a gullible man who feared looking stupid. But the Emperor’s Ministers could only bring themselves to offer flattery and praise when their wiser source of action might have been to speak up and preserve the Emperor’s dignity. Several things may – to paraphrase the popular query – have looked big in His Highness’s new outfit, but his intelligence and his grasp on the situation where not among them.

So casual, meaningless praise – even if it’s meant well – is a problem. It devalues the words we still need to use where genuine praise is needed, and it makes it harder for us to use language meaningfully. It can’t always be ‘the supreme and unparalleled gardening implement, incomparable in all of human history’: sometimes, it really is just a spade. Yes, feedback has an important role to play in motivating others, but mindless glib praise isn’t effective feedback – it doesn’t help the recipient grasp the true level of their performance or quality of their behaviour. It may even give encouragement where the opposite might be more appropriate.

George Orwell, who gave us the horrors of Newspeak in the classic Nineteen Eighty Four, once said: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” The Principles of Newspeak, published as an appendix to the novel, make a far darker version of the point that false praise undermines the real thinking and honest appraisal that are pre-requisites for true leadership or true development:

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘ to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.”

Less scarily, blandly spewing out platitudinous adjectives might make you look uncomfortably like Victor Borge in his timeless Inflationary Language sketch:

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