First Draft #4 - November 16th 2020

Welcome to the fourth edition of our newsletter, this month on concession speeches, Anglo-Saxon, Barbra Streisand and more. Have a thought on any of the below? Get in touch by replying to this email

THE ART OF LOSING

The Trump tantrum on losing the election is not the first defeat to be marked by bad behaviour. After a vicious campaign in 1800, in which John Adams had accused Thomas Jefferson of fathering children by his slaves and Jefferson had retaliated by saying Adams was in league with the English, the vanquished Adams left Washington before Jefferson could acknowledge victory. Most losing candidates, though, manage a little more grace.

Done well, the concession adds a belated and rather forlorn boost to the reputation of the defeated candidate. The two best such speeches are by George H.W. Bush and John McCain. In 1992, when he lost to Bill Clinton, Bush commended “the majesty of the democratic system” and said, rather movingly, that he hoped he had honoured the office that he had held. By the manner of his departing he did so.

But perhaps the finest concession speech of modern times was delivered by John McCain in 2008 on the night that he was beaten by Barack Obama. With genuine admiration and affection, McCain commended the new President and said “I recognize the special significance it has for African Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight”.

It was a generous and a moving thought. It was an observance of a ritual which is part of how a democracy enacts change. The refusal to participate in the ritual is another indication of the fact that Trump is, at heart, an autocrat confined by the institutions of a democracy. The latter will win in the end. Trump will hold out a while yet but eventually surely, in the words of the forgotten Senator Stephen Douglas who was beaten to the Presidency by Abraham Lincoln and which were quoted by Al Gore in 2000, “partisan feeling must yield to patriotism”. (PC)

JARGON BUSTERS: Stakeholders

When the Business Roundtable declared last year that 181 top US companies were no longer beholden to their shareholders, it was to their “stakeholders” that they swore a new fealty. But what actually is a stakeholder? The word breaks a golden rule of good writing: abstraction. When I hear ‘stakeholder’, I cannot picture what a specific one looks like. So while the Business Roundtable was lauded for becoming more accountable, this abstraction actually makes it harder to hold them to account. How can I possibly know if you are serving your stakeholders if I don’t know who, or what, they are? The solution is simple: dump the stakeholders and get specific about who, exactly, you are talking about. And leave the stake holding to Buffy. (JW)

STRAIGHT TALKIN’ ANGLO-SAXON

Winston Churchill said of his speaking style: “My method is simple. I like to use Anglo-Saxon words with the least number of syllables.” Anglo-Saxon words have a blunt force that latin words, which tend to be longer and more abstract, lack. Compare, for example, “equitable” (Latin) and “just” (Anglo-Saxon). Or “adamant” (Latin) and “firm” (Anglo-Saxon).

English’s balance of Anglo-Saxon and Latin has evolved over the years. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French and Latin became the language of legal and political officialdom, while English was the language heard on the street. From the 15th century, English became more recognisably “modern”. By the 18th century, it was not only the language of the street, but also of the courts and commerce.

But in the mid 20th century, English began to lose its grip. A corporate manager class emerged, and with it a technocratic language rooted mostly in French and Latin. Many words thought of today as jargon - “leverage”, “impactful”, “innovation”, “strategic” - are latinate in origin.

Compare these to the “blood”, “toil”, “tears” and “sweat” of Churchill’s oratory. These are concrete ideas. They form clear images in the mind. Such language would, of course, be out of place in most corporate reports. Still, business writers should heed Churchill’s method. The best writing is marked by clarity. And for clarity, Anglo-Saxon has the edge. (ZH)

JARGON BUSTERS: BUILDS (n.)

A document is shared around the virtual workplace. "I have a few builds..." opens the email of one respondent. "Great builds," the other respondents feel duty-bound to declare. But why turn a perfectly serviceable verb - to build - into this horrid new noun? There were other options on the proverbial table. "Thoughts" for instance would work. Or even, heaven forbid, "improvements". But therein lies the rub. Corporate language is an exercise in conflict avoidance. These builds flatter the author. They are no longer writing a corporate powerpoint, they are an architect, perhaps even a sculptor. Their colleagues are simply adding to the beautiful edifice that has been created. It's all a myth of course. Because while they say "builds", it's a wrecking ball they want to apply. (JW)

SPEAK TO WHAT?

