For all his Churchillian postures, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to commentators, has made no contribution toward vitalizing the imagery of British politics. Not for him the flash of a phrase, the shimmer of a metaphor, the shine of an original simile or even a memorable catch phrase like “their finest hour,” “defiance in defeat” (Winston Churchill), “the pound in your pocket” (Harold Wilson) or “you never had it so good” (Harold Macmillan).
Norman Fairclough of Lancaster University took the trouble of analyzing Blair’s statements and speeches to identify the type of words and phrases the British prime minister most often uses. The result is a book: “New Labour New Language?”
There are very few who would associate Blair with a new political language or some vivid expressions excepting his description of Diana as “the people’s princess.” But everybody would agree that if only Fairclough knew of Blair’s difficulty in spelling certain words, he would have added another two words (New Spelling) to the title of his book.
Right now, Blair has mentioned only “tomorrow” as the word he could not spell correctly. He admitted last week that he had incorrectly spelled the word “tomorrow” as “toomorrow” in a handwritten message to a Labour Party candidate in a by-election in Ipswich, eastern England. Not just once, but three times. As was to be expected, the British press published the misspelt words with malicious glee. At first, there was a clumsy attempt by Downing Street to say it was Blair’s “clumsy” handwriting that made it look as if the word had one “o” too many. But Blair knew that it would spell disaster for him to persist with this defense. “There was a very lame attempt from my press office to suggest that it was just my writing that was at fault, not my spelling,” Blair admitted Friday.
The prime minister said he decided to come clean after a journalist pointed out that he had been visiting a school Thursday and was delivering his speech Friday at a university. Maybe he thought he must feel “at home” at institutes of higher learning. Or perhaps it was after his former English master told the BBC Thursday that Blair, though an “obnoxiously bright” pupil at the elite Edinburgh school Fettes, had always had trouble with the word “tomorrow”.
So in the matter of language too, the British prime minister enjoys some kind of “special relationship” with President George W. Bush though he is free from the US leader’s malapropisms and tendencies to mangle words. Bush commits the grammatical errors of a third grader, asking “Is our children learning?”, calling for a “damage bombing assessment” (this was long before Afghan operations) and telling Philippine President Gloria Arroyo during a telephone conversation that they were in different “time lines (zones).” The US leader’s verbal snafus such as cocoa (coca) leaves, Hispanically, misunderestimate etc. are being collected, exchanged and widely circulated in paperbacks and on websites.
But do Bush’s troubles with language make him less effective as the chief executive? Does an ability to spell words correctly make British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown a better public servant than Blair? Is Dan Quayle, Bush Senior’s vice president, unqualified for the office of president because he could not spell “potatoes” correctly?
I think Junior Bush’s adviser Mary Matalin has a point when she pooh-poohs all this quibbling by the media and says Americans are not interested in what the press says about the president’s linguistic and intellectual qualities. The important thing, she pointed out, is how he is influencing their lives. If the approval ratings after the Sept. 11 attacks are anything to go by, the American people think very highly of their leader. In the case of Blair, the British people marvel at the way he has mastered the grammar of international diplomacy, whatever may be his quarrels with “tomorrow”.
Of course, we all like someone who can communicate effortlessly with people. This is especially so when a nation is at war. Remember Churchill’s “blood and toil” speech? But then everybody knows that what is going on now is not a war in the conventional sense where two armies of equal strength meet each other in the battlefield and fight it out. The only person who seems not to have grasped this fact is UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who, at the beginning of the war, urged “both parties” (anti-terrorism coalition and poor Afghanistan) to spare “civilians on both sides.” Perhaps here we have a good example of what George Orwell said was politicians’ attempts to obfuscate or confuse issues. This is surely more dangerous than an inability to spell certain words correctly.
