Book Review: Romps, Tots And Boffins

Romps, Tots and Boffins: The Strange Language of News by Robert Hutton (2013) 135 p.

I do closed captions for evening new bulletins. That’s my dead-end day job, and it largely entails sub-editing the absolutely atrocious scripts filed by journalists around the world, who – despite presumably having graduated not just high school but university – will still spell engine as “enjyn” and other such horrors. (Australian and Canadian journalists are far worse than the British.)

Apart from the frankly bewildering spelling errors, the more subtle thing that nags away at you is how dreadfully cliche and predictable the language of “journalese” is, whether it’s in broadcast or print. Victims always “maintain a dignified silence” in court; political meetings are always “crisis talks” which take place “behind closed doors;” scandal-gripped public figures are always “beleaguered” or “embattled.” I spend all day immersed in it, but anybody who regularly reads newspapers or watches evening bulletins will have absorbed far more of this odd dialect than they realise. Robert Hutton, a proud hack at Bloomberg, took it upon himself to compile a glossary of it which is now collected in this amusing volume. Some highlights:

designer clothes – as opposed to a sack with holes torn in it.
expenses paid– for some reason, when they hear the word ‘expenses,’ journalists assume fraud must be involved. Psychologists might be able to explain why this should be.
flat-screen colour TV – or a ‘TV,’ as they’re now known.
going forward – the reporter, possibly half-asleep, has copied out too much of the press release.
lethal cocktail – there were two drugs in their system, you say?
named locally – the cops aren’t saying who it was, but fortunately everyone in the pub knew.
smoke-filled rooms – where cosy consensuses are reached. This has survived the smoking ban.

I can’t say this would be gripping stuff to somebody who doesn’t either work in the industry or follow the news closely, but I found it quite a brief and entertaining read. Journalese is so pervasive that you don’t really notice it for what it is, and I’m pleased that Hutton has managed to comprehensively compile and articulate something that thousands of us have probably felt only as a vague, nagging sense of irritation.

Re-reading Discworld: Small Gods

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (1991) 400 p.
Discworld #13 (Stand-alone)

This is widely regarded as one of Pratchett’s finest novels, certainly in the early days of the Discworld series. It’s a standalone – possibly the most complete standalone in the series, taking place far from Ankh-Morpork or Lancre, with only a brief cameo appearance by the Librarian and of course Death. Pratchett takes us to the vast desert kingdom of Omnia, a religious autocracy built around worship of the god Om. On the Discworld, as we’ve already learned, belief can create reality – and so gods in turn are reliant on their believers for their continued existence. Om’s problem is that people no longer believe in him as a god per se, but rather in the institution of the church. Shrunk down into the humble body of a tortoise and with his omnipotence vanished, Om finds he has only one true believer left: the naive young novice Brutha, working in the gardens of the Church’s great Citadel. Om clings to Brutha like a drowning man to a life raft, well aware that if Brutha’s belief wavers then his own existence will be imperilled, as he tries to figure out how to make the people of Omnia properly believe again.

Brutha, meanwhile, has been recruited for a special mission by one of the Church’s deacons for of his eidetic memory. Accompanying Vorbis, Pratchett’s latest Machiavellian villain of iron-cast belief, Brutha thus sets out on the journey of a lifetime to Omnia’s neighbour Ephebe, with none of his retinue suspecting their god is riding along in Brutha’s backpack.

This is a case where I really have to differ from public opinion. I remembered very little of Small Gods, and I’ve learnt on this rereading project that this usually means the book didn’t make much of an impact on me the first time around and won’t the second. The best explanation I can come to for why Small Gods doesn’t engage me is because I’m not religious, I wasn’t raised religious, and I live in probably one of the most irreligious countries in the Western world. Being an agnostic or an atheist doesn’t mean you don’t have to cope with religion’s impact on society, but in Australia it has very little effect on me compared to if I were an atheist in, say, Alabama. I just don’t find Pratchett’s ruminations on religious belief as engaging as those on racism or politics or sexism or any number of other things.

As I said, it’s one of Pratchett’s most beloved books, and apparently he received plenty of approving letters from believers and non-believers alike, praising his depiction of faith, belief, and the critical differences between organised religion and a personal relationship with God. I can believe all that, and I can appreciate why so many others love it. It just didn’t strike much of a chord with me personally, and I find myself with very little to say about it.

Next up, we’re back to the witches of Lancre with Lords and Ladies.

Rereading Discworld Index