Drawing sense from the wells of gibberish

Writing about Warren G. Harding, the American president regarded by some as the worst chief executive, former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo rendered this withering assessment:

He spoke in a big bow-wow style of oratory. His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.

The Harding administration is happily gone and mostly forgotten, but the “bow-wow style of oratory” lives on. The armies of pomposity still amass daily in their fearsome battalions. The duty of a careful writer confronting jargon is to police the language mercilessly—to subject every use of a faddish or technical expression to a test of necessity and fitness, every time. The worst enemy of clear writing is habit—the lazy reliance on cliché and boilerplate that, in Edwin Newman’s phrase, “imposes monotony on the language.” Readers who are impressed by jargon are powers to be reckoned with, no question. But they are few, compared with the legions of other readers with no time or patience for tired, bloated, and imprecise prose.

Most important, in the world to which most civic causes hope to lead us, buzz-words are a burden. They represent an obstacle to reason and to real participation by people with other things on their minds. For that reason, clearing away the thickets of bad language is an obligation not only of good writing, but of good thinking and persuading. Let the style be pretty or plain, let the words be long or short, but first of all let the ideas be blunt, concrete, practical, and stark. Any language that promotes those qualities can’t help but enliven the discourse on which democracy depends.