"corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is...
Political speech continues to be, as it was for Orwell, largely the defense of the indefensible, but there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between evil thought and uninspired diction—ensuring fresh diction among students will not ensure fresh thought. We think of “Orwellian” as a shorthand for dystopia, but a more accurate definition might be a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at the expense of objective truth: Expect it to be constantly in flux, particularly in a landscape where political power is itself nebulous...
The bureaucratic voice makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy...
Munoz employs the passive voice at key moments to make it clear that there are no other actors in this drama other than Dao. In a one spectacular sentence, Munoz writes of Dao, “He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent.” There is clearly a series of confrontations happening here, yet he is the only individual identified in the entire sentence. No one did the approaching and no one tried to gain his compliance; instead, the passenger just sat there on the plane, becoming more and more belligerent all by himself...
The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech: It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”) and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity. Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject (“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun (“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as if nothing took place at all."
Related: an interactive guide to ambiguous grammar
FB: #RequiredReading "What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax, grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and unsubtle. On Twitter, I referred to it as a “master class in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility,” and followed with a few tweets that highlighted its use of language to shift the blame on to the victim...
Readers need to know, for example, that journalists who use phrases like “officer-involved shooting” in any context other than a direct quote from law enforcement are derelict. It is law enforcement’s prerogative to use spin and dissimulation to obtain favorable coverage; it is the media’s role to resist this. And yet, this is a role the media has almost wholeheartedly abdicated."
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