Junk
English Home
Introduction
Excerpts
About Ken Smith
Other Books
New Junk
Reviews
Contact Ken
Send
us your best Junk!
If you've spotted a choice scrap of Junk English, submit
it here and Ken may add it to the web site! Read Ken's book first, of course.
Read what others
have sent.
 Order your copy online today! Only $10.36... |
 Buy the book! |
Junk English
Introduction by Ken
Smith
Junk English takes many forms. It is the salesperson who describes a product
as high quality and a real value, the coworker who writes of the positive
side of the consumer equation, the politician who speaks of sensible reform,
the television analyst who talks of anomalous paradigms, your best friend
who says Let's do lunch!
All of us use junk English, often many times a day. That does not make it more forgivable, but more troubling.
Junk English is much more than sloppy grammar. It is a hash of human frailties and cultural license: spurning the language of the educated yet spawning its own pretentious words and phrases, favoring appearance over substance, broadness over precision, and loudness above all. It is sometimes innocent, sometimes lazy, sometimes well intended, but most often it is a trick we play on ourselves to make the unremarkable seem important. Its scope has been widened by politicians, business executives, and the PR and advertising industries in their employ, who use it to spread fog before facts they would rather keep hidden. The result is Edmund Burke's tyranny of the multitude merged with George Orwell's Newspeak, a world of humbug in which the more we read and hear, the less we know.
Junk English is the linguistic equivalent of junk food Ñ ingest it long enough and your brain goes soft.
This book is a catalog of observations, not a text of grammar or style. I have salted it liberally with examples from everyday life. The errors and abuses are blatant and familiar; you will not need a degree in English to recognize them.
This book is also a broad view of an encyclopedic subject. Much had to be pared away, particularly if it fell within wide-ranging topics such as Artificial Vocabulary, Euphemisms, and Jargon Gridlock. If your favorite atrocity is missing, I hope that you will understand. My intent was to keep this book small and handy so that it would be useful to a spectrum of people, for junk English will not go away until all of us recognize it.
This book is judgmental. Some may be uncomfortable with that. But we have been nonjudgmental for so long that abominations like confab and smartize and impactful and conversating have multiplied in our language and will continue to do so until we raise our hands in unison and say, "Pardon me, but what the hell does that mean?"
Junk English is not inevitable. We made it. We can make it go away. Thus this book.