Despite living with this linguistic diversity, the British are astoundingly bad at identifying accents, not to speak of imitating them. They can usually spot a Scot or a Cockney but are hopelessly at sea when it comes to the subtle distinctions between Manchester and Leeds. Everyone knows that that a series of richly rolled r’s and z sounds indicates the West Country, but not many people know that the natives of Ulster call children “weans” and say “What’s strange?”, meaning “What’s new?” They also have a unique form of intonation which makes it sound as though they’re always complaining, which some years ago during the Troubles they usually were.

If the British accent is a myth, so is a working-class one. There’s no distinctively working-class way of speaking in Britain. It’s rather that working people tend to speak with the accent of their region, whereas the middle classes tend to speak Standard English, which is common to all parts of the country. Even so, the grip of Standard or BBC English is loosening, and along with it ideas of correct or “educated” speech which have been with us at least since the 18th century.

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The effect of this is hard to overestimate. Over the centuries, millions of British people have been brought up to believe that their way of talking was improper. Since most of the people around them spoke improperly too, this didn’t matter much of the time; but it meant, for example, that people would think twice before asking them to read out a poem or give a brief speech at a wedding. Language is power, but the great majority of men and women had to make do with a second-class form of power, one contaminated by a verbal virus known as an accent.

This assumes that there are people who speak without an accent, which is as absurd as supposing that one could speak without vocal cords. The fact is that there is no such thing as an accentless form of speech, any more than there is a non-specific way of walking. An accent simply means a particular way of pronouncing a language, and Queen Camilla’s way is quite as particular as Katie Price’s. But there are styles of pronunciation which are socially acceptable and others which are not. The problem is that acceptability is entirely relative. It’s probable that a well-educated late 18th-century gentleman would have pronounced “Duke” as “Dook”, “obliging” as “obleegin”, and “cup of tea” as “coop of tay”. It’s unlikely that he would get to read the TV news if he was around today.

Standard English itself grew out of a regional dialect, roughly the area containing the key centers of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was part of a strikingly successful attempt by a rising middle class to consolidate its cultural power. Just as they needed a common currency, so they needed a shared way of speaking by which they could recognize each another instantly, without going to the trouble of inventing a secret handshake or wearing a old school tie. “A pat on the back” now sounded like “a pet on the beck”, while “barth”, which was once amusingly rustic, was now polite usage for “bath”. “Really” came to sound like “rarely”, though the two can almost be opposites (as in “I really/rarely enjoy dancing”), and in Sloanish circles “It’s my birthday” became hard to distinguish from “It’s my bathday”, suggesting that you took a bath only once a year.

There are also variations in volume. Generally speaking, people get louder as you travel from Brighton to Lancaster, and there’s a myth in Northern Ireland that Protestants speak louder than Catholics. Some of the public school boys I encountered as a student at Cambridge in the early Sixties seemed to bray rather than speak. This was because only oiks like myself were anxious about other people overhearing their conversation, whereas those with true social authority didn’t give a toss. I was once sitting in a Cambridge hairdresser’s along with a dozen or so other customers when a large young man in cravat, hacking jacket and knee-high boots put his head round the door and bellowed to the barber “Johnnies, Albert!” (“Johnnies” meant condoms in those days.) It’s true that barber’s shops were one of the few places where you could buy such goods in those sexually repressed times, but the transaction was usually hushed and furtive, like buying hard drugs today. There was nothing hushed and furtive about the Right Honourables who swaggered along King’s Parade and hooted in cinemas at the feeblest joke.

It wasn’t long, however, before these young men would be fit meat for the satire of Monty Python. In the post-Beatles era, some ex-public school students at Oxbridge began to roughen up their accents, talk down their noses, and even introduce the odd glottal stop into their speech, as in “ta’oo” for “tattoo”. Old Etonians with orange hair and silver nose rings began to make their appearance among the dreaming spires. Anyone who addressed you with a cheery “Ow yer doin’, mate?” was almost certainly from Harrow or Winchester. Rishi Sunak slurs a little when speaking to ordinary people (you expect him suddenly to whip out a flat cap), just as Harold Wilson’s style of speech became more Yorkshire the further north he traveled. Prince William and Prince Harry speak like regular guys, whereas their father does not.

It’s all a far cry from the encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Alone and tearful in London, Oliver runs into a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy” who says “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row” to which Oliver replies “I am very hungry and tired. I have walked a long way, I have been walking these seven days”. It’s hard to know how someone brought up in a workhouse can produce this impeccable piece of Standard English, but there’s a Victorian literary convention which holds that virtuous people tend to speak in this cultivated style. Oliver turns out to be of genteel birth, so perhaps his posh English is genetically determined. You can’t have a hero who drops his aitches, any more than you can have an archbishop who drops his trousers. Moral and linguistic propriety go hand in hand. A gentleman has both good morals and good manners, the latter reflecting the former. As in the novels of Jane Austen, problems arise when someone is socially a gentleman but morally a total bastard.

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A good deal of British humor springs from quick changes of linguistic register. Legendary comedians like Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, and Kenneth Williams all trade in abrupt shifts from the tones of the civilized middle classes to a blunter, more popular idiom. A pretentious flight of fantasy is punctured by a sudden crude or mundane comment. Taking poshness down a peg or two is a familiar British pastime, one that reflects the nation’s fondness for self-deprecation, but it’s particularly striking when the refined and the rough-spoken are combined in the same person. What marks the British sensibility isn’t so much pathos as bathos — sudden swoopings from high to low, all of which depend on an acute sense of the way language is bound up with rank and authority.

Speech divides as well as unites: if they haven’t heard you properly, the working class say “ay?”, the lower-middle class say “pardon?”, the middle class say “sorry?” and the upper class say “what?” In their slovenly way, the upper class are also supposed to say huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, which suggests that they’re as indolent in their speech habits as they are in most other things. The effort of pronouncing consonants is simply too exhausting for them, and can be left to their gamekeepers. Military speech, by contrast, is traditionally clipped and precise, as though everything you say takes the form of a command. Its briskness is also meant to dispel emotion, which can get in the way of killing people. It’s hard to tell someone you love them, or ask them to pass the salt, in the tones of the late Lord Montgomery.

Even so, some kind of Standard English will probably survive as long as the so-called public schools do. Most governing classes in history have educated their children apart from the common people, and teaching them a distinctive way of speaking, or even in some cases a different language altogether, has traditionally been part of that privilege. What kind of distinctive speech doesn’t matter: it might well have come about by some historical quirk that the idiom of urban Lancashire became socially dominant, so that the King would speak like Liam Gallagher and call Prince Andrew “our kid”. In that case, one would probably also come across dissident Oxbridge students with silver nose rings who sounded for all the world like David Dimbleby.

Posh kids have been chattin breeze on the mean streets of Fulham for years now, long before Tottenham girl Adele was derided for sporting Bantu knots and a Jamaican flag bikini for Carnival in 2020 (“hello pon de other side,” Twitter roared), or even before Bedales alumna and celeb offspring Lily Allen crooned “rudeboi you look like a smokah” in 2018.

Jamaican “roadman” slang, alongside borrowings from Arabic, Hindi and Somali, has been settling into 21st-century yoofspeak — known to academics as Multicultural London English (MLE) — for two decades now, causing various moral panics about cultural appropriation and/or the desecration of the English language along the way. Spreading far beyond the M5, teens in Derby, Devon and Darlington have traded in regional phrases for Skepta lyrics.

As long ago as 2008, Paul Weller — once known for taking on the establishment with David Cameron’s fave song Eton Rifles — admitted he would be sending his children to a private school lest they end up “coming home speaking like Ali G”. “I’m just not having it,” the Jam jongleur grumbled. His band came to prominence supporting The Clash on the earth-shaking White Riot tour, inspired by the chaotic events of Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. From cutting his teeth on punk to entering cantankerous middle-class fatherhood, Weller had embodied the complete life cycle of cool, the radical struggles of Windrush London trickling into the tediously ironic lexicon of Noughties teenagers.

White kids picking up the slang of ethnic minorities is nothing new; our language is always evolving, a testament to our island nation’s migrant history. But what has changed, in the past two decades, is the specific role of a working-class urban lexicon in burnishing the reps of the very poshest kids in town. Code-switching has become a careful London art, where bad gyals on the bus arrive home to sound cut-glass pleases and thank yous to the au pair.

Of course, the spread of MLE among the middle classes is not simply a nefarious culture grab. It is a natural consequence of diversity in both physical communities and in pop culture, with grime music bursting out of the 2000s London scene at the same time as Top Boy became the toast of Channel 4. The immediate vibe of both — being tough, ruthless, canny — is absolute teenager-bait; but you only need to actually watch Top Boy to think twice about brazenly copying its lingo in the common room. Not just a gangsta romp, it’s a serious study on young black masculinity, on government policy pushing migrant families off cliffs. But no: it seems many teens, who had only ever stepped foot on one kind of estate, watched this and decided the best takeaway would be to add a “ting” or two to their idiolect as a shortcut to gritty authenticity, however forced.

