My Dear, I Feel Totally Decimated

For years I had always assumed that Clive James was little more than a witty and amusing TV entertainer - which shows how foolish it can be to make assumptions. Then, a few months ago, I read his autobiographical Unreliable Memoirs (pretty frivolous), and Falling Towards England and North Face of Soho (a little more serious), which gave hints of greater depths; and more recently At the Pillars of Hercules, where James displays his alter ego, the erudite (but always readable) literary critic. Now I am half way through another of his books of criticism, The Meaning of Recognition - a title which seems a bit pretentious until we find that Clive J is pulling our legs, for in this, the title also of the first chapter of the book, the 'recognition' is not some abstract philosophical concept but the phenomenon of being physically recognisable due to exposure on the TV screen. (Another chapter, 'Great Sopranos of Our Time' turns out not to be what its title seems to suggest, but is about the TV 'Sopranos' gangster series compared with the Godfather films.)

What resonates with the pedant in me is James's lament at the deterioration of the English language in the media. "Among ordinary pens for hire", he writes, "it is no longer common to write without solecisms; even those who can are likely to bolt phrases together with no real attention to their derivation, and in too many cases their language is utterly emptied of the history that brought it into being".

I am afraid that this situation is largely due to the influence of Television, the medium through which James won his fame. Over and over again we hear presenters and news-readers and interviewed experts mangling the language, or adopting (presumably in order to be accepted as 'ordinary people') modern linguistic quirks, kerb-side idioms and popular cliches; all of which, if we stop to think about it, we can see do nothing to make their statements or opinions clearer or more authoritative: it merely makes the speakers seem superficially more 'ordinary' - so keen is their desire for 'street cred'. James himself is not above doing this sometimes - but it is always 'occasional' and in the appropriate place, somehow genuinely enlivening his prose without demeaning it. It takes a master of English language and literature to do this without vulgarity or bathos.

It was a genuine wildlife expert, I am sure, who told us recently on screen that the arrival in our country of the north American grey squirrel had 'completely decimated' the native red squirrel. Originally the term 'decimated' had the special meaning of 'eliminating one tenth' (thus leaving ninety per cent alive and kicking)*. Of course the word could be used metaphorically with less mathematical precision, to imply severely reducing a population. But phrases like 'completely decimated' and 'totally decimated' are self-contradictory.

The wildlife expert should not be blamed for not understanding the term; but why use long, latinate words when you don't really know what they mean? It is Television, as well as the Press, that has been spreading such misuses. And they really do weaken our language.

* 'Decimated' derives from Latin decem meaning 'ten'.

My Dear, I Feel Totally Decimated