Dalyrmple on exactitude and evasion

Writing at the British journal The Critic, Theodore Dalrymple has an interesting short meditation on the phrase “correctional facility.” Dalrymple is a psychologist and former prison doctor, and the recent execution of a particularly heinous murderer at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana provoked in him a question about the term itself:

The word correctional in this context is not without interest. Who, exactly, is being corrected by an execution? Unless you believe that the lessons learned in this world are carried over into the next, it surely cannot be the person executed. The whole of society, then? But in this case, the “Complex”, or that part of it devoted to executions, and also to the keeping of life-term prisoners, is a Deterrent rather than a Correctional facility. If you imprison someone for life, after all, you are not correcting him, whatever beneficial effect long-term incarceration and the passage of time may have on his character.

Dalrymple has a gift for aphorism, and the one that struck me later in this piece, which began with a meditation on euphemism, was the following broader observation:

“Inexactitude, the handmaiden of evasion, is commonplace.”

Not only commonplace, but epidemic.

Dalrymple notes two motives behind inexactitude of expression: euphemism and evasion. One of these may be unconscious, a flinching away from reality, or, if conscious, simply a matter of politeness, sentimentality, or misplaced delicacy—in all cases a concern for taste over truth.* The other is of necessity conscious. It is dishonesty.

Our epidemic of inexactitude most commonly serves as “the handmaiden of evasion” by concealing the truth behind fogbanks of semi-scientific jargon—especially the language of criticism, sociology, and pop psychology—that is both vague enough and capacious enough to cover anything you want it to. Big, important words, most especially the devil terms of denunciation without which activists would be robbed of speech, are used and misused interchangeably and more and more completely confused.** Vaguery means you can waffle, sidestep, hedge, dodge, fudge, and evade—that is, you can lie—about whatever and via whatever means are more convenient and for whatever purpose serves you in the moment. Jargon, as I implied above, is especially useful for this.

The danger is that sloppy thinking and sloppy expression are mutually reinforcing, especially when there are political points to be gained from euphemism and evasion.

Here’s George Orwell, in a passage I’ve quoted here before and that is more and more often on my mind: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

Perhaps most especially among those who know better.

You can read more of Orwell’s thoughts in his essay “Politics and the English Language” here. I’ve previously paired quotations from it with similar ideas in Chesterton here. And here are the same two writers in a more recent post on jargon, in which, prophetically, the topic of evasion comes up.

*E.g. talking about someone “passing away,” a phrase I now try to avoid. Death is real and I want to acknowledge that. The problem is even worse when someone is described as having “passed away” or even just “died” when they have, in fact, killed themselves. One does not want to be callous, and there is a place for courtesy, but there is also a categorical difference between dying by some process—accident, disease, old age—and killing yourself. Obscuring that difference by inexactitude, for whatever reason, is the kind of evasion we need less of.

**E.g. racism, bigotry, and prejudice mean strikingly different things but are used almost totally interchangeably.