What choice, you might say, do these poor kids have? Being posh is no longer cool. Long gone are the days of Jack Wills supremacy, when lounging about in country piles wearing cable-knit jumpers was all the rage. Saltburn, in which troubled toff Venetia frolicked about on a tennis court with a bottle of Bolly, sparked a brief revival that saw TikTok trustafarians dance their way through listed buildings. To be honest, I’d almost, almost, take a Cotswold shooting party over the “duttiest” Camberwell rave, for at least one is upfront about the number of guests in Debrett’s.

But can we blame this second cohort, skanking to devious beats in a piss-scented lock-up, for putting on a costume? Culture has lurched so far away from Sloane Rangers — and, just as well-heeled graduates find themselves renting further and further afield from their prep schools, fashion has followed them into Brixton, Tooting and Tottenham. Who can blame them for wanting to fit in?

Nor is class and race tourism anything new. In 1957, Norman Mailer taxonomised the Hipster as a fanatical consumer of black culture in a 9,000-word essay. It makes for difficult reading now — not least for its pretty racist thesis that “the American existentialist” (a guaranteed bore) must live with “a sensuous relation to existence” by enjoying bodily pleasures in some sort of hedonistic “primitive” present. It was understandably hated by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. But Mailer’s obvious fetish for what he saw as the liberating abandon within black culture, of its supposed proximity to death and reality, revealed in itself the way edginess tends to pluck choice things from other worlds, borrowing and refashioning until they become accessories for discerning whites, like trinkets from so many marvellous holidays.

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It is fascinating that, 70 years on, cool elites are similarly using black argot as a totem of hipness and modernity, framing everything non-white and non-posh as sensual and gritty. But we should be wary of buying into Mailer’s insufferable hipster mode by letting this slip without critique. A recent conversation with an old friend about his moving to Bow was shot through with euphemisms to this effect — that a bit of time in a different “community” (why does this term never apply to the stucco-fronted houses of Westbourne Park?) might be “cool”, “eye-opening” even.

One of the appeals of these fake accents, which is also at the heart of their problematic nature, is that they are perceived as “anti-establishment”. If the system is white, moneyed, strict — a.k.a our parents — then the coolest rebellion must be the opposite. Part of the allure of slang is that it is not understood, or is despised, by a perceived enemy: middle-class parents’ horror at their children picking up MLE only makes it more enticing. For fear of seeming prejudiced, such disdain is best expressed in careful euphemism. In 2010, Emma Thompson told Radio Times that, on a visit to her old school, she urged pupils not to use slang words such as “like” and “innit”. “I told them, ‘Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid.'”

But is it truly fair to equate the use of slang with intelligence? By doing so, Thompson encircles the most poisonous stereotypes about inner-city teenagers without naming them —  insinuating that hanging around on the wrong side of the linguistic tracks imparts some sort of wretchedness on the speaker. Besides, she need not have worried, for the old school in question was the Camden School for Girls. These clever girls, primed to float demurely into top jobs, know more than most how to code-switch. Indeed, the point about code-switching is that it comes easier to the elite, because the thousand secret signals of privilege cannot be learned from the telly, but from years and years of subtle and exclusive schooling. And whatever we pick up, we can just drop, with no risk of discrimination. For others, not so.

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Emma Thompson’s alarm at teenagers “sounding stupid” or jeopardising proper English is therefore a little disingenuous: posh kids will always have RP to hand when they need it. Did Thompson really think the Camden girls would forget how to speak nicely? In reality, if the past 20 years show anything, MLE’s posh adopters do so as a teenage fad — and it will never get in the way of a Fulham boy and his birthright, a job in finance or fine art.

Middle-class parents, then, do not fear linguistic extinction, but their own murky and problematic associations with not speaking “properly” — crime, stupidity, drug use. Really, Cressida… did we put you through Hill House to speak like a gangster? But what they do have right is contempt for the artificiality of the whole affair.

For more than anything, it speaks to the way fashion has come to cannibalise the aesthetics of diversity, feeding the illusion of London as a great bastion of social mobility while only lending cachet to uptowners. Our capital’s youth scene is now one that favours these MLE magpies, so many miniature curators, trying on accents like Marie Antoinette demurely playing peasant in the Petit Trianon. For a generation so tormented by a desire to be candid about privilege, this trend is a toe-curling exception.

We rarely think about what it means to assign towns or neighbourhoods to the bottom of our moral geography; but those who live in them often feel ashamed, not because they have committed any wrong but because they know they are seen as lesser beings. They report feeling small and powerless, with their behaviour “painfully scrutinised and negatively evaluated”. Sadness, depression and a sense of isolation can often follow. The effect on the self can be devastating.

Curiously, this kind of humiliation becomes possible only when a society has, in its ideology, transcended ideas of natural difference, and convinced its citizens that they are due equal rights and dignity. For instance, when women and non-white people demanded equal rights and dignity, they rightly began to push back against the everyday slights and humiliations visited on them by dominant groups, who found shaming people on the basis of their gender or race increasingly frowned upon. 

In the great era of post-war social democracy, something similar began to happen in the case of social class. In the most wince-inducing scene of The Remains of the Day, set in the Thirties, the butler — Stevens, whose life goal is to serve his master with complete devotion and professionalism — is humiliated by the patrician friend of Lord Darlington who wants to demonstrate the lower class’s ignorance of global affairs and therefore the error of permitting them to have a vote. Yet, despite our own embarrassment and rising sense of outrage, the butler, played in the film by Anthony Hopkins, did not seem to feel the humiliation — because he accepted implicitly that he was of a lower social order and should not be expected to know these things.

Social shaming is by no means confined to the lower orders, whom today we refer to with terms such as disadvantaged communities and the precariat. In fact, shaming is a general phenomenon of stratified society, although its effect is much more apparent in some.

A survey of Australians we commissioned for our new book, The Privileged Few, found that half of young adults admit to having felt ashamed about where they grew up, the school they attended, or their parents’ employment. Shame is a strong emotion to admit too, even in an anonymised survey. We found that parents in households with children are much more likely to admit to feelings of shame than those in households without children, perhaps because adolescents feel shame more intensely than adults and memories of emotional wounds fade as one grows older. In our follow-up focus groups, some made poignant comments about how, as children, they thought they were normal until someone denigrated their suburb or their school or even their father’s low-status job.

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The side effect of this shaming is worryingly that people lower down the hierarchy say they conceal where they live or where they went to school, either by lying or becoming evasive when asked. One of our informants spoke of how “people would cringe when I mentioned the… suburb I came from, so sometimes I’d pick another suburb, so they don’t cringe”. Another said that when he mentioned his state school to a partner at the accounting firm where he works, “he visibly recoiled… He looked at me differently.”

In 2012, Owen Jones published Chavs, a powerful polemic against the demonisation of the working class, or at least the element of it characterised by the media and some politicians as “feckless, criminalised and ignorant”. But the extremes of condescension, scorn and even disgust directed at “chavs” should be understood within a broader distribution of “microaggressions” up and down the social scale and manifesting in feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, resentment, guilt, envy, arrogance and contempt. Unlike debates over the microaggressions of race and gender that have dominated the public domain in recent years, the microaggressions of class are often ignored. Yet they seethe beneath the surface, erupting at times when the privileges enjoyed by elites become too brazen, too egregious — justas they did during the pandemic. 

As the Covid virus spread in the early months of 2020, and London began to shut down, wealthy families fled the city for their sanctuaries in the country. Others took to their yachts or flew to Caribbean islands. Estate agents fielded inquiries from the super-rich for “mansions with bunkers”. Newspaper stories reporting the flight of the rich attracted a torrent of bitter and cynical comments from the public. 

We argue in our book that relations among those up and down the social scale are fraught with emotional effort and inner turmoil. Informants for our study (in “egalitarian” Australia) admitted that they pay more attention and respect to people they believe are wealthy or influential. Some look up to them even though they don’t want to and it goes against the grain of their moral code. One conceded that if someone pointed out a billionaire at a party then “I think you may afford them a bit more respect”. These comments were made bashfully, as if looking up to the rich and powerful went against some inner principle or entailed a small sacrifice of dignity.

At the other end of the spectrum, some from a higher position in the hierarchy may want to be respectful and congenial in their relations with those below, but risk being seen as condescending, disrespectful or unduly familiar. While one spoke of levelling-up by changing the way she speaks and carries herself in the presence of a higher status person, another, who had attended an elite school, commented that the adjustment can work the other way so that “you might come down a notch or two”. But he has also discovered that the gulf between the elites and the rest sometimes takes the form of disdain from below: “You get on really well with somebody and then they ask you that dreaded question ‘Where do you live? What school do you go to?’ And the instant you say it, their face drops.”

