Wooden language is language that uses vague, ambiguous, abstract or pompous words in order to divert attention from the salient issues.Caparini, Marina; Fluri, Philipp (2006). ''Civil Society and the Security Sector: Concepts and Practices in New Democracies'', LIT Verlag Berlin–Hamburg–Münster, . The French scholar Françoise Thom identified four characteristics of wooden language: abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete, tautologies, bad

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

s, and

Manichaeism Manichaeism (; in New Persian ; ) is a former major religionR. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ''Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times''SUNY Press, 1998 p. 37 founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian Empire, Parthian ...

that divides the world into

good and evil In religion, ethics, philosophy, and psychology "good and evil" is a very common dichotomy. In cultures with Manichaean and Abrahamic religious influence, evil is perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good shoul ...

.Michiko Kakutani
"The death of truth"
''The Guardian'', 14 July 2018 The phrase is a

literal translation Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In Translation studies, trans ...

of the French expression ' which appears to have been coined by

Georges Clemenceau Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (, also , ; 28 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A key figure of the Independent Radicals, he was a ...

in 1919, and became widely used during the 1970s and 1980s after being brought back into French from Russian via Polish. In France, wooden language is commonly and strongly associated with politicians and the conditioning at the National School of Administration, as attested by intellectual

Michel Butor Michel Butor (; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator. Life and work Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven childre ...

: "We have had, among the misfortunes of France, the creation by

General de Gaulle Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (; ; (commonly abbreviated as CDG) 22 November 18909 November 1970) was a French army officer and statesman who led Free France against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government ...

of the

École nationale d'administration The École nationale d'administration (generally referred to as ENA, en, National School of Administration) was a French ''grande école'', created in 1945 by President of France, President Charles de Gaulle and principal author of the Constitu ...

which holds the monopoly of the training of politicians. They have to go through there, where they learn the ''wooden language''".Emmanuel Legeard
"Une Conversation avec Michel Butor", ''Le Monde'', March 2016
The fictional language of

Newspeak Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements ...

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...

's novel ''

Nineteen Eighty-Four ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also stylised as ''1984'') is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final ...

'' often mirrors and satirizes wooden language.

References

Rhetoric {{rhetoric-stub

See also

References