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POLITICAL ENGLISH ii POLITICAL ENGLISH Language and the Decay of Politics Thomas Docherty Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Thomas Docherty, 2019 Thomas Docherty has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Docherty, Thomas, 1955- author. Title: Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics / Thomas Docherty. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055637 | ISBN 9781350101395 (hb) | ISBN 9781350101388 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages–Political aspects. | English language– Political aspects. | Communication in politics. Classification: LCC P119.3.D63 2019 | DDC 320.01/4–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055637 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0139-5 PB: 978-1-3501-0138-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0141-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-0140-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. For Bridie May Sullivan and Hamish Docherty vi CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 On pluck: English and money 13 2 English nativism and linguistic xenophobia 33 3 Fundamentalist English: The stiff upper lip 67 4 On truth and lying in a political sense 95 5 Words, deeds and democracy 137 6 Profanity and free speech 165 7 Remnants of dissent: Free speech, political silence and guilt 191 Select bibliography 229 Index 234 viii POLITICAL ENGLISH INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Prospero: I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that made them known. Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 1; SCENE 2) ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Adorno made this claim first in 1949, in an essay on ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’.1 The statement invites at least two ostensibly mutually incompatible questions. Can there be a language that is adequate to atrocity? And, even if there is, how dare we minimize atrocity by finding a language that adequately respects the extent of a political atrocity such as Auschwitz? The question posed in the book you are about to read is related to this. What happens when political language itself becomes so vicious and degraded that it itself becomes an occasion of atrocity? What happens when the condition of our political debates is such that the language itself damages the lives of those citizens who are subjected to it, and even subjected by it? When Adorno reiterated his argument again, in 1968, he wrote that ‘I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue 1Theodor Adorno, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983), 34.