We are not suggesting an equivalence between disdain from above and disdain from below. The face drop does not have the social power of the cringe. As Kathryn Abrams observed, “a war of disgusts is one that those less socially privileged are unlikely to win”.

These injuries of social class are often felt most painfully in the schoolyard, among children yet to learn the rules of social inhibition or, indeed, respect for difference. In schools, interactions among students and between students and teachers are beset by the everyday slights and humiliations associated with social and economic difference. Yet the language of class, once a powerful tool serving the interests of equality and dignity, has fallen out of fashion. The words to parry the microaggressions of class are absent.

If you speak to 11-year-olds, they can call out sexism and racism, even ageism, but when it comes to discrimination or vilification on the basis of class or social status they are dumbstruck. Those students who intend to remain in the state system after primary school are often shamed by those whose parents are sending them to elite private schools. Public schools are “shit”, said one. How does an 11-year-old respond? With an explanation of the social benefits of the public education system? Or with an epithet such as “snob”, which has little rhetorical power in the neoliberal area of “choice” and getting ahead by whatever means possible. The absence of a language of class politics — as opposed to a vibrant language of gender and racial politics — means that shaming on the basis of social status or the school one goes to is taken in as personal wound rather than as an expression of social division.

Students at elite private schools in Britain as elsewhere are taught to assume the superiority of their position. As one graduate observed: “I joined Westminster School [in London] for sixth form. On my first day we were given a talk by the headmaster, who told us: “You are the crème de la crème of this country. Sitting around you are future leaders. Don’t you forget it.”

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These schools aim to imbue the offspring of the elite with certain higher moral and spiritual qualities, a process known as consecration, sanctifying these students as beyond the ordinary and moulding them into objects of power and influence; in short, elite. They are taught the dispositions of ease, confidence and entitlement appropriate to a world of privilege. 

The uncomfortable conclusion we draw is that elite privilege is best viewed as a set of everyday practices that sorts and reproduces social strata. Studying the alchemy of how privilege is done, whereby elites seek and are granted exclusive benefits, suggests that the privileges bestowed on elites are not a by-product of wealth but an organising principle used to enforce social difference. In the end, it is our collective compliance that makes elite privilege so deeply entrenched and “natural”, even though it is responsible for so many harms: economic harms, civic harms, and psychic harms, not least the everyday system of shaming and humiliation that is characteristic of a society of privilege. 

Still, it’s a dangerous game for the elites because shaming can congeal into resentment, a political anger that can break through in unpredictable ways. A political class that not only lacks an understanding of the problems of class demonisation but actively seeks to participate in it is doomed to face the reckoning of a vengeful electorate.

A few years ago, the ground suddenly became the floor. For centuries the ground has been outdoors and the floor indoors, but now people fighting in the street are said to roll around on the floor. Armed police confronting a criminal in a park now shout “Get down on the floor!” when they mean the ground, to which a smart villain might reply “But there isn’t a floor around here!” You can find some fascinating plants in the woods if you look on the floor. You’re unlikely to find an existential crisis there, however. Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It doesn’t mean “imminent” or “severe”, it means “actually existing”. So an existential crisis is an actually existing one, which is the only kind of crisis you’re likely to come across. Non-existential crises are as rare as Trotskyist taxi drivers. If you want to impress your friends at dinner parties, you could say: “The morning star and the evening star are conceptually distinct but existentially identical”, meaning that the words mean different things but refer to the same actually existing object (the planet Venus). Or perhaps you should just say: “I had an incredibly impactful existential crisis on the Hyde Park floor.”

Some verbal innovations stick and some don’t. “Hopefully”, for example, doesn’t mean “It is to be hoped that”, which is what everyone uses it to mean; it means to do something while full of hope. But nobody is going to abandon the term just because a professor points this out, so what once would have been a misuse is now an acceptable usage. This is part of how languages work. The archaic word “anon” once meant “right away”, but given the human tendency to procrastinate it came to mean “soon” or “shortly”. For much the same reason, “I’ll be with you immediately” means the opposite of what it says, while “presently” once meant “right away” but now means “in a while”. “A mental health episode” also means the opposite of what it says. It’s just that people can’t bring themselves to talk about mental illness.

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To refute is not to deny something but to prove that it’s wrong. So when someone says “I refute that”, you could always say, “Alright then, go on, refute it”. These days, “literally” is no longer to be taken literally. Someone described Ghislaine Maxwell as “literally the apple of her father’s eye”, which would have seriously affected his vision. People now literally explode with rage or literally fall through the floor with astonishment. Pubs are “literally just down the road” — rather, perhaps, than metaphorically so.

“Criteria” and “phenomena” are now used as though they are singular nouns. Even my computer does this in the case of “criteria”. People who are trying to talk or write in a “polite” way (Morrissey in his autobiography, for example) say things like “It’s an exciting time for you and I”, probably because they think “you and me” is too colloquial. But “you and me” is correct here — or, to put the point in a quaintly old-fashioned lingo nobody speaks any more, a pronoun takes the accusative case after a preposition. “It’s I” is grammatically correct but unacceptable; we’d say “It’s me” instead.

A “fulsome” apology isn’t whole-hearted but grovelling. The word “internet” is strictly speaking a tautology, like “unmarried bachelor”, since all nets are inter. One of a million good reasons for not becoming a Scientologist is that that’s a tautology too: “logy” means “knowledge” and so does “science”, so “Scientology” means the knowledge of knowledge. It’s doubtful that being told this would induce Tom Cruise to tear up his membership card. Or consider “She may potentially go on to study law in Berlin”. Spot the superfluous word in that sentence. “Potentially” is almost always unnecessary. A lot of people stick in a “potentially” when they use the future tense, but as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might have said, it’s like a cog in the machine of language that isn’t meshing with anything.

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The liberal complacency of Martin Amis

By Terry Eagleton

Lots of verbal expressions have changed over time. We used to describe a collection of things as “several” or “many”, but now it’s the more technical-sounding “multiple”. There used to be questions about the steel industry, but now they’re around the steel industry. Things were once up to you but now they’re down to you. They were once sorted out, but now they’re just sorted. Once upon a time only babies and parcels were delivered; now everything is. “Begging the question” used to mean assuming the truth of something you’re trying to prove, but for the last century or so it’s come to mean raising a question.

There used to be changes, but today they’re almost all sea-changes or step-changes, while some windows have become brief, generous or rapidly narrowing, which our ancestors would have found as puzzling as doors being neurotic or munificent. People used to say that they were standing in a queue, but nowadays they say that they were stood in it. The same goes for “were sitting” and “were sat”. To use that old-fashioned lingo again, the imperfect tense is giving way to the perfect. Since these changes are almost certainly here to stay, this is a good example of how what’s strictly speaking ungrammatical can become common currency. It isn’t strictly grammatical to say “politics is the art of the possible”, but nobody is going to alter the “is” to “are”.

Good grammar forbids ending a sentence with a preposition, but you don’t often hear “This is a situation up with which I shall not put”. T sounds are now regularly dropped off the ends of words (“startin”, “deep in my hear”), and may well vanish altogether in the future, but they aren’t pronounced either in the poshest French, and there’s no law that decrees that every sound in a word must be pronounced. If you live in Burnley or Barnsley, dropping your h’s may be the correct thing to do. If you live in Camden or Chipping Norton, or anywhere where “a pat on the back” becomes “a pet on the beck”, it probably isn’t. There’s no reason why regional forms of speech should conform to Standard English. In fact, Standard English itself was once a regional form of speech. I went to school near Manchester, where pupils from small Lancashire mill towns would say things like “Hast tha seen ‘im over yon?” or “Ah’m reet jiggered” (I’m really tired). Given the conventions of their linguistic community, this was the right way for them to talk.

Language is interwoven with our forms of life. To give an example: people today quite often use the word “necessarily” unnecessarily, as in “It isn’t necessarily that all Tasmanian greengrocers are psychotic, it’s just that some of them are a bit eccentric”. What they mean is that all Tasmanian greengrocers aren’t psychotic at all, but adding a “necessarily” makes the statement sound less definite, and being indefinite is what postmodern culture prizes, in contrast to being certain. Certainty these days is increasingly equated with dogmatism, so that to say “It’s nine o’clock” is unpleasantly unambiguous, whereas “It’s like nine o’clock” is suitably tentative, provisional, open-ended and anti-authoritarian. Not many postmodernists, however, are so cavalier about certainty when it comes to finding out whether their bank account has been raided, or whether a certain drug might cause foetal abnormalities.

