Language & Politics: Antecedent and Voice

August 8th, 2008 Posted in Language & Politics

I’m not a fan of pedantic language columns — I’ll take the colloquialism and neologism over “standard English” and grammar Nazism any day. I don’t have time to carefully proofread this blog, which is probably rife with errors — but I try to avoid the kinds of errors which I think are important.

And there are errors in language that I consider important, because I think they have something to do with clarity of thought. Take this one from a story on yesterday’s NPR (I hear little tidbits like these all the time):

“the material has not been made public, but officials expect to do so later today”

The subject of the first clause is “material,” the subject of the second is “officials.” The active “do so” has a passive antecedent — “made public.” Officials are not expecting to be made public.

So what’s the big deal?

First, there’s the failure to think about antecedents and the internal logical consistency of sentences. The writer, editor, and proofreader didn’t notice the reverse of voice from one clause to the other. Most proofreaders will catch more obvious grammatical mistakes. But in this case you’re more likely to catch the mistake if you’re thinking about the logic of the sentence, and that requires more than rote grammatical catechisms. (One way to achieve that understanding is through the study of highly inflected languages like Latin and Ancient Greek — where much of what is grammatically hidden in a time-weathered language like English is made explicit).

And I can’t help but think that carelessness is related to failures to carefully scrutinize the soundness of other kinds of connections — e.g., the administration’s rationales for the Iraq War.

Second, there’s the use of passive voice and vague attribution. Passive voice is not always a bad thing, but it’s often a way that bureaucrats and academics make sentences sound more technical and “objective” than they are by hiding the personalizing subject. For journalists, there’s also the matter of concealing a lack of specificity caused either by anonymous sources, reporting on reporting, or the substitution of the reporter’s opinion (or shit-stirring) with some vague attribution (e.g., “some say”). In this case, the vague “officials” is buried in the second clause, resurrected at the last moment when it’s clear that “materials” won’t simply take care of themselves. And that’s what gets the sentence in trouble — essentially, it’s the result of a journalistic gambit to avoid specificity. Either the reporter took this bit of info from anonymous officials, or the report is so far along the grapevine that a specific attribution has been lost. While that vagueness is not a big deal in this case, it certainly is in many others.