??? The Underground Grammarian

This is an extract from the edition of the Insanely Profitable Tech newsletter that went out on 26 Aug 2024 - it's my weekly firecracker to the Squirrel Squadron packed with provocative thoughts and tips. The full version has this and more - it’s all free! - just sign up here to get it first: https://squirrelsquadron.com/

My mother subscribed to a quirky little newsletter called The Underground Grammarian, but I was the one who devoured it the moment it appeared. It wasn’t an electronic missive like the ones I send you every week; this was an A5 paper booklet printed on an ancient letterpress and sent through the post, on a rather irregular schedule, by an eccentric and combative professor of English named Richard Mitchell. Mitchell set out at first to skewer the absurd verbiage and confused thinking of administrators at his university, then broadened his aim to include teachers, bureaucrats, artists, and anyone else whose brain could emit gibberish like this, from the January 1982 issue:

“We agree that to plan best on where long range goals would project the district, a careful review of current status needs to be given. The base formed from this assessment and examination can be used to launch successfully that which needs to be initiated.”

The Grammarian pithily remarked that “[the author] may mean, of course, that planners should take account of facts. Wow. He may just as well, on the other hand, be saying that you can hardly expect any concrete plans for the future from someone who doesn’t know what the hell is going on in the present.” Through sixteen years of publication, and in four commercially published books, Mitchell constantly dissected and ridiculed absurdities like this, pointing out that they revealed not just clumsiness of writing, but disorder of thought. The masthead of every pamphlet prominently quoted Ben Jonson: “Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.”

I loved the Grammarian as a child because it gave me a glimpse of an intellectual world I didn’t inhabit. (My high school was ranked number one in the country–in football and marching band, not in anything academic.) But now that I coach many of you in improving your leadership through conversations, I’m constantly referring back to the lessons Mitchell taught about clarity and directness of language, which I find form the fastest route to productive conflict and rapid learning.

For instance, when visiting a client recently for a tech assessment, I kept hearing the engineers referring to a new technology strategy that “had been adopted” and therefore couldn’t be altered. My ears attuned through years of reading Mitchell, I quickly picked up the key grammatical clue: there was no hint in their language about who had originated the scheme, so it was going to be difficult for any of us to figure out the reasons for the plans, much less change them. And I remembered the grumpy grammarian remarking that “[t]he user of the passive verb doesn’t want a universe where responsible agents do their acts.” Why would the developers circumlocute a la Voldemort, twisting themselves into linguistic knots to avoid naming the mysterious strategist??

When I pressed for more, the coders told me that they’d heard about the new approach only indirectly, and that though they thought it might be the brainchild of a new senior leader, they had actually never confirmed their guess–in fact, none of them had ever even met him! Checking with that leader and others quickly revealed that there had been considerable miscommunication about the company’s plans, and we immediately uncovered several highly profitable options that the tech team had assumed were off the table.?

The passive voice almost always serves to obscure and obstruct the real causes of disagreement, as it did for my client. It’s easier, for sure, to shrug linguistically and let the phrasing blur reality, so unpleasant actions are just done, not perpetrated, and mistakes just happen, with no one actually responsible. But I urge you to join the quixotic guerillas who bear the standard of the Grammarian cause, and ban the impersonal and the vague from your own speech and that of your team–I promise the result will be more disagreement, more candour, and more great ideas.

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