Passive+voice+and+some+among+us,+Tim+Cohen,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 2003/07/11 12:00:00 AM
=Passive voice lets some among us shirk one’s responsibility=


 * TIM COHEN**

AS A South African journalist, one is asked occasionally by foreigners (in a slightly loaded way) what one thinks about the country and its future. My response is always the same. The new SA is a fabulous country, bristling with opportunities and potential. But it has one enormous fault: widespread abuse of the passive voice.

The passive voice is, of course, a useful technique for inverting the object and subject in a sentence, subtly changing the emphasis. Fowler’s Modern English Usage has discovered no fewer than five “passive disturbances”, which makes the whole topic positively creepy. Fowler is particularly hard on the impersonal passive — “it is felt”, “it is thought”, “it is believed” — construction.

“But when one person is addressing another it often amounts to a pusillanimous shrinking from responsibility. The person addressed has the right to know who it is that entertains a feeling he may not share or a thought he may consider a mistake, and is justly resentful of the suggestion the it exists in a void,” Fowler thunders.

This ability to soften the effect and widen the possibilities of whom the perpetrator might be has proved an immensely useful tool in political discourse. Politicians of all descriptions and nationalities tend to use the passive voice to hint broadly about things they would rather not say directly.

Perhaps the most notorious example belongs to former US president Richard Nixon. After all the bugging of the offices of his rival, and the cover-up that followed, all Nixon could manage was: “Mistakes were made.”

It allows the speaker to deflect blame, and this is particularly useful when the one being blamed is the speaker himself. The most pertinent recent example was not in fact a politician, but a Catholic churchman, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York.

The cardinal was fending off the accusation that he had reassigned paedophile priests to other parishes even after suspecting their crimes. He then wrote a letter to church members asking forgiveness, saying: “If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

This is a classic example, not only because it unwittingly repeats the Nixonian construction and because it is an unwittingly obvious obfuscation, but because Egan managed to combine the passive voice and the subjunctive mood. As deflections goes, this is top class.

Strangely, the church is a favourite haunt of the passive voice. Evidently it was favoured by the Spanish inquisitors, who used it as an accusatory tool.

Another institution that favours the passive voice too much is, alas, the fourth estate. It is depressingly common to read in newspapers phrases such as “Mr X, who is believed to have …”, and so on.

In SA, the passive voice is often used in combination or in conjunction with the sentences where the object is simply glossed over. This is where the passive voice has mutated into an active sentence construction without a tangible subject.

For example, how many times have you heard the phrase “some among us”? And it is here that our politicians are most culpable.

Speaking about moral values recently, Education Minister Kader Asmal said that although society could not compromise basic rights to discipline itself, practical measures were needed to create high moral values “without some among us mounting high horses”.

Sadly President Thabo Mbeki is a terrible offender, and uses the “some among us” terminology often. A quick internet search reveals that Mbeki and the phrase “some among us” appear 179 times. As recently as in his reply to the debate on his opening of Parliament speech, on the topic of racism, Mbeki said: “There are some among us who are keen that we should say nothing about the hurt we feel.”

In a recent article on the African National Congress website, Mbeki took a swipe at the “fishers of corrupt men” (something normally considered to be a useful exercise), referring in part to a number of articles written in this newspaper without ever mentioning who he was talking about.

In the process he managed to amalgamate a whole host of different people with widely differing perspectives on the debate about SA’s arms procurement exercise.

It may be that South Africans are just not ready to discuss openly what they honestly feel with one another. The liberal use of the passive voice may be a kind of a foil that allows discussions to take place that might not otherwise happen at all. If this is so, it would be a way of averting a slide into full-scale verbal diatribes.

But there are certain individuals who believe that it is conceivable to have a full and frank discussion on all topics. There are even some among us who are thought to believe that open discourse is a crucial part of democracy. It is widely believed that without addressing problems directly, it may, according to some, be impossible to resolve anything.


 * Cohen is chief reporter.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=795356**

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