Jonathan Franzen has made the news this week, by berating digital media and corporate capitalism. Those were themes of his most recent novel, Freedom. His previous book, The Corrections, played with the fashionable phrase ‘dysfunctional family’, and exposed how the term has been bastardised by misuse. He re-emphasises that final point in the clip above.
The abuse of language and the prevalence of bad writing exercises most writers, especially the good ones. VS Naipaul and Martin Amis, for instance, are severe on the subject. Naipaul advises those who misuse words to ‘look for other work’, while the content of Amis’ The War Against Cliché is arch: this sentence on Cervantes is merciless, ‘While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability.’
Even humble Fleet Street is incensed by imprecision; and Sir Harold Evans’ Essential English is invaluable to jobbing hacks and editors as a style guide.
The Spectator’s language columnist, Dot Wordsworth, has her own views on these matters. She best expressed her position in a review of the political writer John Rentoul’s The Banned List — a book that sought to make the war on cliché total by banning stock phrases like ‘job of work’. Dot thought that Rentoul had the ‘wrong end of the stick’. We need more clichés, she said, because without them ‘there are no proverbs, no shared references, and language itself is scarcely possible.’
But, for a writer to abuse a word or phrase — for instance by labelling a family that argues about politics as ‘dysfunctional’ — is a crime (now there’s a cliché). Worse than that, it is to denote membership of Dot’s ‘confederacy of dunces’.
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