I don’t think organisations in Malta understand quite what the use of slapdash English says about them. It says that they are not perfectionists, that they are prepared to settle for low standards, and that getting it right doesn’t matter to them. People then extrapolate from this to the rest of their business. If this is the organisation’s attitude towards the use of language, they think, then it might well be the organisation’s attitude throughout.
But of course, this presupposes that the person exposed to an organisation’s careless use of grammar, syntax and vocabulary is in any way better at all of that. Organisations get away with it because lots of people know even less. What counts, though, are the people who do know better; they are put off, and they make a difference.
This is the first thing I think of when I read the Labour Party’s English-language news site, maltastar.com. I can’t get past the abysmal writing, which obscures everything else. You would have thought that if the Labour Party was going to bother spending all that time and money communicating in English with God-knows-who, it would spend a little more and find people who actually speak and write correct, idiomatic English. I don’t think the Labour Party – or any other organisation in Malta, for that matter – would ever dream of communicating in atrocious Maltese. Yet it is considered acceptable to communicate in atrocious English. Lower standards are thought to be quite all right because, after all, English is not our language so abundant errors can be overlooked or forgiven.
This may be the case with the spoken language. When speaking, we don’t have time to think, to check the correct grammar or vocabulary, or to work out how best to say what we want to say. At least, that is the case when we are not perfectly fluent. The written word is another matter altogether. When you’re writing something, you have time to check it and you should check it. There are dictionaries. There are people who know, people you can call. But best of all, there are people who know how to write the language, so they should be the ones doing the writing, and not somebody who speaks pidgin or who thinks in Maltese and then translates semi-literally into English.
It is not just offensive when the official communications of a political party are in truly terrible English. It is unwise. It tells us not only that the political party is teeming with people to whom English is really a foreign language, but also that in the view of this political party, mistakes are not important. Attention to detail is not important. A polished approach is not important. Getting it right is not important. And slapdash amateurism is fine.
The thing about maltastar.com is that it communicates rather more effectively than the Labour Party understands, and it communicates the wrong sort of things – a kind of ongoing ‘my computer malfunctioned’. The revamp of the site was months in coming, yet when it was done it turned out to be antiquated, badly designed and cumbersome. There is a something seriously amateurish about it, as though it is run by a group of poorly educated people in their 20s who are trying to talk to others like them, using a language that is foreign to both.
But worst of all is the language itself. This is the official news portal of one of Malta’s major political parties, the Opposition party, and yet it reads like a third-form essay written by somebody from a Maltese-only household in a state school where English is never spoken. It is pitiable, and what is more pitiable still is that it just about sums up the Labour Party’s standards and attitude towards politics and governance in general: “U ejja, mhux xorta. L-aqwa li naslu.”
Two nights ago the site ran a story with the headline ‘Malta pays 5% VAT on children vaccines.’ I remarked on my blog that the Labour Party knows something the rest of us don’t: that you can vaccinate yourself against a bad case of the children (a new form of contraception, perhaps?). So the next morning, they corrected it: to “childrens’ vaccines”. Presumably, the correction was made by somebody who thinks, as many people do, that the plural of child is ‘childrens’.
The interesting thing is that even though the system underscores spelling mistakes in red and grammatical errors in green (at least, mine does – online as well as off), they still don’t bother to check what’s wrong. They probably think that the green and red lines are just pretty decorations, or that the system is being unnecessarily pedantic and full of what a certain type of person likes to think of as ‘sinifiteti’. The same story gave us more: “Dr Gonzi continued to deny the existence of this report uptill the moment” and “the Implementation of a patient registration system” – the invention of words and the turning of others into proper nouns.
Then there was the headline “Dutch government against a mandatory burden sharing”. Yes – I wanted to ask – a mandatory burden sharing what? The answer was in the first line of the story: “The Dutch government ‘does not believe in a mandatory burden sharing agreement’ and is not planning to take any immigrants from Malta.” Nobody has explained to the writer that ‘mandatory burden sharing’ – and the last two should be hyphenated – are adjectives, that the noun is ‘agreement’, and that adjectives cannot be used in isolation but require a noun, especially when there is an ‘a’ hanging about. So according to Labour’s maltastar.com: “A mandatory burden sharing was passed in the European Parliament” – just like a bowel movement, then – “however, is yet to go through the Council of Europe.”
I find these things painful, and they detract from the credibility of what is being said. If the Labour Party thinks it is a good idea to communicate in English – and it is, so well done on that score – then it should make sure that it’s done properly.
Free health for all
The saddest thing about the partisan bickering over free health care for all is that it means no serious discussion will be possible. Commonsense tells us that the present system is unsustainable. It also tells us that a person who can afford to have a surgical procedure carried out privately should not take the place of somebody who can’t. But then there are ethical quandaries and moral dilemmas. How do you means-test somebody who doesn’t earn very much on paper but who still somehow manages to take holidays and buy cars? Do you demand that he gets his priorities straight and uses his holiday money to pay for surgery? I can see how well that one will play.
Try as I might, I just can’t get comfortable with the idea that there is a group of people who should be denied access to free health care. They are the ones whose maximum national insurance contributions and taxes fund the state health care system in the first place. It seems a little too – well, socialist, if you like – to demand that when they use the services they are bankrolling, they should pay to use them while everyone else gets the same service for free.
What’s being suggested in some quarters is that the same group of people be made to pay twice over while another group of people pays nothing at all, or next to nothing.
Those who really can afford to pay do so in any case. Put off by hospital waiting lists and blessed with private medical insurance, they have their problems seen to by private clinics and private hospitals. It is only when they really can’t avoid it that they go to the state hospital, and in that case, I don’t think they should be asked to pay.
It’s a difficult one. But the behaviour of Joseph Muscat and now, Edward Scicluna, really is not helping. Professor Scicluna went on record a year ago as saying that completely free health care for all is unsustainable. Now that he is a candidate for the Labour Party, and Joseph Muscat is fighting this election as though it is a general election, claiming that the government plans to introduce payment for health care, he has changed his tune.
Completely free health care for absolutely everyone, Edward Scicluna said a few days ago, is unsustainable only because the government doesn’t know how to do it. The Labour Party, he implied, will be able to wave a magic wand and work it all out. Sadly, his foray into politics has undermined the credibility he had as an economist.
Free health care for all is, like divorce, something that should never be turned into a partisan stick with which to beat the other. Like divorce, it is a bullet that one or other of the parties is going to have to bite sooner or later when in government. A more mature approach by Joseph Muscat will only serve to make his life easier once he is prime minister and having to contend with the vast problems of free health care himself. But so far, he has only the short term in mind, and in the short term, the objective is to make sure he becomes prime minister. Then he’ll see. History, unfortunately, repeats itself.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog
is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com