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Ireland is a Freudian dream

By Terry Eagleton

Language is a central constituent of our humanity. It’s true that some other animals employ highly complex sign-systems, but it’s unlikely that dolphins have come up with an equivalent of War and Peace, unless they are being remarkably furtive about it. Since language is the medium in which we hatch concepts, it’s what allows us to perform life-saving surgery, but also to turn flame-throwers on peasants’ huts. So are we superior or inferior to creatures that can do neither? The answer is an unequivocal yes and no.

Pointing out linguistic abuses is a perilous business. Language is so intimate an activity that to criticise the way somebody uses it can feel like undermining their identity. People have fought and died over the right to speak a particular language, or the freedom not to speak one imposed on them by an alien power. In 19th-century Ireland, schoolchildren sometimes wore sticks around their necks in class, and the stick was notched each time they used an Irish word. At the end of the school day, the child with the most notches was beaten in front of its fellows. Yet the teachers who ran this system were mostly Irish themselves, and might well have been Irish speakers. They were concerned that their students should succeed in life, and speaking English was thought essential to that end. The Irish constitution exists in two versions, one English and one Irish. Both documents state that in the event of a discrepancy between the two, the Irish version will be deemed to take precedence. But the Irish version is widely believed to be a translation of the English version. This is the kind of thing the English call “very Irish”.

One peculiarity of language is that it is effectively infinite. There’s always more of the stuff to come. I could, for example, carry on writing this essay indefinitely, except for the fact that I’m reet jiggered, so I won’t.

Plato observes that poets love their poems like fathers love their children. That’s why writers hate to cut their own work — to “murder their babies”, as they must learn to do if they hope to be any good. But they hate it more when others murder their babies, and are even ready to die for the ones they’ve raised and sent out into the world.

D-503 — the protagonist of We, the dystopian sci-fi novel of totalitarianism published in 1921, for which the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin was lucky to be exiled rather than shot — calls the diary he has just begun “a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I and, at the same time, not I.”

And when the KGB confiscated the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, Grossman wrote to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, asking: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

A famous passage from the Talmud helps to explain why writers feel this way — and why we should, too: “Adam was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he preserved the entire world.”

Had the first human being died alone, neither Eve nor any of her descendants would have existed. The destruction of a soul is the annihilation of all of its potential offspring, physical and spiritual, until the end of time. But a human soul is an entire world in another way. Perception, thought and feeling open the soul to very many things beyond itself — in principle, to all things — whose impressions it absorbs and assembles into a more or less meaningful whole. Apart from this humanising work, the notion of a universe, a single, all-encompassing whole, might never have occurred to anyone. But this inner world can also be destroyed, corrupted by forgetfulness and publicly erased.

For writers, this Biblical passage rings true: “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” God is said to have fashioned the waters of primordial chaos into a universe by divine speech. One need not be a believer to learn from this story. Human beings are obliged to sort social and psychological chaos by way of logos — reason, speech, order, proportion — in the first instance through law, ritual and the cultural memory of myth. Communities of shared meaning and purpose are woven of language, without which individual experiences would otherwise be poor possessions held in dumb isolation by lonely hominids.

Like the poets and chroniclers of remote antiquity, novelists and dramatists speak to the enduring questions of human life: who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They fabricate buzzing microcosms peopled by characters that live and breathe on contact with other minds and fertile imaginations. Censors don’t just cut out writers’ tongues and stop up readers’ ears, they obliterate worlds.

But the public response to the extensive and aggressive censorship of our time has been depressingly muted. In part, this reflects a widespread loss of what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feeling for language and the meaning of words. Most people don’t read books, let alone good ones. They produce and consume short, easily digestible “texts” through electronic media, but hard-won habits of literacy rust in disuse.

Few people know the thrill of repeatedly casting into the depths of a difficult piece of writing, feeling a tug on the line and hauling up a catch of meaning. That experience was more common when deep and challenging books were recited, studied and memorised as sources of wisdom. “Turn it and turn it,” an ancient commentator said of the Bible, “for everything is in it.” Generations of our forebears thought the same of Homer and Dante, Aristotle and Confucius. Who reads like that anymore?

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The metallic clang of abstractions now drowns out the living word of particular human minds. Like all bureaucratic and ideological jargon, the governing language of our time is flat, colourless and crude. It is no longer that of poets, prophets and statesmen, but of what Nietzsche called “the coldest of all cold monsters” — the increasingly unified, propaganda-generating, information-gathering-and-monitoring conglomeration of public and private entities that is the post-modern State.

The contemporary sclerosis of language has profound psychological and political consequences. One of Samuel Beckett’s characters wistfully contemplates the dance and hum of bees as they enter and exit their sun-drenched hives, exhibiting a kind of connectedness from which he is excluded by his lonely consciousness. That consciousness of exile is both quintessentially modern and distinctively human. It envies the bees, but cannot find satisfaction in any socially-ordered aggregation of identical units. It yearns for the inner connection between individuals that distinguishes a community from a characterless crowd. But censorship and the decay of language serve only to strengthen the hive-mind and the crowd.

The corruptions of language, politics and society we are now witnessing were foretold in some great dystopian novels of the 20th century. But the English and American authors of those novels had the evidence of history before them, in the form of ideological tyranny: Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism and Maoism. And they’d learned from the Bard that what’s past is prologue.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one of the characters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remarks. In the regime of Oceania, which is ruled by a technocratic elite “shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”, books are everywhere hunted down and destroyed. The State language is crudely binary (like one university’s definition of a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men”), purged of nuance and full of “telescoped words and phrases”, of which its very name, Newspeak, is exemplary. A large department meticulously destroys and reproduces newspapers on a daily basis, rewriting the past to conform with the demands of the present. (Orwell couldn’t have guessed how easy this would be in the digital age.)

The vocabulary of Newspeak is constantly shrinking, because its “whole aim … is to narrow the range of thought”. The State hopes that restricting speech to “short, clipped words which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind” will ultimately eliminate “thoughtcrime” — or independent thought — if only because “there will be no words in which to express it”.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, elite technicians govern a stratified society composed of classes of virtually identical human beings grown in scientific hatcheries. While a global State founded on eugenics hasn’t yet materialised, much that Huxley imagines has already come to pass. The society he foresees is debased in familiar ways. It is characterised by a cult of youth; an economy driven by entertainment and the pleasures of virtual reality; the near-universal, habitual use of psychoactive drugs, contraceptives and aphrodisiacs; overt public sexuality; general promiscuity; and a swarming media that makes a great public spectacle of non-conformists.

Love and friendship are hardly possible under these conditions. The citizens of the World State are mere shadows of human beings: smiling surfaces without tragic depth. Little wonder that the one surviving lover of Shakespeare is driven to suicide.

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Most people in Brave New World are content with their lot. Thankfully, we are not quite there yet. Ray Bradbury envisions a society more like our own, one full of vague foreboding. Fahrenheit 451 describes a rushing world of violence, suicide and looming war in which a depressed populace distracts itself from the slow death of love and longing with vapid entertainment. Bradbury explicitly connects the fact that “our civilisation is flinging itself to pieces” with the destruction of literature and the deliberate falsification of the past.

Montag, the protagonist, makes a living burning books, in accordance with rules said to have been established in 1790 by the “First Fireman”, Benjamin Franklin. His wife Mildred, who claims to be happy, spends her days in a room with three walls of television screens, surrounded by her “family”: soap-opera uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who “said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud”. She has no recollection of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills one night.

An old professor who’s been unemployed since the last liberal arts college shut its doors tells Montag that the magic of books lay in “how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”. But they are hated because they “show the pores in the face of life” to a world that wants “only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless”.

Chief Beatty, Montag’s deeply conflicted boss, explains how we got here. Everything sped up in the 20th century, when horses, dogs and carts were replaced by faster and faster machines. Time contracted. Books were condensed and pre-digested, “levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”. School was shortened, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored”. Sound familiar?

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How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

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Fahrenheit 451 concludes apocalyptically, with a revelatory global catastrophe. Bradbury draws on some very old stories to make the meaning of this ending fully intelligible. Montag flees a doomed city like Lot escaping the burning of Sodom. The world collapses and must be rebuilt. Insofar as there is hope, it lives in the hearts and minds of scattered old men who remember the writings of Plato, Swift, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Montag himself recalls passages from a forbidden volume of Ecclesiastes.

At the novel’s end, Montag remembers a verse from Revelations, The Book of the Apocalypse: “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruits every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Jews called the Bible — in Greek, to biblion, or “the book” — an etz chaim, or tree of life. In Revelations, the river of the waters of life sustains two trees of life: the Hebrew Scriptures (whose fruits were the twelve tribes of Israel) and New Testament. The “leaves” of these trees, their pages, were understood to be medicine for the sickness of “the nations”, people who knew nothing of the Bible.

