The main point of political prose, said George Orwell more than half a century ago, was to give ‘an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Orwell accused politicians of the being deliberately unclear in their prose, pretending to communicate but really aiming only to obscure.
You don’t need to look very far to see Orwellian echoes in the political language of our times. Take ‘credit crunch’, a word which popped up in newspapers as it became apparent that the country was facing recession. While ‘recession’ conjures unsightly images of dole queues and derelict factories, ‘credit crunch’ sounds inherently benign, like a breakfast cereal containing free toys in little plastic sachets.
Then there’s ‘quantitative easing’, which sounds lovely, like a scientific name for a nice lie down. It certainly doesn’t have the same alarming associations as ‘printing money’, which brings to mind moustached German housewives of the 1930s exchanging wheelbarrowfulls of banknotes for loaves of bread.
But the most shameless attempt to make things seem better than they are through semantics that I have ever seen was the use of the word ‘legacy’ in a recent nonsensical press release about the new Olympic media centre.
The Olympic Media Centre planned for Hackney Wick
There’s been a lot of pressure on the Olympic Development Authority to ensure that the 2012 games will have a lasting benefit for Londoners. In other words, that the games will have a ‘legacy’.
The Olympic Development Authority has found a very easy way to ensure that this will be the case.
It has replaced the word ‘future’ with the word ‘legacy’, presumably using the useful ‘edit / replace’ tool on Microsoft word.
You can read it here if you don’t believe me.
At first you think it’s a typo. “The media centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games will create just under 900,000 square feet of business space in legacy with the potential to generate thousands of new jobs.”
In legacy? Don’t they mean in the future? Same thing, according to the ODA, which boasts that the centre “has been designed to be as flexible as possible to accommodate a range of legacy tenants and uses.”
Those ‘legacy tenants’, it continues, will be able to take advantage of ‘state-of-the-art utilities, power and digital connectivity, both during the Games and in legacy’.
The happy effect of this linguistic odyssey is, of course, since ‘future’ and ‘legacy’ are the same thing, then unless somebody drops an atomic bomb, the Olympic Development Authority can hardly fail to deliver the ‘legacy’ it has promised to Londoners.
I wish I could say this was just some halfwit press officer. But then ODA Chairman John Armitt chimes in.
He says: ‘This innovative design provides a quality working environment for the media during the Games while delivering flexible and green employment space for a range of potential business uses in legacy.’
Tom Russell, Group Director for Olympic Legacy at the LDA, couldn’t agree more.
‘’The media centre site will become a major employment driver in legacy with a main focus on the creative industries.’
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney:
‘Local businesses and media companies have expressed strong interest in moving to the facilities in legacy, and we will continue to work to secure the best possible legacy for our Borough.’
And finally let’s hear from the big man, Sebastian Coe, Chairman of the London 2012 Organising Committee:
‘The impressive facilities we have planned will leave high performance workspace in legacy.’
The press release is only 1000 words long. If you ask Microsoft Word to replace the word ‘legacy’ with ‘bananas’, it has to make 25 replacements. Net effect on the amount of sense made by the press release? Zero.
How can we trust our government to tell us the truth when it’s not even speaking our language?
6 Comments
April 11, 2009 at 11:01 am
Ha ha – ‘’The media centre site will become a major employment driver in legacy with a main focus on the creative industries.’ Utter twaddle.
April 11, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Fantastic post! I look forward to reading more of your wonderful blog posts in legacy.
April 13, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Great blog and thanks for the link to the original press release. It makes very interesting reading.
In particular I note the emergence of an interesting new time-line to the future … er sorry, I mean legacy. First we have the present (its re-assuring that this is ‘on track’), which will be followed by “games-time”. This sounds a bit like that week after the exams at the end of school term when you were allowed to bring in Monopoly and Kerplunk. But I guess they must mean that 3 week hiatus between the ‘present’ and the ‘legacy’ during which people on drugs jog about a bit.
I also found it confusing that the “demanding green standards” (in legacy) will be met by having a “brown roof” (Ok, I admit there are bird and bat boxes as well!). However, careful reading reveals that ‘the legacy’ would comprise an “innovative mixture of permanent and temporary elements.” So the local bats would be wise not to get too comfy because it seems the local demolition companies are not going to be left out of the legacy altogether.
April 17, 2009 at 11:37 am
‘Legacy’ means different things to different people. To those who live near the proposed ‘heritage site’ at the moment, the legacy of the industrialising of the Lea catchment in the Victorian period is still with us. Foulsewers, misconnected to surface water sewers by cowboy plumbers, still pump huge amounts of untreated domestic foulwaste into the river all the way through the ‘heritage site’ .On the ‘artists’s impressions’ for the Lea as it runs though the site, the Lea is depicted as twinkling blue water with swan basking on it. My advice? Peg on nose and avoid the water features.
April 20, 2009 at 11:46 am
I know it’s a bit off-topic, but … I’ve voiced the same concerns about the phrase ‘credit crunch’, only to be put down by a couple of financially minded housemates who pointed out that ‘credit crunch’ refers to the distinct cause of the recession, and so is actually an incredibly apt, punchy title for the whole thing.
So I’m back on board with the credit crunch.
May 21, 2009 at 3:38 am
Super writing!! hope to visit soon:)