Crunch Time – Less Than Ten Days To Go!
Emil van der Poorten
So far there have been relatively few polls published relating to the watershed election that will soon be upon us and some that I have seen amount to little more than gobbledegook parading as erudition, with the text seemingly contradicting the graphs and other mumbo-jumbo accompanying it! I don’t know whether this is a phenomenon typical of the current political discourse in English in Sri Lanka or whether the so-called “researchers” really don’t know what they are talking about and fall back on concealing that fact with a pile of verbiage.
I should insert a disclaimer here in the matter of polls, surveys and analysis conducted by Social Indicator, the survey research unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu’s much-reviled (by the Malinda Seneviratnes of this country particularly!) publication and organization have published a literate and seemingly balanced analysis of a poll reflecting the current public mood. Thank you, PS & Co. for another example of literacy that serves, among other things, to expose the “Free Lap-top Journalists” for what they are and for whom they act as poorly-disguised apologists.
And speaking of the English language and its debasement, recent copies of the daily and Sunday papers to which we subscribe carry advertisements for candidates in the election soon to be held which, if collected in one volume, could provide the ultimate catalogue of banality and abuse of the English language. Sometimes both, but always hilarious!
Typical of politicians, the slogans are vacuous.
One says, in part, “…the main object of education is not only scholastic achievement but to bring forth exemplary citizens.” Whatever happened to the 20th century school of simple expression that followed Ernest Hemingway’s admonition against using “ten dollar words?” Maybe, they’ve all followed Margaret Mitchell’s ode to banality and have “Gone with the wind!”Read More
