Never mind the story. Sometimes a headline alone is enough to fire up a
controversy. The New York
Daily News once turned the trick with
this
beauty about a president who refused to help a bankrupt metropolis: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." And now
MoveOn.org has given us
this headline atop an ad in
The New York
Times: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Republicans have
denounced the thought behind the headline while Democrats have mostly
danced a little sidestep. Meanwhile, liberal bloggers have
piggy-backed on the word
play with headlines that denounce "General Betrayous."
I think what we have here is more than a failure to communicate.
It's a seduction by creativity, an insincerity mated to hyperbole to
meet the demands of a snarky and polarized political culture. The
headline writer should have followed the advice, almost a century old
now, of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lectured his Cambridge students
that "style ... can never be ... extraneous ornament ... Whenever you feel
an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it
-- whole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to
press.
Murder your darlings."
In other words: Stop showing off. Never permit clever language to distort your message.
The MoveOn.org writer should indeed have written the phrase "General Betray Us," showed it off to friends and colleagues, and then murdered that
little darling, burying it and leaving possible exhumation for another day. I make this case as someone who leans left of center,
but who thinks the characterization of the general as a traitor is as
reckless and dishonest as the accusation that those who oppose the war are hurting the troops and lending
aid and comfort to the enemy.
Here's how the American Heritage Dictionary defines "betray": "To
give aid or information to an enemy of; commit treason against." The word belongs to a constellation of language that includes the words
"treason" and "tradition." All three words derive from the Latin
verb "tradere," meaning to hand over or hand down. The good
meaning allows us to hand down the fruits of culture and family; the pejorative meaning condemns us for handing over help to an enemy.
I do not believe that the headline writer thinks that General Petraeus
is a traitor to his country. Nothing in the ad under the headline
supports the pun in the title. Instead, I think writer and editors
succumbed to the oldest literary temptation in the book: to look
clever in front of the world -- meaning and consequences be damned.
When used wisely, the pun, the rhyme, all wordplay can illuminate the
world and speak the unspeakable. My best example comes from a
lyric I just discovered in the song "Manhattan," already famous for the line: "The city's
clamour can never spoil / The dreams of a boy and goil ..." That's
child's play compared to this Rogers and Hart adventure: "We'll
go to Greenwich / Where modern men itch / To be free...." Think
of that wordplay as a coded celebration of gay sexual culture in Greenwich
Village, and be startled and delighted, as I was, at the date of its
origin: 1925.
"The great enemy of clear language," wrote Orwell, "is
insincerity." Even the brilliant phrase must die if the
writer doesn't mean it.
In journalism where the heading or title of an article...