Despite the best efforts of some of our greatest writers, the healing power of books has been mostly forgotten in our time. Must we really wait until our world is thoroughly burned and broken before we begin to mend it?

Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments, a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes” to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings.

On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable — and not just for non-native speakers. The Census asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” Even assuming you successfully parsed its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain.

Is a “gender” a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity? According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it could be any of these. So, whether or not you “identify with” a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a “gender you identify with”) will partly depend on what you think “gender” is. It also partly depends upon what you think “to identify with” means, since this is hardly an everyday term. And then there’s the awkward fact that, if you are an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to have a “sex registered at birth” at all.

One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don’t invite false positives. By the ONS’s own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of “community testing at LGBT History Month events”, which is a bit like gauging atheists’ understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the Vatican. Why didn’t those in charge anticipate that a question couched in obscure genderese might stump noninitiates, even if it would please their Stonewall overlords?

The most obvious hypothesis would be that the ONS was cajoled, guilt-tripped, befuddled and emotionally blackmailed into linguistic compliance, like many a fellow national institution before it. Maybe so, but a wider explanation is also available: that those who designed the question didn’t even realise it was couched in obscure genderese. They took their own standards of linguistic apprehension to be universal and binding.

This is a tendency that extends well beyond transactivism. Word choices can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is to convey the status of the speaker or author. Now that many of us spend our days sitting around scrolling emails and timelines, reading snippets and writing things with our thumbs, word choices are one of the main opportunities to socially signal. Slang, jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords are all ways to imply that you’re in a particular crowd.

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Belonging also requires knowing what words not to use. As social animals, we can’t help but practise what linguistics expert Deborah Cameron calls “verbal hygiene”: trying to purify language of socially problematic word choices. If you’re a well-off Tory, you’ll want to avoid terms such as “toilet”, “lounge” and “settee”. If you’re a well-off Lefty, you’ll want to avoid phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen”, “cancel culture” and “lab leak”. The Right dislikes grammatical solecisms, especially when committed by Angela Rayner; the Left is much more concerned with moral solecisms. Either way, though, it’s at least partly a way of indicating who’s in and who’s out.

Many of us practise verbal hygiene simply in order to have an easier life. Some enjoy throwing the rulebook at others as a means of social control. Still more hubristic individuals — usually with PhDs — try to rewrite the rules altogether, inventing new lexical standards out of the blue and then associating any deviance from them with a suspect character. In certain circles, serious disagreement about meaning is cast as linguistic violence, and semantic power grabs are attributed to everyone but oneself. They want to “create divides” ,“police” categories and “colonise” minds and vocabularies. We are simply building a better world from our book-lined offices, one enforced redefinition at a time.

Whatever their provenance, knowing the speech codes for your own social group is consistent with relaxing them for others. It is possible and indeed desirable to understand that not every deviation from a group norm is a deliberate rule break; that sometimes people just aren’t familiar with the rules in the first place. Children and pensioners should get leeway for most forms of expression; either it’s too early for them or too late. Sometimes a white person will say “some of my best friends are black” simply because some of her best friends are black. She isn’t automatically to know that some count it as a racist dog whistle. And sometimes a man will enthuse innocently about feminist causes on behalf of his “wife and daughters” without realising his supposedly terrible anti-feminist error. He just means it.

Familiarity with your own group’s linguistic rules is also consistent with recognising that observance is a poor general guide to much else about a person. Manipulative types will mould their language in ways that invite confidence and disguise true motives. History is littered with gullible upper-class people, lured into handing over their assets to con artists who can accurately state the difference between “less” and “fewer”. The gunman who killed five people in Louisville last week was reported as having listed his pronouns on LinkedIn.

Trouble also arises when you’re an unreflective type who only ever encounters people in your own tribe, and who takes your intuitions about verbal hygiene to determine everyone else’s impurity. In institutions dominated by those of a certain age, income bracket, political sensibility or educational background, this is a real risk. Exacerbating this risk is the widespread reduction in meeting others face-to-face at work and in socialising outside of the office, both of which remove valuable opportunities to get to know human nature in the wild. If life is a series of highly straitened, professionalised encounters with people like yourself — if, say, you never meet a working-class person who you aren’t paying for something — it’s no wonder that failures of imagination occur about what others might be saying or hearing, by way of the very same words.

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At worst, this myopia can lead to serious miscarriages of justice, especially when the semantically short-sighted have influence on the judicial system. This week also brought news of Christopher Mitchell, a welder from Caister-on-Sea convicted of aggravated “hate crimes” for making statements critical of a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a local library. For writing in a Facebook post that the drag queen in question was “grooming children” and that the parents of attendees “clearly have serious issues and should have their devices checked”, Mitchell received a 12-month community order including 20 rehabilitation days, 150 hours’ unpaid work, and a fine of £1,500. To anyone not already mired in rainbow-sanctioned speech codes — according to which the word “grooming” must never be applied to brave and stunning LGBT+ folk — this looks like a serious overreaction to the exercise of free speech.

But if fear of harming others doesn’t lead to more circumspection in interpreting others by one’s own lights, then perhaps the fear of harming personal reputations will. Mindlessly following unacknowledged tribal speech codes can result in extremely lazy thinking. Those responsible for the Census debacle at the ONS now look ridiculous; as does the BBC reporter who interviewed Elon Musk on Wednesday, so sure of received wisdom that Twitter is awash with hate speech that he hadn’t bothered to memorise any examples before confronting Musk about it. In a similar vein, the FBI were also made to look daft this week, when FOIs revealed they rather histrionically had classified common internet slang such as “redpilled” or “based” as indicative of “violent extremism” linked to the incel movement.

But when it comes to second-hand embarrassment, perhaps nothing tops Stonewall CEO and self-described “data geek” Nancy Kelley, cheerfully tweeting on Census publication day about how happy she was that her manor in Newham was so full of trans people. As Kelley’s fellow Newhamites might put it, it’s amazing what confirmation bias can make you Adam and Eve.

For most people, this is obviously excessive and easily dismissed as laughable, if not mystifying (cigar store Indians are such an archaic item that most Americans have never seen one). But for those who believe strongly in editing books for sensitivity, stories like this present a conundrum: to acknowledge the inanity of this particular read would be to open the door to questions about the legitimacy of the whole practice. Hence, anyone who draws attention to something like the scalp/scalpel complaint — as I did when I stumbled across the article about it — is accused of “cherry-picking“, using outlier examples to slander an otherwise noble and useful profession.

If cherries are being picked, it is from an exceptionally well-endowed tree, to the point where it surely makes sense to ask whether there’s something about the concept of sensitivity reading — or the people attracted to it — that lends itself to this sort of excess. If these incidents are not representative of the norm, they nevertheless suggest that a highly authoritarian strain of identitarianism has penetrated publishing; even the relatively uncancellable Bret Easton Ellis came in for pre-publication criticism recently from sensitivity readers, who complained that his new novel “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”.

But amid all the arguments about what sensitivity reading is, what seems far more interesting is what it apparently isn’t: there is not so much as a whiff of a pretence that this type of editing improves the literary quality of a book. One of the most common responses to those who question sensitivity reading is that they’re no different from any other subject matter expert, like the palaeontologist who reads Jurassic Park. This is an argument predicated on the somewhat crude notion that simply to be possessed of a given skin tone, genital configuration, or sexual orientation automatically conveys an unparalleled expertise in what all people of that given sex, race or orientation think, feel, and/or find offensive. The one time I served as a sensitivity reader, as a favour to a male writer who wanted his manuscript vetted for potential offences, it was not my “lived experience” as a woman that proved useful. It was my embarrassingly deep knowledge of the toxic dynamics and idiotic slap fights that periodically roil the world of young adult literature; indeed, anyone who shared a similar fascination with extremely online bullshit could have done the job.

But leaving aside the problematic nature of asking one person of a given identity to speak for all people of that identity, the idea that this is just another type of editing is belied by the way that authors themselves talk about the practice, which centres not on the quality of the story but the morality of the person telling it:

“I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t want to be an accidental asshole — so I’m eternally grateful for the sensitivity readers who’ve saved me from myself.”

“EVERYONE is biased, we can’t help it. We are limited to our own perspective and our own upbringings and culture and education. And so it’s so important to have those sensitivity readers. Not only did they help me not offend people (I hope), they also taught me about myself.”

