The English language taketh, the English language giveth away.

For people who care what they say, the introduction of nouns in lieu of verbs is often Hell. No, I won't card you; I will ask you for your identification card.

Do you note how little information is crammed into the noun-as-a-verb sentence while the other contains everything?

If you care about these things: read on. If you do not: read anyway.

Moran's writing is walking the walk. For example:

The words felt chlorine-washed of life.

A few short words say so much.

The paragraphs below all stem from Joe Moran's brief and explosively interesting First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Writing, Reading…and Life. I recommend it without any shadow of doubt and will include it in a forthcoming post about reading materials for technical writers.

Spoiler alert: After his writings that I include below, Moran waxes on the power of the verb. Buy his book to read the rest of it.

English is getting nounier. More than half the words in the dictionary are nouns and the number rises each year. Linguists work with a huge sample of language called a corpus, with which they track how words are used. These corpora were once harvested onerously by hand. Now it is all done electronically, creating vast databanks of sentences. Whole libraries of books can be quickly scanned—even without opening them, using terahertz waves that percolate the pages and their chiaroscuro of ink and blank space so the words can be deciphered by an optical character reader. With such modern magic we mine the billions of ways, over hundreds of years, that writers have woven words into sentences. This is how we know that English is filling up with nouns.

A noun may try to convince the reader that something is real, and may even succeed. Website content delivery platform is not just a noun, but four nouns—so it must be a thing. It lives!

[...]

For [Thomas] Merton, the noun-stuffed sentence was a canker on modern prose. In one of his last essays, “War and the Crisis of Language,” written in 1968 as America mired itself in Vietnam, he showed how this cankerous writing amputated us from reality. He began with an odd analogy: the revival among evangelical Christians of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. The speaker in tongues, who is meant to be channeling the Holy Spirit, is actually talking fluent gibberish. To speak in tongues is to speak without fear of dissent. You cannot be gainsaid because no one knows what you are saying, least of all you.

Merton saw glossolalia as a metaphor for much modern writing, which is “locked tight upon itself, impenetrable, unbreakable, irrefutable.” Dwelling in a closed circuit of unmeaning, this writing permits no reply. It has moved so far from the verbal energy of speech that it has lost all sense of a voice speaking to an audience. It has been written by no one to be read by no one. It is anti-language, a weary run-through of the linguistic motions.

Merton went on to examine American government statements about Vietnam, with their hypnotically bland vocabulary of pacification, escalation and liberation. The words felt chlorine-washed of life. But beneath the flat nouns and lumbering syntax lay horrible truths. Enemy structures were the burned huts of razed villages. Vietcong were the charred bodies of the villagers. The kill ratio was how many more of those bodies there were than those of American soldiers.

Adolf Eichmann during his trial.

Around this time Merton was also thinking about Adolf Eichmann. The most troubling aspect of the Eichmann trial for him was that a psychiatrist examined the defendant and found him quite sane. He felt no guilt, ate heartily and slept well. He spoke and wrote in a desiccated official language with which he seemed to have convinced himself of his own sweet reasonableness.

The Eichmann trial had taken place in Jerusalem in the spring and summer of 1961. Over a hundred Holocaust survivors came one by one to the witness box. Each gave devastating testimony: of being forced into ghettos, confined in cattle trucks, marched through dark forests in the frozen winter and then set to work as slave labor in the camps, having to live with the constant smell of death as their fellow prisoners were shot and gassed around them. In the dock, behind glass, sat Eichmann. All the evidence pointed to his having overseen the deportations, signed death warrants and visited the camps to see his orders being met.

Eichmann was now in his mid fifties, thickly bespectacled, his hairline receding, his voice deep and calm. He had the air of a slightly overextended middle manager. When cross-examined, he answered in one-note monologues. Asked about forcing Jews to wear the Yellow Star, he would go off on a long detour about police regulations for official letters, the protocol for getting the department chief’s signature and the meaning of all the different colors of ink. As the prosecutors got ever more irritated, he sounded ever more dignified and dull.

And how did this company man defend himself? With an impenetrable shield of nouns. He described his role as “emigration specialist.” The Auschwitz death trains were “evacuation transport.” Things either fell, or more likely did not fall, within his “area of competence.” Where he could, he hid behind the passive voice. “Everything was geared to the idea of emigration,” he said. “But constant difficulties were caused by various offices in a bureaucratic manner.” Of the Wannsee Conference, which finalized plans for murdering all the Jews in German-occupied Europe, he said only that “the various types of possible solutions were discussed.” He spoke in the stock phrases that were how he had come to think and see. As Hannah Arendt wrote in the New Yorker, “Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such sentences.”

This noun-ridden language—stale, self-proving, sleepwalking from one big noun to the next—has become the argot of modern managerialism. To measure its staleness, count the nouns. The nouniness of a piece of writing is a sure sign of lack of care for the reader and lack of thought in the writer. For writing is not just a way of communicating; it is a way of thinking. Nouny writing relieves the writer of the need to do either. In nouny writing, anything can be claimed and nothing can be felt. No one says who did what to whom, or takes ownership or blame. Instead of saying that x is not working (verb and participle), they say that there has been a loss of functionality (two nouns) in x. These words are not even trying to illuminate; they are immunizing themselves against the world. The aim, even if unknown to the writer, is to bore the reader into not looking closely at the words. Instead of inviting a response, as writing should, it shuts it down.

Photo by Stephane Hurbe on Pexels.com

Nouny sentences are the Sargasso Sea of prose. The actual Sargasso Sea is bound within a circular system of currents called the North Atlantic Gyre. These currents turn the sea into a garbage patch, as the congealed oil, plastic and other debris carried into it has no way out. In the days when ships needed sails, they could be stranded here for weeks waiting for a gust of wind. The sea is almost a marine desert, the surface waters taking so long to change that they are depleted of nutrients. All that grows there is the floating sargassum seaweed after which it is named. Sargasso Sea prose is like this: flat, becalmed, full of the tar balls, junk and seaweed of inert nouns, and stuck in its own little microclimate, away from the swirling, tidal ocean of life.

When people try to hide their personalities behind procedures, they enter this Sargasso Sea of sentences. When they want to sound rational and reasonable, but to avoid mentioning any inconveniently actual people—living, thinking, suffering, struggling to survive just like them—they use words voided of meaning, like modernization or incentivization. No one has to teach them to write this way, just as no one has to teach a grown-up eel, swimming happily in a European or American river, to turn tail and find its way thousands of miles back to the real Sargasso Sea, where it will mate, spawn and die. An eel knows when and where to go; a writer knows when and where to start writing nounily. The switch in the brain has been flicked.

Mostly this kind of uncommunication is tedious but harmless. But Merton saw that, because it sounds so boringly sane, it could make the insane sound routine—even the insanity of napalm death, nuclear war or genocide. Inside such artificially sealed-off language, the maddest realities seem sensible. When nouns rule over sentences, all the air has been punched out of them. Emptied of life and humanity, they have been refilled with inertia and nothingness. All the imaginative promise of words has been pulped into a lumpy noun gravy, neither liquid enough to flow nor solid enough to be forked. This noun gravy is tasteless but, should we swallow enough of it, noxious.