December 29, 2013
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Is this meant seriously or as a joke? I have no idea to what it refers: presumably some remark made on Facebook to which brittle or hypersensitive persons might take offense. What is clear from both the form and content is that: a) the native language of the person who wrote it is English; and b) he has had a college education, for no one else could write the language of Shakespeare and Milton so excruciatingly.
Whether joking or not, the author has mastered the difficult art, essential for bureaucratic careerists, of conveying only a penumbra of meaning while writing at considerable length. This is a skill that I have not acquired, for, try as I might to imitate bureaucratic language, clear meaning keeps emerging from what I have written. I will never get anywhere in a modern organization (not that I want to).
The author also displays that crucial social skill in the modern world, the ability to talk endlessly about himself without revealing anything of any importance or interest whatever. This skill comes naturally to those who are self-obsessed without self-examination. Psychobabble is to self-knowledge as political correctness is to political philosophy.
“Core identity” is precisely the type of expression that trips easily off the tongue, or from the pen or keyboard, of someone whose mind has been thoroughly bureaucratized. “Core identity,” indeed: It conjures the image of a radioactive rod used to generate electricity by a nuclear power station. No wonder staff became “personnel” and then “human resources.” When a sixteenth-century German bishop said that the poor were a goldmine, at least he was talking ironically if not cynically.
A question I have often asked myself is whether anyone actually thinks in the language of the email I have quoted, and whether the language of the circulars which I received from the managers of the hospital where I worked corresponded in any way to the actual content of their minds. The possibility that it might is too horrible to contemplate, and therefore I avert my mind from it.
