“May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as prime minister

Barack Obama isn’t the first successful politician to talk about ‘hope’.

On 4th May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK, and concluded some lines from St Francis of Assisi with a contrast between ‘despair’ and ‘hope’ as she entered 10 Downing Street (see clip below).

The quotation was supplied to her by speechwriter Ronald Millar, who reflects on it (and how she delivered it) in the same video clip.

The New Year is a more personal 30th anniversary for me, as it was during the UK general election of 1979 that I first started recording political speeches on audio tape (video recorders had still to become widely available).

So I'll be using this as an excuse to revisit some of that early work in future blog entries, which will start with some comments on ‘Margaret Thatcher and the genesis of female charisma’ – that has some resonances for the likes of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

Name your price: the curious language of television advertising

More and more British television advertisements are referring to prices in a way that bears little or no relationship to the way we talk about prices in everyday life.

Commercials are telling us that an armchair priced at two hundred and ninety nine pounds costs “two-nine-nine” and that a three-piece suite priced at four hundred and ninety nine pounds can be ours for “four-nine-nine”.

There are presumably two reasons why the ad agencies have sold their clients on the idea of listing digits as an 'effective' way of mentioning the price of a product. One is that it avoids having to mention high-sounding numbers like “ninety” or “a hundred”. The other is that these shorthand digital options save on costly air time: there are only three syllables in “four-nine-nine” compared with eight syllables in “four hundred and ninety nine pounds”, which takes more than twice as long to say.

But the trouble is that, to any competent speaker of English (e.g. the mass television audience), these linguistic inventions stand out as noticeable and distinctly odd in comparison with the more usual conversational way of referring to the price of things in tens, hundreds or thousands of pounds. What’s more, if you actually follow the advertisers’ preferred usage, it can lead to confusion and embarrassment, as happened on the only occasion on which I can ever remember describing a price in this rather unusual way.

After I’d spent £1,250.00 (one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds) on an antique dining table, my late mother-in-law said she’d like to pay for it as a house-warming present and asked me how much it had cost. Taken aback by such unexpected generosity, I replied (perhaps unwittingly following the advertisers’ example of trying to make a high price sound lower) by saying “twelve-fifty” – at which point, she reached into her purse and handed me £12.50 (twelve pounds and fifty pence).

I won’t dwell on how the conversation developed after that, because what really interests me about all this is the question of how ad agencies manage to get away with persuading their clients to buy into such bizarre linguistic usages without regard for what (little) we know how language actually works.

Another example of heavy investment on the basis of questionable advice from the agencies is the huge number of TV commercials in which there is no spoken reference at all to the name of the product being advertised. Even when this key information appears in a written caption on the screen, it won’t be noticed by the millions of viewers who are reading a newspaper, doing a crossword puzzle or are using the break to make a cup of tea.

The expensive pointlessness of such commercials was summed up many years ago by Professor W.M. O’Barr of Duke University, when he pointed out that the advertisers and/or their agencies don’t seem to realise that eyes have eyelids but ears don’t have ear lids – the obvious consequence of which is that, however inattentive viewers are, they will at least hear the name of the product being advertised.

The net result of all this is that we often become very familiar with expensively created artistic film footage of cars doing extraordinary things without being left with any idea about what make or model of car it is that we’re supposed to go out and buy.

Meanwhile, the ad agencies seem content to carry on ignoring research, like that by O’Barr, that could point them and their clients in much more profitable directions.

Ready-made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech

Given that Barack Obama is such a brilliant orator, it might seem a bit presumptuous to offer any suggestions for his inaugural address next month. But these lines from another presidential inaugural seem uncannily relevant for someone taking office at a time of economic crisis:

“These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions… It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

“Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity … For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

“You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

“The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away…

The speaker was Ronald Reagan at his inauguration on 20th January 1981. More than two and a half decades later, the depressing thing is that nothing much seems to have changed – including the optimism/hope of the newly elected president.