Edwardian English is alive and well in the memos Hong Kong civil servants draft
- Hong Kong administrators are taught English usage so arcane one might think it a parody. It’s bad enough on paper; when speaking they sound constipated
- In earlier times people didn’t expect much from their appointed ‘representatives’ and so the latter’s pompous civic sentiments rarely left them disappointed
As George Orwell memorably wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”; this shrewd observation remains as starkly true in contemporary Hong Kong as in post-war Britain.
As dummies across Hong Kong’s political and administrative spectrum scramble to master their new ventriloquist’s language, squirm-making linguistic contortions are hilariously evident – or at least, they remain entertaining to those able to see the gallows humour that underpins various chilling present-day political realities.
But how did this ventriloquism appear in the past, when the actual language deployed by an earlier generation of ciphers in Hong Kong’s public life – English – was not merely unfamiliar, but foreign as well? Like everything else, from clothing and pastimes to patterns of thought, forms of language used were directly borrowed – or else carefully mimicked – from those in power.
Legislative Council Hansard reports, and other records of public speeches from a century ago, invariably reveal aldermanic turns of phrase and pompous civic sentiments that would not have been out of place in Leeds or Liverpool. In an earlier Hong Kong, most people didn’t expect much from their appointed “representatives”; when a low bar for expectations is firmly set from the outset, and then given no realistic cause for revision over time, the verbal antics of others rarely disappoint.
Other emotions come into play – disgust, dismay, resignation, despair – but not disappointment, which seldom arises when little is expected to begin with.
Arcane usages from earlier times tenaciously remain in other areas of Hong Kong life. Astonishing though it may seem, local civil servants still attend English-language memo-drafting courses in which writing style and general usages remain firmly anchored several decades before the 1997 handover.
In this other universe, carefully crafted missives are directed to the attention “of your good self” – to cite merely one example of verbal flummery. Dear reader, I am not making this stuff up – like so much else in Hong Kong life, these apparent parodies simply couldn’t be invented.
And how do I know for sure? Because friends at various ranks in the civil service have, from time to time, sent me example drafts to check for curly grammar, obscure or contentious vocabulary, and other grade-reducing infelicities.
When it is pointed out that certain usages – like the above mentioned – would not have been out of place during the reign of the present British Queen’s grandfather, they invariably lament that this is just how things are in Hong Kong, and anyway, without writing like that, they don’t pass the course.
Then there are the spoken anachronisms – this particularly applies to certain senior officials when using English; unable to completely jettison local forms of received pronunciation painstakingly caned into them by the nuns at their long-ago convent school, the resultant strained tone and grimace merely makes them sound, and look, like they are having a hard time of it on the loo, rather than addressing the public, via the press, on some matter of pressing civic or constitutional concern.
Orotund vocabulary and convoluted turns of phrase sound impressive until parsed; it then becomes obvious that Hong Kong’s florid speechmakers have nothing much to say, and say it as regularly as possible.
Contemporary usages differ little; recent catchphrases leave observers in no doubt of where certain turns of phrase originated, and whom they are deployed to please. As in the past, modern political correctness insists upon loyalty gestures; in their latter-day form, scare-quotes swiftly collar any term considered questionable, “so-called” dubiously labels the seemingly legitimate, and “in accordance with the law” immediately contradicts any vagrant suspicion that some course of action might not now align with what the same words were generally understood to mean, only a short time ago.