“It’s not being PC; it’s being a decent human being”

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It’s hard not to notice that for a sizeable contingent of authors, hiring a sensitivity reader is only nominally about accuracy, and really about ticking that “decent human being” box. The sensitivity read serves as an indulgence which, once purchased, gives you permission to tell certain kinds of stories. Whether the resulting story is entertaining or well-written is irrelevant; it’s morally good. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, for writers who are perceived as out of step with the new orthodoxy, the conflation of getting a sensitivity read with being a decent human being can send a powerful message to capitulate and conform, or else. Nice story you’ve got there; it would be a shame if someone found it offensive. Sensitivity readers are not supposed to be censors, but in practice, the line is blurred: it is understood by authors that declining to make suggested sensitivity edits is likely to result in a book being cancelled, with all the reputational damage that entails — this, according to Anthony Horowitz, was his primary reason for not fighting the inanity of the scalp/scalpel conflation — and sensitivity readers are not above using their influence to kill a project before it’s got off the ground.

That said, this is not an argument for getting rid of sensitivity readers. Sensitivity reads are less a moral signifier than a matter of craft, one some writers will find useful, and some will not. To write fiction is to write imaginatively outside the bounds of one’s own experience, and any tool that allows someone to do this with confidence — including employing a sensitivity reader — is certainly fair game. In my own books, when writing about experiences that are truly foreign to me, I tend to collect research from multiple people and perspectives, establishing a baseline pool of knowledge and then letting imagination take over from there. But I also care less that the result is authentic than that it is engaging.

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Meanwhile, a cultish conviction has developed within the writing community of late: that the most important thing a novel can be is “authentic”. And yet, some of the best works of fiction are anything but: the satire of Gary Shteyngart, the lowkey horror of Shirley Jackson, the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the time-travelling raptures of Diana Gabaldon. These books aren’t authentic, but something far better: fantastical, or imaginative, or absurd, or terrifying, and to alter them in the name of authenticity would be to drain them of their spark. What makes a story compelling is not its adherence to reality; it’s whether it feels true, in the moment, on the page.

If anything, this is what troubles me about the push to normalise sensitivity reading: that it seems to signal a narrowing of the literary landscape, a massive cultural shift in what we understand the purpose of art to be. The new paradigm is one in which we worry less about communicating an idea than about the specific words we use. Consider the recent, viral chart suggesting more sensitive alternatives to “violent” language in the workplace, the apparent intention being to make people communicate with their colleagues in the colourless, ultra-literal style that we use to make ourselves understood by Siri. Despite their alleged purpose, these guides do not actually foment better communication; they hamstring it, imbuing every exchange with the subtextual fear of how an uncharitable person might misinterpret what is being said.

If this is a bad way to be in the office, it is a worse way to write a book — or to read one, for that matter. But of course, most people don’t read this way. One of the most peculiar things about sensitivity readers is how very far their concerns are from those of actual readers, who tend to be far too interested in what’s happening on the page to wallow in the offensive implications of this or that individual word choice. Three years ago, the New York Times review of the novel American Dirt made much of the book’s “strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin” — the type of thing a sensitivity reader would surely flag as potentially problematic. But when I read the book myself, even despite having been primed to notice said “fascination”, the mentions of skin tone were such a seamless part of the story that they didn’t even register. One imagines that the millions of readers who made the book a massive bestseller were similarly unperturbed.

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The question, then, is: who is actually served by this type of editing? The rare reader who would actually take offence at the use of the word “scalpel” in Horowitz’s book is entitled to his feelings, but he can always read another book (or better yet, write a scathing review complaining about this one’s rampant bigotry). The implication of sensitivity reading, though, is that every book should be written with this person in mind, that his sensibilities should form some sort of literary standard. I’ve tried to imagine how this might play out in other creative fields — what would happen if, for instance, the restaurant industry employed sensitivity tasters to flag any dish that contained too much spice? Certainly, the chefs would baulk at this: why should the sensibilities of those who can’t tolerate spicy food supersede those of the people who consume ghost peppers recreationally? What greater good can possibly be served in making sure every dish is tailored to the tastes of the most sensitive, when there are so many ingredients, and the table is so very big?

Of course, some creators want to centre sensitivity in their work, and they should — because diversity, real diversity, is about there being something for everyone, including those who read books in gleeful anticipation of finding something to get mad about. But surely there should also be room for readers, and writers, who simply don’t share those sensibilities. Writers who value an engaging story over an authentic one, writers who are confident and unapologetic in their ability to imagine the interior lives of their characters. Writers who don’t want to treat their readers with sensitivity — because they would rather tear your heart out, make you swoon or rage or cry, and leave you breathless.

But the military is far from alone in this new fixation with gender politics. If you haven’t yet been asked to declare your pronouns, it won’t be long. Sooner or later, your employer will suggest that you sign off emails with them, or announce them along with your name at the beginning of meetings.

Declaring our pronouns has become the most common way in which we are expected to pledge allegiance to the new identity-obsessed religion that has captured most of our major institutions. The likes of Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn, and Kamala Harris have all performed the ritual, but other figures have been less predictable. Who would have anticipated that Richard Moore, the Head of MI6, would suddenly decide to include “he/him” in his Twitter bio?

Such examples are a reminder of just how far the virus of Critical Social Justice has spread. Earlier this month, it was reported that members of staff at the British Library were being encouraged to wear pronoun badges with “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them”. Last year, Scottish civil service staff were being asked to sign off emails with their preferred pronouns in order to “foster an open culture that is supportive of the LGBTI+ community”. Even the BBC has issued guidelines to encourage its staff to make similar gestures, claiming that adding pronouns to emails is a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”.

Many of the more vociferous criticisms of pronoun declaration have come from the Right, which has inevitably created the impression that where you stand on this subject is a matter of political affiliation. As with so many debates in the culture wars, the issue of pronouns has been misrepresented as a simple question of whether one is on the right or wrong side of history.

Activists insist that it is just a way to be inclusive and polite — and in many cases that is clearly the intention. Yet the genuinely liberal position is to oppose pronoun declaration, and it is worth outlining this case in full given that most of us, at some point in the near future, will be faced with the choice between explaining our reasons for refusing or capitulating for the sake of an easy life.

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When you ask someone to declare pronouns, you are doing one of two things. You are either saying that you are having trouble identifying this person’s sex, or you are saying that you believe in the notion of gender identity and expect others to do the same. As a species we are very well attuned to recognising the sex of other people, so, for the most part, to ask for pronouns is an expression of fealty to a fashionable ideology — and to set a test for others to do likewise.

In her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce explains the notion of gender identity as “something like a sexed soul”. Some take the view that each person has an innate gender identity that transcends physiological considerations. The definition of “woman” is therefore as fluid as can be imagined, because a “woman” is simply someone who identifies as a woman. The obvious next question — “what is a woman?” — is often dismissed as transphobic, presumably because the answer inexorably directs us towards the reality of sexual dimorphism.

Yet gender identity ideology is simply not a belief system that most people share. I do not identify as male; it’s a biological fact, as mundane as the fact that I’ve got blue eyes or that I’m right-handed. I am not here talking about gender dysphoria — those people who feel as odds with their sex and seek to adapt either through medical procedures or the way in which they present themselves — but rather the notion that we each have an inherent gender that has nothing to do with our bodies. This is akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.

In an article in the Metro this week, a young person who identifies as non-binary complained about being misgendered by doctors when seeking treatment for endometriosis, a condition of the womb. But for a medical practitioner, biological sex is an important consideration that cannot simply be wished away. In the article, the writer notes that one young doctor — who had just completed a trans inclusivity training course — “seamlessly switched to using ‘they/them’ pronouns” in their conversation, although why he would make the curious decision to start addressing his patient in the third person is not clarified.

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By Julie Bindel

This point is often overlooked. Announcing one’s pronouns has little practical purpose in most scenarios, given that we do not refer to individuals by their pronouns unless we are talking about them, rather than to them. Moreover, even raising the question can be offensive. Julie Bindel has observed that women who reject traditional notions of femininity are frequently told that they “look like men”. To ask such an individual for her pronouns can be construed as a kind of attack, given that she will have struggled to achieve acceptance as a woman who simply does not conform to sex stereotypes.

Then there is the added complication of neopronouns. “They” and “them” are now routinely adopted as singular pronouns by the mainstream press, as though syntactically shambolic prose is a small price to pay for being seen to be “inclusive”. This usage has not caught on with the general public, but this hasn’t prevented staff at online dictionaries from updating their definitions in accordance with their new creed. No longer do they see their role as recording the inevitable evolutions of the English language, but rather re-engineering words and their meanings to suit their ideological preferences. On university campuses, it’s not uncommon for badges to be distributed during freshers’ week to limit the potential for faux pas. “My pronouns are he/him/his,” the badge might say, but it could just as easily be “they/them/their”, “xe/xem/xyr”, “ne/nym/nis”, “ve/ver/vis”, “fae/faer/faers” or “zie/zim/zir”. This kind of cryptic puzzle makes for quite the initiation.

