Psychiatry professor Patricia Casey was telling us in this paper the other day why journalists have been so far unable to come to terms with our President, Mrs Mary McAleese, and why (as it seems to her) the same crowd displays "an obvious and ongoing dislike" for her.
It's all to do with words. They're not good enough, and as journalists we are not good enough with them. As Prof Casey put it: "Words in themselves are limited but necessary conduits for conveying information about the complex world we live in and to make sense of our environment we classify our experiences linguistically."
There was more of this stuff leading to her conclusion that journalists "are thus hidebound by the flawed system of communication that is language, and ever increasingly, soundbite.
"In this process complexity is forfeited."
God help us, it's the truth, even if our bark is worse than our sound bite. We are simple creatures in the media, confined to language so plain it is downright embarrassing. Spending our time talking to each other, which is all we ever do, only makes the situation worse. And body language, of course, is quite beyond us: any intelligent observer would note a very poor level of literacy in this area, with frequent regrettable misunderstandings.
As for rising to a simple simile, never mind a metaphor, we would scarce know where to begin, our thought processes are that primitive. And if we did, the sub-editors would be there with their scalpels in a flash. The odd bit of alliteration is all we're allowed though the arts crowd has been known to slip through the occasional synecdoche.
There was one lad here a few years ago who completely lost the run of himself when asked to run up a two-part series on the problems of the Abbey Theatre (to fill a gap in the pages). In the first piece he got two similes and a simple metaphor past the subs, and emboldened by this he ran riot in his second article, packing it full of metalepsis, litotes, synecdoche, antonomasia, tralation, onomatopoeia, metathesis and prosopoeia.
Nobody in the office could understand a word of the thing so, of course, it fell foul of the sub-editor's rule of thumb, "If in doubt, leave out", and the lad himself resigned two days later, though I heard he picked up a junior ex job in the Department of Agriculture sometime afterwards.
So Prof Casey is no doubt right when she says that journalists cannot cope with President McAleese's use of metaphor and are thrown into confusion for example by her avowed aim of "building bridges".
Tied to the sound bite and hopelessly mired in the lower levels of language we are very poor on the imaginative leap, and, of course, how do we react when confronted with people of superior power in that area? Yes, with rage and envy, and out comes all the nasty innuendo and the attachment of guilt by association that we were accused of during our President's recent canter to the Park.
Right. Meanwhile Alan Clark, the British Tory MP whose comical and personally revealing political diaries became a best-seller, is in the High Court (at the time of writing) attempting to stop the Evening Standard publishing a spoof diary under his name (though it also carries the name of the real author, journalist Peter Bradshaw). Mr Clark complains that readers are confused, with many people thinking the column is actually his, and not a spoof.
The fake diary, the most popular thing in the newspaper, according to editor Max Hastings, is a comical mixture of whimsy and salaciousness: it chronicles fictitious accounts of Mr Clark speeding in his Jaguar, opining on the charms of female colleagues, regularly over-imbibing and describing his party leader in rather unflattering terms.
In other words it is very much like the genuine Clark diaries, but Mr Clark has claimed it is damaging his reputation. He has sued not for defamation but for false attribution of ownership and "passing off".
If I were representing Mr Clark I would have no hesitation in using the arguments out forward by Prof Casey.
The supposedly spoof diary is highly imaginative, full of all kinds of creative notions, such as the suggestion that Mr Clark had ordered police to fence off the Serpentine so that he could enjoy an early-morning dip. No person of sound mind could therefore think that such clever creative material, full of wordplay and metaphor and flights of fancy, could be written by a journalist. Therefore it is quite reasonable for readers to presume it is being written by Clark himself, a man of considerable imagination, especially in the area of his own perceived sexual attractiveness.
I rest my Casey - I mean my case.
