The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

14 JULY-AUGUST 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Up Babel Creek Without a Paddle D ramatic changes in our life and culture greet the For- eign Service officer returning from overseas. These changes have so much accelerated that a three-year absence is sufficient to make apparent sweeping currents moving contemporary American society. … Since no one likes to be observed objectively, the officer returned from abroad is well advised to keep quiet in mixed company. … But on the theory that the FSJ is not mixed company, I will attempt some impressions. The first change I noted on return this time was an advancing American deafness. Tellie sets, record players, instructions to children and even conversation are turned up much higher than they were, and people seem now to strain to hear. It is difficult to catch the meaning of spoken words above the telephone, the washer, the dryer, the barn dance in the rec room, the jet whine overhead and the rumble of traffic. One notices an insistent new shrillness in voices, a phenomenon once associated with the old and hard of hearing. By all means the most startling development in the American culture in the last three years has been the deterioration in the use of the English language. … Not simply a lazy slurring of the syllables, it is a degenera- tion of the thought that once gave the word its impulse. It reflects not flabbiness of the tongue muscles, but of the mind. What was only a noticeable trend among teenagers a few years ago to substitute a ritual sound like “cool” for a well-selected descriptive adjective is now accepted as an adult approach. Imagine my surprise, then, to find on my desk a State Depart- ment memo in which a proposed course of action was described as “exciting.” This is the language my daughter uses anticipating a Girl Scout hike. I closed my eyes and saw myself in forest green with Scout kerchief knotted at my neck, merit badges on my sleeve, proposing to the British an exciting condominium to exploit the oil reserves of Upper Chad. I was as dismayed by the State Department’s “flap” dia- lect in the 1950s as I am now by its “crunch” dialect in the 1960s. This effort to show exclusiveness by developing an “in” jargon may be juvenile, but it is not a serious threat to our culture. What is serious is linguistic laziness that lets the art of communication fail by default. It is a part of the responsibility of an educated elite to maintain the standards of the mind and intellect. This process of widening the elite numerically is called the democratic process. This process is not to be confused with the process of lowering the standards, which induces the slow death of the culture. It seems ironic that a department which emphasizes the use of foreign languages seems indifferent to its own. —Excerpted from an article of the same title by Saxton Bradford, FSJ , July 1966. 50 Years Ago sies and consulates. There is too much corporate cloning, and the institution is change-resistant. The headquarters operation is overly segmented; we need to be more supple and better connected in order to be more effective.” —Shannon Mizzi, Editorial Assistant Social Media— How Diplomats Could Be Using It A Q&A session involving Foreign Service officers from U.S. Embassy Beijing was removed from the popular Chinese question-and-answer website zhihu.com at the end of May, The Wall Street Journal reported. Viewed more than 1 million times, the Q&A entertained such diverse ques- tions as how to obtain cheap Broadway tickets and how to set up a food truck business in the United States. Spokesman Benjamin Weber said the embassy was disappointed by the removal of the Q&A. “The questions were submitted from Zhihu, and we under- stand they were based on the interests expressed by Zhihu users,” he stated. According to the WSJ , the removal was not surprising, given the recent crackdown on “Western influence” and online speech in China. “The U.S. considers this as cultural outreach or promoting cultural under- standing,” Willy Lam, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the WSJ . “But Beijing sees this, I think, as an act of hostility, to try to poison the minds of young Chinese with American ideas.”