Although no employers are as yet mandating pronoun declaration, there is something coercive about the request. An actor friend of mine recently told me that it is now common for members of a new cast to state their pronouns at the beginning of the rehearsal process. In such circumstances, he says, to refuse would be unfeasible. For one thing, objections to the practice are not very well understood, and you would be instigating a tense and lengthy debate just at the moment when the cast ought to be bonding. More seriously, a refusal would doubtless result in accusations of transphobia, and the actor in question would be unlikely to be cast in future productions. Who is going to scupper their own career over a couple of words?

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The heretics will not be silenced

By Jess De Wahls

It is often forgotten that many transgender people are opposed to pronoun declaration for a number of reasons. It draws needless attention to them when they just want to get on with their lives. It can have the effect of “outing” people against their will, particularly if they are in the early stages of their transition. It creates a false impression that gender identity ideology is the norm even though it is a belief system shared by relatively few. Most importantly, compelled speech is a fundamentally illiberal prospect, one that should always be resisted by all.

It is strange that the objections to pronoun declaration are so often construed as being “reactionary” when they are essentially progressive. Many who believe in liberal values will therefore feel uncomfortable in refusing to state pronouns at work. But until more people are prepared to make their feelings clear on this issue, it will continue to be misinterpreted as “a Right-wing talking-point”.

A refusal to participate in these rituals need not be antagonistic, and most employers will be happy to hear your reasons. There is always the possibility that you could be accused of transphobia or hate, but this is simply part of the coercive strategy. For all the awkward conversations that might arise, there is nothing Right-wing about standing up to ideologues who insist on imposing their values onto everyone else.

There was backlash from religious groups, calling the move “eugenics”. But was it? The word “eugenics” can be used to refer to things like mitochondrial donation, insofar as it means something like “efforts to remove ‘harmful’ genes from the gene pool”. But the classic example of eugenics are things like the Nazi programme of forced sterilisation; a programme that did awful things to people against their will.

Using the term “eugenics” to refer to both was, I think, a semi-deliberate tactic. Opponents of mitochondrial donation were trying to associate those evil things in people’s minds with the more complex cases. That doesn’t mean that mitochondrial donation is automatically right. But the fact that a loose definition of the word “eugenics” can be used to apply to both it and Nazi murders does not make it necessarily wrong.

A similar sort of tactic appears to being deployed in the ongoing debate over the Government’s proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy. 

It was not that many years ago that homosexuality was viewed as a mental illness requiring curing: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed same-sex attraction as a psychiatric disorder until 1973. And as I’ve written before, there’s not much evidence that you can change someone’s sexual orientation, while the methods used to do it have often been brutal: zapping people with electric shocks while showing them homoerotic images; chemical castration; even lobotomy, as recently as 1969.

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By Tom Chivers

“Conversion therapy” is, therefore, rightly held up as something unacceptable: the classic example of conversion therapy is a gay man or lesbian woman being forced, against his or her will, to submit to something approaching torture, in an almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to change his or her sexual orientation.

The Government’s legislation, though, refers not just to efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation, but also to efforts to change their gender identity. And I’m concerned that, just as with the word “eugenics”, using the term “conversion therapy” like this stretches it to beyond the point of usefulness.

Of course if someone is trans, they should not be told that they are not — or told that they are inferior, or defective. But sexual orientation is a fairly stable and well-defined concept: we know what is meant by being sexually attracted to one sex or another or both, and, on the whole, people’s sexual orientation remains the same throughout their adult lives. Importantly, also, if someone does change their sexual orientation, all they need to do is start dating people of the appropriate sex.

That’s not true of gender identity. While there clearly are many people who don’t identify as their biological sex, exactly what is meant by a “gender identity” is unclear. The Human Rights Campaign defines it as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither”. How one feels is important, but it is subjective — and unlike sexual attraction it’s not tied to obvious behaviours, such as choice of sexual partner.

It’s also not clear that it’s stable. While some young people are clear from a very young age that they do not identify as the sex they were born in, and remain so until adulthood, that’s not true of everyone. According to several medical textbooks, perhaps as many as 85% to 90% of prepubescent children who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria — that is, severe discomfort in their birth sex — no longer do by adolescence, although they do say that if those children are still dysphoric in early puberty, it is “almost certainly permanent”.

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By Julie Bindel

And, crucially, the decision about whether a young person is trans or not can be much more consequential and irreversible than the decision about whether they’re gay or not. Full transitioning may involve hormones, drugs to delay puberty, and surgery.

All of which may be absolutely necessary and right; there are plenty of examples of young people who transitioned and became much happier and healthier. But the combination of an unstable concept and a major, consequential life decision means that we need to be careful about deciding whether someone, especially a young person, is “really” trans or not.

That’s why we should be concerned about the use of “conversion therapy” as an umbrella term. Of course, if there are therapists telling trans people that being trans is shameful or sinful, or that it is a defect that needs to be purged, then that is wrong, and those people should be punished. But I don’t think it’s very common.

The Government’s own research refers to two main kinds of conversion therapy: spiritual, “pray the gay away” versions, and “psychological methods” such as talking therapies. About 5% of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the UK have been offered conversion therapy, mainly of the spiritual kind, usually because their sexual orientation conflicts with their community’s religious beliefs.

There is much less research into how common gender identify conversion therapy is. But the Government’s assessment does say that “a much higher percentage of transgender respondents (29%) than cisgender respondents (15%) said their therapy had been conducted by healthcare professionals”.

That would make sense, if some therapists are assessing that some patients are mistaken about their transgender status, and offering them alternative routes — for instance, watching and waiting, or treating some mental health condition that they have — and patients are unhappy at the lack of affirmation of their condition. And often such assessments are reasonable: gender dysphoria is often found alongside other conditions, such as autism. There are also other conditions, such as borderline personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder, which can lead to patients having unstable senses of self. While it’s important to listen to patients, that doesn’t mean always assuming that they’re right in their self-diagnosis. 

The Government’s proposed legislation does make room for therapists to “support a person who is questioning if they are LGBT”. But as one GP says, “lots of my patients are not questioning; they are very assertive that they are trans”. Sometimes simply affirming a patient’s, especially a child’s, beliefs about his or her identity, is not the right thing to do.

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Kathleen Stock: I won't be silenced

By Julie Bindel

Perhaps the safeguards in the proposed law will protect doctors and therapists who want to be more cautious about affirming patients’ gender identity in every case. But some therapists are clearly concerned: the GP quoted above goes on to say that “The way this is worded at the moment, I could end up in prison.” Surely it will not come to that, but it would be deeply concerning if there was a chilling effect on medical professionals’ willingness to talk about gender to their patients.

Like the term “eugenics”, the term “conversion therapy” is powerful: it summons up images of torture, of homophobia, of religious and institutional abuse. And just as with eugenics, that power needs to be directed carefully. The arguments should never be “because we use the same term to describe them as we used to describe Nazi atrocities”. 

Of course, there may sometimes be excellent reasons to affirm children’s gender identities, rather than challenge them. I suspect it may be best to let clinicians use their best judgment, in some cases. But we should be careful about using the term “conversion therapy”. Something has gone wrong if doctors are worried about going to prison for discussing the best treatment for their patients.

Tragedy recalls us to a sense of our fragility, but also of our value. We wouldn’t mourn for creatures we didn’t regard as precious. Not many of us are devastated by the death of a flea. A cynic is unlikely to lose sleep over Covid deaths in Indonesia.

If we are living through a tragedy, it is a collective one. The Greeks would have understood this too: the point of the Chorus, a bunch of ordinary citizens who sing and dance their way through the tragic drama, is to socialise the disaster, making it more than just the affair of a few patrician figures. Even so, you couldn’t have a cook or a cobbler as the hero, since their lives weren’t considered important enough. Those who fall from the greatest height make the biggest splash.

The death of Achilles or Agamemnon is a momentous event which sends shockwaves through the public realm, whereas the passing of a slave is private. It has no more significance than the killing of a flea. It doesn’t count as a historical event. Back then you couldn’t have a tragedy called Death of a Salesman, even if there had been salesmen in ancient Athens. It would be as bizarre as calling your play The Fall of Troy: A Farce in Three Acts. 

None of this class distinction survived the emergence of mass democracy — a political idea which, ironically, was born in ancient Greece. In the 20th century, by far the bloodiest hundred years on record, tragedy became universal. Once you develop weapons like bombs, you globalise suffering and lamentation. As the tattered old cliché has it, we really are all in this together. You just have to take anyone from the street and push them to their limit. You can even have a tragedy about plumbing, as in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. 

One of the ancient Greeks’ deepest fears is of hubris — the pride or presumption which leads you to overreach yourself and bring yourself to nothing. When the citizens of Thebes or Athens observed such arrogance they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that it would have its comeuppance. A species which dominates and destroys its natural habitat in the name of power and acquisition is now reaping the fruits of its overreaching.

