The Future is Vibrant

The Future is Vibrant

Election is when political clichés come out in great number in the manifestos. Here is a focus on the use, or rather misuse, of the word “vibrant”.

George Orwell wrote that “Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.

There is a very vibrant wind blowing through local politics! In 2014, there were 6 cases when it was let loose in the printed word. Let us be honest: it is a meaningless or hackneyed adjective. It is lazy writing.

Please can we have a moratorium on the use of the word in 2018?

Meanwhile if you spot a “vibrant” in any 2018 manifesto or a website of someone standing for election, please let me know. I’ll do a “vibrant” watch. And let me know any other terms which are also the political equivalent of empty fluff, please also tell me.

I shall be sharpening my pen for a future blog looking at the 2018 manifestos for a “Yes Minister” style of writing which makes the right kind of noises by using language badly.

From 2014:

Richard Renouf

“creating a vibrant economy to support our ageing population”

Andrew Green

“We must ensure that we have a successful, as well as vibrant and diverse economy”

Bernie Manning

“I am committed to working towards a vibrant, safe and pleasant town.”

Len Norman

“Continue to provide strong and vibrant representation in the States in the interests of St Clément parishioners”

Nick Le Cornu

“Restore Fort Regent to a vibrant sports and social centre”

David Richardson

“Jersey needs a healthy , robust, vibrant and forward thinking Finance Sector”

Ivan Hewett, writing in 2014 in the Telegraph noted how popular “vibrant” had become:

"Mostly 'vibrant' is laden with ideological weight. Instead of functioning as a straightforward adjective, it’s now a marker of things which are held to be desirable by those in authority. You get a clue as to what those desirable things are by perusing such things as urban regeneration plans, or policy documents of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport."

"Say for example a firm of architects is commissioned to reconfigure a square or a neighbourhood, or a local authority wants to create an arts festival. There’s a particular quality the writers of these documents always yearn for; 'vibrancy'. It seems no neighbourhood is worth living in unless it can be described as vibrant, and no festival is worth public subsidy unless it too can be called vibrant."

Of course, as linguistics shows a word becomes identified with some ideal state of being, its original specific meaning becomes clouded.

And as Kenneth Roy pointed out in 2016 in the Scottish review

“Positive. Vibrant. These tacked-together words are the modern equivalent of the verbal refuse identified by George Orwell in his survey of political speeches and reports as long ago as the 1940s. They are meaningless.”

Orwell himself notes that in this kind of political language:

“Writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy”

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”

“And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in." 

"They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”

Be a vibrant voter on election day so that we can have a vibrant election!