Brought up on Fowler, Orwell and the virtues of plain English, an oldie reflects on the changing language of newspapers, the conversational intimacy of social media and the literary traditions that connect them.
My language was too darn simple, the chatbot seemed to say, marching to the monotonous beat of subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object, without any variation. Stung to the core, I retorted that I had learnt my English in the 1970s, when Ernest Gowers’ Plain Words and Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage were my style bibles. Fowler derided “elegant variations”, I reminded the chatbot. Plain words were preferred, such as the homely “wish”, of Old English origin, to the Latinate “desire”. Our hairstyles and wardrobes could be flamboyant, as befitted the youth of the Seventies, but the reigning model in writing was George Orwell, famous for his clarity. I was not a fan of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, but his essays and letters were, in the “hip” phrase of the day, “far out”.
I will admit that I admired the rich prose of John Updike, the artistry of Jan Morris and the inimitable language of the humorist P. G. Wodehouse, but they were masters to whose heights I could not soar. I had to stay firmly grounded, watch my grammar and mind my idioms. Plainness was the refuge of the meek of language, usage-cautious people like me. And plainness has its own enduring beauty, like the words of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The chatbot wanted me to be more adventurous and introduce greater variety into my language, a thoroughly laudable initiative. But, to recall the words of a former colleague in a newsroom long ago, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” A chatbot trying to upgrade a relic of the Seventies stylistically was likely to meet with as little success as the forever wars.
I was reminded of my age while reading a Substack that I could never have written, so different were its words, flow and cadence. It had a smooth, conversational intimacy that could never be mine.
A voice I could never match
The writer, Crispina Robert, is a Singapore journalist who has also taught journalism. Here she writes about meeting Mishal Husain, the former BBC broadcaster who is now with Bloomberg:
“In my current role, I find myself in a most unique — and dare I say — uncomfortable position. People whose work I consume frequently, whose writing or interviewing style I admire are now within sitting distance of me in the newsroom.
“Last week, Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain was in Singapore. She was assigned a desk two seats away and I felt like a bashful fan wondering if I should just say hi. I did eventually and it was completely mortifying.
“She’s delightful. Considered and kind, the ultimate professional.”
Robert recalls: “But what stuck with me was her account of her move from the BBC to Bloomberg, where she now has a show (The Mishal Husain Show). She was turning 50 and felt that she wanted a new purpose and place for the next chapter of her career.”
“This led me to wonder about what talented people want,” she adds. “At a certain point in a very successful career, money can be a weak tool. Walking through a new door at a specific stage in life can come down to who is at the top and what the organisation stands for.”
Robert has a nice, engaging style, and her Substack is worth reading for what she says about young people, Singapore’s ministers, and for her particular riff that money is not everything. She adroitly weaves all this into a post that is perceptive but never taxing on the brain.
I think it is a fine example of writing for social media: chatty, intimate and smooth.
But this smooth, personal style was not the creation of social media. It was the product of newspapers, which began developing what they called a “reader-friendly” style back in the 1980s, with shorter sentences and paragraphs and simpler words. It was the language of USA Today, which, from day one, tried to attract readers with colourful graphics and concise reports.
When I first saw the paper in the 1980s at Oxford Bookstore in Calcutta, I found it too lightweight. I preferred the Guardian, which I read in the British Council library, the New Statesman, which I bought regularly from a South Calcutta bookshop, and Time magazine, old copies of which I picked up from the pavement book stalls outside Oxford Bookstore in Park Street. The New Statesman, edited by Anthony Howard, had fine writers and an excellent back-of-the-book section; Time dazzled with its linguistic fireworks; and the Guardian was the Guardian, opinionated and engaging. I revelled in their language. My own plain style did not make me impervious to the charm of their words. USA Today did not have the same appeal: it could be snappy, but it was not sexy like Time, chic like the Guardian or literary like the New Statesman.
How newspapers taught everyone to chat
Yet it was the “reader-friendly” style of USA Today that was picked up by emulators. The New Paper was launched in Singapore with the same mix of colourful graphics and easy reading, with the encouragement of the then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who believed that the Straits Times, the existing English daily, was too heavy reading for Singapore’s workers. The New Paper thrived. Even the internet in its early days did not hurt newspaper sales in Singapore, but their days were numbered once social media grew. The New Paper has ceased print publication, while the Straits Times soldiers on with depleted advertising, spun off by its former shareholders as a drag on the market but sustained by government funds.
Not even the “reader-friendly” style could save newspapers once plain folk got the hang of it and churned it out for free on social media, which anybody could access with their indispensable phones, without which life would be impossible. In a way, newspapers conspired in their own downfall by popularizing a style that their readers could imitate because it was so conversational.
An older tradition: Lamb and Didion
Not that the “reader-friendly” style was entirely the creation of newspapers. Writers had a hand, too, and so did book publishers, who saw a market for books made easy: annotated, abridged, or rewritten for children, such as Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, who adapted the plays for young readers.
Charles Lamb (1775–1834) is also remembered for his deeply personal essays, which anticipate the seemingly confessional style of today’s influencers. Like Crispina Robert, who begins with her encounter with Mishal Husain, Lamb buttonholes the reader. “Reader” is the opening word of his essay “South Sea House”, set in London:
“Reader, in thy passage from the Bank—where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,—didst thou never observe a melancholy looking handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left—where Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate?…
“This was once a house of trade,—a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here—the quick pulse of gain—and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled.”
Evocative, descriptive and intimate, this essay could be a forerunner of personal social media posts but for its length and literary quality.
Personal essays still resonate with readers, as do diaries and memoirs. Joan Didion’s collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, remains a celebrated snapshot of America in the 1960s and an example of New Journalism, in which the writer becomes part of the story. Here is Didion writing about her childhood crush on the iconic Hollywood star John Wayne:
“As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to live, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.”
The excerpts I have quoted from personal essays have a wistful note, which may or may not appear in influencers, but they are always personal.
The influencer age
All influencers want is a bit of your time, though not necessarily to regale you with stories; they may also be promoting a product or a cause, and themselves, of course. In fact, influencers end almost every Facebook post with a plea to like it, unabashedly pushing for recognition. Oldies like me remember when it was bad form to toot your own horn, but we are now in a brave new world where hustle is the name of the game.
Influencers have to be chatty, personal, intimate and persuasive. They are multi-talented, really. They have to know their audience and how to hook ’em. It is a tall order, but the payoffs can be huge. The podcaster Joe Rogan has more than 40 million followers across Spotify, YouTube and Instagram. That is more than the total UK newspaper readership: according to the London marketing agency Newsworks, as cited by AI Overview, “Total UK news brand readership reaches 23 million adults daily and 37 million weekly.”
Imagine that: one man’s followers exceeding the readership of the entire British press!
As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
That reminds me: are words and phrases coined by Shakespeare as widely used as they were before? Chill, bro. As Shakespeare might have said, “Thereby hangs a tale” that, “come what may”, we may explore another day.