The fact that he liked it was secondary to the shocking fact that he had understood what I had written this time. Even as I mumbled out my thanks, a pebble-sized worry started to grow in my brain. Where had I slipped up? How could he figure out what I had written? The only hope I held out for myself was that maybe, just maybe, he thought he had understood the piece, but actually hadn’t.
You may be asking what kind of chicanery is this? Why would anyone wish to write not to be understood? More importantly, why would you waste six minutes, 10 if you’re slow, of your well-trimmed Sunday reading an incomprehensible write-up, or worse, a column that seems as pointless as all the letters in the English alphabet apart from ‘i’ ?
Let’s just say that what I’m attempting here is to convince you of the strategic advantages of being obscure.
Some professionals are already familiar with the benefits that jargon, bureaucratese and diplospeak bring to table talk. ‘We are willing to make joint efforts with the US to cohere to the dialogue and consultation mechanism and take each other’s concerns into consideration to better achieve mutual benefits.’
What former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao is saying here delivers the opposite of what a stiff drink drunk swiftly delivers to the drinker: an anti-epiphany, an unrealisation. But for the person knowing the context – the comment made during talks with then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice regarding the US credit crisis – it bears a message: China telling the US to take measures to stabilise the latter’s currency. Reading ‘In his Heideggerian-deconstructive conception, a community is unavowable in being perpetually deferred’ (this is a real quote) may require a Tylenol on the rocks. But for the ‘linguinsider’, it not only makes sense, but also provides an air of exclusivity where only the ‘select few’ in the ingroup ‘gets it’. The Latin word ‘gaggire,’ from which ‘jargon’ comes from, means ‘to chatter’ things that the casual listener won’t understand. There was a time when in Delhi parties, I would break into Bengali with a fellow Bengali so that others in the room wouldn’t know that I was passing comments about them. But after the 2002 Devdas where Aishwarya says ‘Eeesh’ and provides non-Bengali speakers a Rosetta stone to crack the language, and after 78% of employable Bengalis left West Bengal to find real work elsewhere, Bengali as jargon was no longer feasible. Now I speak in euphemisms so convoluted that never mind my interlocutor, even I stop being comprehensible to myself.
But being incomprehensible (to most) has its virtues. In these days of ED raids and hurting sensibilities faster than you can say something that will hurt sensibilities, being understood isn’t just overrated, but it can also get you in trouble. Better to come across as talking/writing gibberish or something utterly fatuous than arouse the interests of those who love their interest being aroused.
Noam Chomsky, when he was better known as the father of modern linguistics and not as a ‘left-lib’ activist, came up with the sentence, ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ in his 1957 book, Syntactic Structures. This was an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-constructed but semantically as nonsensical as ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’.
Obscurity as a strategy flips this semantic non-function around and makes meanings opaque for readers outside the ingroup. This is textual cryptography – hiding or coding information so that only the person(s) the message is intended for can make sense of it.
So, dear friends, when my Hyderabadi friend said he liked something I wrote, I felt so vulnerably understandable as if I was suddenly ‘de-panted’. And if you think that I’ve failed to make myself perfectly unclear in this column today, you’re entitled to your thought, and I to yours.
