OPINION
Harry Palmer
Near the end of my secondary schooling in the late 1950s, my English teacher was Mr Dooley. He was apparently required to also teach what’s now called ‘civics’ – how politics worked, how to take out a mortgage to buy a house, etc – and he gave us a couple of ideals to live by as we prepared to enter the world in 1960.
‘Don’t believe all you read in the newspaper’ and ‘Newspaper journalists picture their readers’ ability to understand text and their breadth of vocabulary as being that of a 13 or 14 year old. Humans think in words, so if you have a limited vocabulary, your ability to think and express yourself is necessarily restricted. Make it a habit to learn a couple of new words each day from a dictionary.’
As anyone who lived during those times will be aware, great social changes began to take place around the world as the gloom of the aftermath of World War II began to lift (enforced food rationing was only brought to an end in 1954), but it also seems a great dumbing down began, and this continues to evolve today.
The early 1960s saw the emergence of a distinct youth culture, with its own fashion, music and values. Young people began to challenge traditional authority and assert their own independence and dominance over culture. This led to a number of changes, such as the relaxation of dress codes and the rise of popular music. And, in keeping with the feeling of being at the start of a new era, UK newspapers scandalised readers with the titillating details of the Profumo affair in 1963: the goings on between a government minister, a high-society showgirl and a Russian spy.
The 1960s also saw a sexual revolution as people became more open about sex and sexuality. This was due in part to the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961 which gave women more control over their fertility. The revolution led to the increasing acceptance of premarital sex and cohabitation. And, of course, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexuality in England.
In 1965 the Labour Government began closing grammar schools in the UK. They were for the children of toffs, the Labour Government claimed at the time. Kids were subjected to an intelligence test at the age of 11 – “The Eleven Plus” – and a pass meant being granted admission to one of these elite institutions. Failure meant being diverted to a ‘secondary’, ‘comprehensive’ or ‘technical’ school, where intellectual development was not promoted as fully. The education in these schools was more intended for the working, blue-collar class.
Meanwhile, a certain Rupert Murdoch moved to the UK from Australia and contributed to the ongoing dumbing down, even from those standards mentioned by Mr Dooley: for example, stealing the ideas of magazines like Tit Bits and Reveille to include page-three girls. Murdoch purchased the UK newspapers The Sun (“I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” he told editor Larry Lamb) and the News of the World in the late ’60s. It was to be another decade or so before he got around to kicking the legs from under the mighty print unions by going electronic, sacking printers and moving his papers from Fleet Street, the centre of the world of UK daily newspapers at that time. He then bought ‘The Thunderer’, otherwise known as the Times and Sunday Times newspapers, beloved of the elites of politics, the arts and the so-called intelligentsia. Many more media acquisitions followed and he moved on to North America, purchasing a number of newspapers and 20th Century Fox as he continued to grow his empire.
Although the BBC has more eyeballs by far than any other UK media outlet, it is despised by many for its distinctly left-wing bias (which it denies, of course) and the fact that a licence to view it costs citizens around 159 pounds a year: a lot of money to the not very well off. However, Murdoch’s newspapers are far more popular and influential, with the Sun selling around 1.2 million copies per day.
Today, newspaper and online journalism competes with social media and portable entertainment. I suspect recent generations, with their shortened attention spans, and education in the ‘three Rs’ displaced by indoctrination, have been accommodated by the media writing and speaking in shorter sentences and using words from a pool that statistics show to be most commonly understood by early teens. I admit I am not aware of any studies to support this contention, but in this day and age of forced conformity, would you expect this sort of information to be readily available?
Although the style of journalism in Murdoch’s UK newspapers is widely criticised for being lowbrow and sensationalist, it has also been very successful in attracting readers and making money. They are some of the most popular in the UK and have a significant influence on public opinion; hence the unashamed courting of Murdoch and his editors by sycophantic politicians that share a contempt for the public, especially when they want to torment their population with ‘pandemics’. Murdoch rivals, like the Daily Express and Daily Mail, seek to emulate this.
William Shakespeare died in 1616, aged 51, and his collected works apparently show he had a vocabulary in excess of 31,000 words, compared with the average person today having a vocabulary of around 20,000 words. There are no recent studies confirming the loss of vocabulary in the average person, but since Mr Dooley benefitted us with his advice, I suspect not only has vocabulary decreased, but cognition with it. In the past decade or so sharp criticism has been brought down, via both mainstream and social media, on anyone using words deemed verboten, usually by the self-elected illiterate mob, who, unless stopped, will have us all back to grunting the few words in conversation left to us. African American Vernacular English, or Ebonics, is a waypoint to that final destination.