Can I speak to that issue? I mean, I can try. I’m not sure it’ll listen, it being an abstract concept and all. “Speak to that” is one of those tics you hear once then notice everywhere. I first heard it in an American podcast in 2017. Since then it’s apparently spread across the Atlantic and around the world and now it’s virtually impossible to listen to any exchange without hearing people speaking to things. Right wing populism. Voter suppression. Russian disinformation. All are being spoken to incessantly. Perhaps it’s like at a party. If we speak to them enough, will they get bored and go away? (AD)

ALL THE TALENTS

Warren Beatty delivered one of my favourite political speeches. Not in Bulworth, his 1998 film about the Presidency, but in January 1993, as himself, at the inauguration ball of the newly elected President Bill Clinton. Beatty and his wife Annette Bening acted as joint masters of ceremonies and, in introducing the star turn for the evening, Beatty gave a masterpiece in saying a lot quickly: “I have been introducing a number of activists at fundraisers”, he said. “One group includes a singer, a composer, a writer, a producer and a director and I think I can save us some time here if I just introduce them all at once. Ladies and gentlemen, Barbra Streisand”. (PC)

A POEM

The Mad Gardener’s Song

"He thought he saw an Argument

That proved he was the Pope

He looked again and found it was

A Bar of Mottled Soap"

by Lewis Carroll

THE ANNUAL DISTORT

The Financial Reporting Council, the UK’s accounting watch-dog, has called on companies to make their annual reports more readable to lay readers. Excellent. Most annual reports are impenetrable mush, written as if they have set out to befuddle you (which is sometimes, though not always, true). What irony then that the FRC’s own report was so flatulent with jargon itself. The FRC declared that annual reports should be made more appealing to, you guessed it, “stakeholders”. They should become more “agile”, whatever that means. Perhaps it has something to do with their becoming “unbundled” and “a network of interconnected reports”. Our advice to annual report writers (and we’ve written a few ourselves) is simple. Forget the “stakeholders” and write like you’re talking to your non-expert friend. If you can’t explain it to them, you probably don’t know what you’re saying either. (JW)

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

In Plato’s Gorgias, the philosopher cast rhetoric as a cheap trick of the demagogue, whose devastating persuasive powers will lure us to our ruin. Far better, Plato thought, to place the governing of a nation in the hands of Philosopher Kings, like… Plato. His underlying assumption was that the crowd are too fickle, stupid or mad to be trusted to vote in the best interests of the state. There certainly can be a madness of the masses, as the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay chronicled beautifully in his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

But let Joe Biden’s victory be a reminder that this is not always the case. There may in fact be more wisdom in the crowd than we tend to think. As James Surowiecki wrote in his masterful Wisdom of Crowds, the collective intelligence of a group can sometimes far surpass that of an individual. He cites the statistician Francis Galton, who watched 800 fair-goers guess the weight of a prize ox. Few were close individually but, remarkably, the average of all the guesses was just 1lb shy of the true weight. Aristotle, the greatest of rhetoric’s theorists, placed more trust in the crowd than his teacher, Plato. In Politics, he wrote: “For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively.” Cast the crowd as a madman at your peril, because if this is madness then there is method in it. (JW)

LANGUAGE AND BEYOND

• Think populists use simpler language than their liberal opponents? Think again, says this academic study.

• When Biden said in his acceptance speech that 'too many dreams have been deferred for too long', he was referring to Harlem, a poem by Langston Hughes. This article explains how Hughes' 'I dream a world' influenced MLK's most famous speech.

• Ever wondered how English sounds to an uncomprehending ear? This fictional baseball team dreamed up by a Japanese games designer in 1994 offers a clue (our MVP: Bobson Dugnutt).

• Language fact: with no “h” sound in their alphabet, Russians call Harry Potter "Gary" Potter.

• A parody of Dominic Cummings by Alex has been doing the rounds on Twitter.

• Anthony Lane is on top form in this New Yorker piece on the letters of American poet John Berryman.

• Obama's new memoir is an excuse to revisit the 22-year-old future president's smart take on Eliot’s Waste Land.

• The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos argues US politics is defined by perpetual struggle between violence and reason.

• Sound advice on how to manage and motivate people from Arsene Wenger.

NEW FROM US

• Phil in the New Statesman on the path ahead for Republicans

• Zach in Unherd on the politics of Springsteen country

ONE MORE THING

At The Draft we’re specialists in writing and rhetoric. We help businesses and public figures make their case more persuasively. If you need our help, get in touch. And if you enjoy First Draft, forward it on.