DENGL 32 BEWARE TRASHICACY

Trashicacy Ahoy!

I have come across the exquisite pleonasm ‘competency’; I can’t say where, I can’t say when, I hadn’t the presence of mind to note it down. It joins pomposities such as ‘residency’ (something that geniuses take up) and ‘presidency’ (something from which incompetents are torn down). Such are the verbal treasures we are enjoined to tolerate, even enjoy, by those who celebrate the evolution of language along with the erosion of quality in the accessible English educational system. Luckily, we are told (and see, those of us who live in North West London

http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7027768/england-their-england.thtml) that rich Russians are riding to the rescue, buying into the model of Wodehousian culture which will need but a small cadre of professionals to sustain. Thus far (I presume) the preparatory school teachers who still know their whos from their whoms, remain mostly English; one can imagine the day, though, when they will no longer be available but have to be replaced by experts trained in elite Chinese colleges. This picture of (upper) middle class England maintained as a theme park has been drawn by the author Julian Barnes (England,England).

Not only are Russians (and other oil drenched Midases) drawn to enjoy the island they see as safe, and intriguingly quixotic, but in one tiny instance Americans come to experience “study abroad” in a context that is historically distinguished, sufficiently different from what they know (?) at home, without being too threatening, and possibly worth storing on the mantelshelf of memory. One such course is “Media in UK” during which some effort is made to disentangle what may be meant by various deployments of the word “media” – which proves to be an extraordinarily plastic term. This course has been told that the European Union (or experts who serve it, who have survived numerous planning meetings in agreeable locations – carbonoxious plane flights, lavish dinners after the deadly business sessions – I know, I used to attend such things) has decided that all member nations should deliver, by December 2011, an audit of the degree in their country of something they call “media literacy”. This has been labelled in various ways,

( the most widely adopted definition of media literacy is “… the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms (Livingstone, 2004, p.5).
Already in 1992 US media educators and activists established a definition for the media literate person as one who should be able to access, analyze, evaluate and produce print and electronic media ( Kubey, 2005) and the UK’s OFCOM uses the same definition )

though it may be challenged that the term “media” has not itself been defined, and ‘literacy’ has been deployed in way that can be called metaphorically illiterate. All this might be discounted as a mere piece of academic entertainment – except that the jamboree is to be paid for by “EU funds” (that is, taxes drawn from those EU countries who can afford them).
Moreover, the audit is to be repeated in 2014 and every three years thereafter.

I have offered suggestions on sensible ways in which to deploy the terms media and literacy);

(I confess I can not see how to insert a link to my paper which is available from me on request - mallory.wober@gmail.com)

but here I alert my friends to a danger I can foresee – which is that a new category of “competency” will presently be devised which may be called “trashicacy”. I realised this last night as I strove to put the remains of a large cardboard box into an outdoor container intended to accommodate paper and card, only to find there plastic bags full of plastic bottles and drinks cans. In the borough where I live this is not (yet) a punishable offence – but one reads that elsewhere it is, so the sanctions may soon ‘come home’. The competent citizen will in future have to analyse and dispose of rubbish of a variety of forms, in prescribed ways. Rubbish is too English a word to live as a metaphor in a bureologism, so trash will have to do the job. The -acy ending is parallel in a thoughtless kind of way with its appearance in (media liter)acy and I have proposed an intermediate –ic- not because it scans better, but for the overtones of tragedy it introduces.

So – I give to the world, a new word – and to the Eurocrats, a new ticket to conferential holidays justified under the banner of promoting the environment and better citizenship in a glorious future – trashicacy. You have been warned.