There is one special category of weirdness in speech-making – when you deliberately use loaded language. Simple, everyday words rarely carry emo- tional baggage. They are the couriers of the English language: they get to their destination as fast as possible, deliver the message and hurry away to their next assignment. But if you want your messenger to deliver flowers as well, and wait for the right reply, you need a specialized message service. Loaded language uses slightly special words, which say ‘Hooray!’ or ‘Boo!’ as soon as they are uttered. We had an example in the Introduction, in the speech by Huxley against Bishop ‘Soapy’ Sam Wilberforce: ‘rhetoric’ was a Boo! word (so, of course, are the words ‘Soapy Sam’).
Not surprisingly, politicians are especially adept at using Hooray! and Boo! words. Many receive elaborate coaching on words to avoid, words to use
and words to pin on their opponents. For example, few politicians in the English-speaking world will talk about ‘public spending’. At best that is a neutral expression, and ‘spending’ has some negative connotations. The Hooray! expression is ‘investment in public services’.
In politics, words often travel in pairs, in a Boo! version and a Hooray! ver- sion. Examples are ‘elitist’ (Boo!) and ‘expert’ (Hooray!), or ‘bureaucrat’ (Boo!) and ‘public servant’ (Hooray!), ‘repressive’ (Boo!) and ‘tough’ (Hooray!). If you like another country’s rulers they are its ‘government’, if you are uncertain about them they are its ‘administration’, and if you cannot stand them they are its ‘regime’.
Perhaps under the influence of politics, the same kind of pairing is increas- ingly frequent in ordinary speech. Think of ‘simple’ (generally a Hooray!) and ‘simplistic’ (Boo!), ‘easy’ (neutral or Hooray!) and ‘facile’ (Boo!) or ‘flexible’ (Hooray!) and ‘pliable’ (Boo!): politicians who are fond of the buzzword ‘flexible labour markets’ might try the effect of substituting ‘pli- able labour markets’.
Quite often you can get more of a Boo! or Hooray! effect with a strange word rather than a commonplace one. Calling someone ‘oily’ is pretty insulting, but call him ‘oleaginous’ to express real contempt. ‘Woolly thinking’ is bad enough but ‘flocculent thinking’ (with its echo of ‘flatulence’) is far more pejorative. Another strange word with a useful echo is ‘inspis- sated’ (it means thickened or condensed, as in Campbell’s Inspissated Soup) and it works well in conjunction with words like ‘gloom’ or ‘tedium’ or ‘obscurity’.
Sometimes a foreign word carries more Boo! or Hooray! than an English one. ‘Bureaucrat’ is quite a wounding expression but ‘apparatchik’ is posi- tively venomous. When I toiled in British politics as a dingy researcher I often borrowed a title from French politics as a more glamorous job descrip- tion: ‘chef de cabinet’. If you are ever stuck for a colourful expression I rec- ommend the Yiddish language. Why call someone a ‘mediocrity’ when you can call him a ‘nebbish’, a ‘schlemiel’ or a ‘nudnik’?
You can get more of a Boo! or Hooray! effect with a strange word rather than a commonplace one.
When no current word, English or foreign, is sufficiently loaded it can be very effective to make one up. An easy way to make up words is to tack on certain prefixes and suffixes. Common word-creating
prefixes are Euro-, crypto- or mega- and mini-, and (pretentiously) uber-. Possible suffixes include -onomics, -ology, -otomy, -ocrat, -phile, -erast, -phobe, speak, -oholic, -naut, -ism, -ics, -ite and -ize. After Watergate, anything can be made into a scandal by
adding -gate to it. Many of these work especially well when tacked on to a proper name. Yiddish offers the useful suffix -nik, usually pejorative (real estatenik, no-good-nik), occasionally complimentary (refusenik).
However, as a result of newspapers this form of word creation is becoming dangerously close to cliché, especially the use of -gate. You might instead prefer to make a slight switch on a familiar expression. My old boss Denis Healey did this to brilliant effect 20 years ago in British politics when he called Mrs Thatcher’s economic policy ‘sado-monetarism’. The term was so successful that it passed into international use, to describe the deflationary policies of other right-wing leaders. More recently I enjoyed the term ‘apathexy’, to describe voters who are not only indifferent to the political process but positively repelled by it.
A few months ago the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, found a new word as a blanket insult to all the critics of his anti-terrorist laws. Rather than use the now cliché term ‘kneejerk liberals’ he branded them the ‘Liberati’ conveying the same message with (for him) the useful added sug- gestion that they were foreign. (He might have made it still more insulting by calling them the Gliberati.)
New and strange words work as loaded language only if they have associa- tions for your audience. When you try them out, be your audience listening to you. Are they intrigued or excited – or irritated by your affectations? If in doubt, cut them out (see Chapter 10, ‘All your little darlings must be killed’).
To sum up, loaded language is a context in which you may succeed with a weird expression (even one you have invented). A weird expression can work not only because of its novelty, but because it will almost certainly
An easy way to make up words is to tack on certain prefixes and suffixes.
change the pace of your speech. You will slow down when you say it, either for relish or simply to be sure of saying it properly, which means that your audience will have to slow down with you and (you hope) concentrate a little harder on your meaning.
● Speech-makers and speech-writers use many special tricks and techniques – but they are all used regularly in ordinary conversa- tion.
● When you try out any trick or technique, talk it through and try to remember when you used it or heard it in ordinary life. If you are writing for someone else, imagine him or her using that trick or technique in conversation.
● Be careful before you use tricks or techniques which have bad associations – and good associations.
● Plain, simple, everyday, jargon-free language is nearly always right, and can easily take off into poetry.
● But you may use ‘weird’ language to reach a ‘weird’ audience or make an ordinary audience respond in a special way.
● Unusual, foreign and invented words can sometimes carry an especially loaded message.