Those like King Lear who would be everything must be taught the lesson that humanity is nothing — frail, sickeningly vulnerable and driven by animal need. Kings must be reduced to vagrants, as Lear wanders the heath with fools and madmen. Once you acknowledge that you’re nothing, you have a chance of becoming something — but only, like Lear or Oedipus, by being hauled through hell. For Lear, this repentance comes too late to prevent his death. Whether this will prove true of humanity as a whole remains to be seen. It isn’t looking good.

The problem is that hubris is built into the human species. Because we live not just in a physical world but a world of meaning, we are able to overreach ourselves all the time. Our bodies can build themselves a prosthesis known as civilisation. Technology is an extension of our bodies, but one that can escape our mastery. Badgers and squirrels by contrast, can’t create weapons of mass destruction, unless they’re being very furtive about it. They can’t extend very far outside themselves. They aren’t universal creatures, unless squirrels in California are somehow in touch with squirrels in the Ukraine.

This inability to overreach themselves means that they can’t blow themselves up, but neither can they read Marcel Proust. This is because they don’t have language; but this lack of language or developed concepts is also what keeps them safe from nuclear warfare. (One might make an exception here for dolphins, who after a few lessons might be able to write as well as Jacob Rees-Mogg).

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Being a linguistic animal is both a blessing and a curse. In fact, the ancient term “sacred” means both. Because human beings live in a richly developed conceptual world, they can create things which are in danger of slipping from their control and taking on a tyrannical life of their own. Yet having language also means that they can be closer to each other than mere physical contact. They can share their inner lives with each other. Love relationships consist mainly in talking, unless I’m missing out on something.

Civilisation, so Freud claims, is a product of Eros, meaning the creative drives as a whole. There is, however, a problem. Eros is not the only source of civilisation. In order to build bridges and cathedrals, you also need to harness the power of Eros’s old enemy, Thanatos, or the death drive. The death drive for Freud is turned outwards and used to subjugate Nature. Only in this way can cities and social orders be built. Thanatos, however, is a notoriously unreliable servant. It doesn’t want to subjugate things; it wants to tear them to pieces in an orgy of obscene enjoyment. So the very force which is intended to overcome chaos is secretly in love with it. Anarchy lies at the very heart of authority.

Tragic figures aren’t exactly guilty, but they aren’t exactly innocent either. If they were deep-dyed villains, they would forfeit our sympathy and we would be indifferent to their fate. Napoleon may have been a tragic figure, but Hitler wasn’t. Yet tragic heroes aren’t blameless, because the tragic crisis results from their own actions, however little they may intend it.

Oedipus, who has been described as a “guilty innocent”, doesn’t mean to kill his father and marry his mother, but he contributes without knowing it to a network of cause and effect which causes these things to occur. His own past actions return to plague him in alien form. “We are neither the innocent nor the wicked,” remarks the protagonist of William Golding’s novel Free Fall. “We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.”

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By Aris Roussinos

It is just the same with climate change, which nobody ever intended but which is the consequence of billions of individual acts. Nobody ever turned the ignition key in their car or heaped a shovelful of coal on the fire with the idea of wiping out the human race. As Inspector Clouseau might say, no-one is guilty and everyone is guilty.

It’s the same with the Christian idea of original sin, which means that we are sinful but not responsible for it. In the tangled web of human actions and relationships, you can’t move without hurting someone somewhere. Our actions spin out of control and breed monstrous consequences which can come to dominate our own lives. The ancient Greeks knew all about Marx’s concept of alienation. It’s just that they gave it the name of Fate. We are weaving our own inescapable destiny all the time, and doing so through actions which are genuinely free.

The good news is that free action to avert total collapse is still possible for us, if only just. We can take heart from the fact that not all stage tragedies end badly. The first great piece of tragic art we have, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, ends on a positive note. The blind, beggarly Oedipus is finally gathered to the gods, while Shakespearian tragedy usually ends with the tentative emergence of new life. We come away from many a tragic drama remembering the dignity or defiance of those who go to their deaths, not just their agonies. A tragedy isn’t always a piece of theatre which ends in total ruin. It’s a situation in which you have to be broken and remade if you’re to have any chance of redemption, and even then there are no guarantees. As the poet W.B. Yeats writes, “Nothing can be whole or sole/That has not been rent.”

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

We shall, for instance, weather Covid, but not reducing the planet to flood and desert is a different matter. To avoid that, we shall need to renounce the urge to power and possession which has driven us so far, and learn instead to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. That means undoing an awfully long history, and history is what we mostly are made of.

It’s true that people will do extraordinary things if the only alternative is to die. Certainly nothing short of such an alternative will cause governments and the transnational corporations to abandon their death-dealing habits. But people will also do extraordinary things if they think they are going to die anyway, such as murder, rape, loot and hunt for vengeance.

We haven’t thought enough about what kind of existence we will have if doom becomes unavoidable. People who have nothing to lose are dangerous. I wouldn’t like to be a racist cop if those I’ve beaten and humiliated know they can hang me from a lamp post without being put away for twenty years because the world won’t last that long. One thing is for sure: being broken and remade rules out mere reformism. Reformism wouldn’t have kept Lear alive, and it won’t keep us alive either.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor in English at Lancaster University. 

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.

The linguist Max Weinreich joked that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” – in other words, it’s only the trappings and endorsements of power that confer the exalted status of ‘language’ on one dialect and not another.

There’s some truth to this. Why is that we consider Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian to be separate languages (which are, to various degrees, mutually intelligible), but not to the ‘dialects’ spoken in different parts of Italy?

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Global English is a force for division – not unity

By Peter Franklin

These days, it’s very fashionable to question the idea of dividing things between either/or categories. Such ‘binaries’, for instance the ‘gender binary’, are seen as being artificial, discriminatory and denying of the existence of a spectrum between the predetermined extremes. Especially problematic are those binaries which suggest a hierarchy of status – for instance the language/dialect binary, in which examples of the latter are considered to be non-standard, ‘provincial’ or ill-educated variants of the former.

Therefore, the counter-position – which is to regard all dialects as languages in their own right, or to see all languages as no more than privileged dialects – is very much in keeping with the intellectual spirit of the age.

But is it in keeping with reality? In a fascinating article for Aeon, Søren Wichmann writes about the research that supports a legitimate distinction between languages and dialects.

The starting point is a database of languages:

“In 2008, a number of linguists came together to form the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), of which I am the daily curator and a founder. The ASJP painstakingly assembled a systematic, comparative dataset of languages that now contains 7,655 wordlists from what would be two-thirds of the world’s languages…”

The difference in the way that two languages express the same concepts can be quantified using a measure called the Levenshtein Distance:

” …named after Vladimir Levenshtein, a Soviet computer scientist who in 1965 devised an algorithm to compare two strings of symbols. He defined ‘distance’ as the number of substitutions, insertions and deletions needed to turn one string into the other. The Levenshtein distance can usefully be divided by the length of the longest of the two strings, because this puts all the distances on a scale from 0 to 1. This has become known as the normalised Levenshtein distance, or LDN.”

The researchers calculated the LDN values between different members of each ‘family’ of languages within their dataset. Unsurprisingly, they found that some relationships were closer than others. Crucially, however, the LDN values of the different pairs were most commonly found at either the high or low end of the distribution:

“…the distances tend to hover around either a relatively small value or a relatively large one, with a valley in between. As it turns out, the valley tends to lie in a narrow range around a mean of 0.48 LDN. Without losing significant precision, we can say that speech varieties tend to not be halfway similar in their basic vocabulary. Either they will tend to be more similar, in which case they can be defined as different dialects, or less similar, in which case they can be defined as different languages. Herein lies the distinction between language and dialect.”

There were some exceptions to the rule – for instance the LDN value between Swedish and Danish was found to be in the linguistic no man’s land between being dialects of one another and being clearly separate languages. (To complicate matters, intelligibility between the two tongues is asymmetric – Danes understand Swedes more than the other way round; indeed, their fellow Scandinavians sometimes joke that the Danes can’t even understand one another.)

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By Graeme Archer

On the whole, however, the language/dialect binary, while not absolute, does appear to have a basis in reality.

I wonder if this might the way we should think about about binaries more generally. We should be free to question their place in culture, but also free, where the evidence justifies such a conclusion, to accept their validity.

To make sense of the world it is necessary to make distinctions – to recognise that one thing is not like another. That should never be an excuse for prejudice, of course – nor for enforcing compliance with social norms when difference does no harm to others.

But, equally, when distinctions are tested by time and experience, the fact that they’re seldom absolute and without complication, does not mean that they’re completely bogus. Indeed, to pretend otherwise is itself a rather binary way of thinking.