The essential first step to undermining truth is to tamper with language

Ihave a Dutch colleague whose love of the English language is greater than any English person’s I’ve ever met. ‘So succinct,’ he’s always telling me. ‘Like the sign “Mind The Gap’ in London Tube stations. In Holland, we’d need five times as many words to say the same thing.’

Certainly, one can admire in an objective way the weight of deception and/or pretension that can be packed into a single phrase. Think only of ‘customer service’. Or ‘Golden Delicious’. Or ‘no worries’. George Orwell famously observed that the essential first step to undermining truth is to tamper with language. And in today’s ‘woke culture’ — a name I find distasteful to type for its sheer illiteracy — our boundlessly beautiful, powerful and expressive tongue is being tampered with as never before.

There’s been less mention of the ‘friendly fire’ with which grieving parents are sometimes told their sons or daughters in the armed forces have been killed, as if that should be some comfort. Instead, as repellent in its own way, we have the phrase ‘safe spaces’ which universities now pride themselves on creating for their students.

Safety, that is, from any viewpoint that might contradict their preconceived notions or prejudices, once the whole purpose of further education. Staff members who threaten to disrupt this torpid twilight zone are driven out of their jobs and visiting lecturers with any hint of controversy are ‘cancelled’ (the implication being not the event but the person scrubbed out) or ‘no-platformed.’ The same Orwellian censorship is applied to subjects being studied. A Scottish university recently warned its English students that a range of authors including Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and even Agatha Christie might upset or ‘challenge’ them — surely, the measure of any true classic.

Oddly, though, there’s no attempt to shield these same tender young souls from the porn and slasher movies with which they’re constantly bombarded.

Regular book-writers like myself are particularly vulnerable in this climate. More than one fellow author has had an about-tobe-published work birth-strangled and has been dropped by their longtime publishers because someone in the office had been offended by something they’d written.

The novelist Sebastian Faulks is so scared of being labelled sexist (for the accusation automatically spells guilt) that he’s vowed to give no more physical descriptions of his female characters. If Gustave Flaubert had had such cold feet over Emma Bovary or James Joyce over Molly Bloom, think how much poorer literature would have been.

Meanwhile, so-called ‘identity politics’ have spawned the offence of ‘cultural appropriation’, meaning, for us writers, to use characters not from one’s own ethnic group. Especially culpable is any writer who is white and their characters are not.

I have to admit my own backlist includes a collection of stories largely about African-American musicians and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. My sole motive was to glorify them and their artistry. Yet if either book had been published today, I’d doubtless be in trouble with the prose police.

My least favourite bit of misrepresenting modern jargon is ‘the national conversation’, with its beguiling vision of civilised people in quiet discussion over bone china teacups. But more often, it is a vindictive mob such as has hounded and persecuted and even threatened the life of J.K. Rowling via social media for having exercised her right to free speech on matters of gender.

These woke tribunals manufacture new condemnations in such quantity that it’s hard to keep up. While riding in cabs whose drivers have African or Eastern European backgrounds, I’ve thought it only friendly to ask where they or their families started out from. But according to the latest woke decree, this isn’t friendliness: it’s ‘a microaggression’.