Today’s AP wire carries a hard-hitting story on the economic crisis by one Jeannine Aversa. I am about to explain why this article pisses me off, but let me preface this rant by saying that I have no personal quarrel with Ms. Aversa. Except with regard to her writing, which as I previously mentioned pisses me off.
Here’s a Yahoo News link to the story in question, which may or may not be stale by the time you read this post. Just to set the context for you, this is not an article for the history books by any means; it’s really just the economic crisis article du jour.
Yet this article manages, in its scant 670 words, to make use of the following creative words:
dreaded
deteriorated
engulfed
skittish
deepest
axed
suffering
slashing
carnage
fighting
worn-out
battered
retrenched
tailspin
burrow
vicious
moribund
massive
woes
plaguing
I’ve isolated them from the text because the use of this kind of language in print journalism is now so common that you might not even notice the words in the context of a column. I know I often don’t. But look at these words by themselves. These are serious words. They look like they belong in a recollection of wartime horrors, not an article about the economy. They are of completely unnecessary impact.
Furthermore, these words broadly fit into one of two categories: words with a denotative or connotative sense that invokes physical pain, peril or violence; and words that personify non-persons. Let’s start with the former. Here’s the same list, with all of the “violent” words bolded:
dreaded
deteriorated
engulfed
skittish
deepest
axed
suffering
slashing
carnage
fighting
worn-out
battered
retrenched
tailspin
burrow
vicious
moribund
massive
woes
plaguing
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with colorful language. The English language would be nothing without it. Some of these words’ literal meaning goes largely ignored in contemporary speech and writing–”plaguing” and “fighting” are two good examples–but others in this list appear calculated to invoke physical distress in the context of the economy. The phrase “the moribund economy” particularly annoyed me since it literally states that the economy is facing collapse, an assertion which is factually unsupportable. Yet by using a word inaccessible to those of little vocabulary, presumably including her editor, the writer gets away with it.
My other concern is with the personifying language in the article. Consumers “burrow” — not just one consumer, but consumers as a whole. That same mass of consumers are “worn-out” and “battered.” One sees this horde of American consumers crawling through a desert, dying of thirst. Companies are “reluctant” and “hesitant” about myriad things. The Federal Reserve is described at one point as performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation upon the national economy. This is not a novel, where this sort of writing is smiled upon.
There is a type of person who personifies inanimate systems that are too complex for him to understand. Who responds with great emotion or excitement to words that invoke violence and warfare, whatever the context. That type of person is an idiot. We’ve all met them; there are a lot of them out there.
This is, therefore, an article written for idiots — another data point in a disturbing trend of current event articles geared to the stupid reader. Instead of providing thoughtful journalism that encourages the reader to learn and think, this article and others like it seek only to provoke, providing the barest factual details devoid of analysis. Shame on the Associated Press for carrying it, and shame on any newspaper that deems it suitable for publication.
This is exactly the kind of careless writing that would have annoyed Mark Twain.
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