The grandmother test

From our Really Late Book Review series.

When debates are in danger of becoming overheated, or when minutiae and distractions creep up, a friend of the K-Landnews likes to do the "grandmother test".

Scientists call this a thought experiment, we normal folks call a "what if" scenario. The grandmother test consists of asking the question "how much of this would my grandmother understand", or "how would this look from granny's point of view".

It is meant to bring some serenity and focus to highly emotional discourse, and, surprisingly, we have seen it work.

We were reminded of the grandmother test as we continued rummaging through our unexpected library and came across the book " Fair of speech", edited by D.J. Enright, published by Oxford University Press in 1985. Subtitled with "Euphemisms, Sex, Death, politics, the media, the law, medicine, and many others", it looked intriguing.

Very soon, the patterns on the paper were transmitted by photons bouncing off of the page, picked up by dual biological sensors, transformed into electric impulses, filtered, and passed on to a neural processing unit for analysis.

Grandma would be been puzzled by this sentence, and she would have asked politely for clarification.

What, specifically, triggered the reference to the grandmother test?

The "Politics" section of the book, with its enumeration of diplomatic phrases as seen and heard in the media and the translation of their meaning into everyday understanding.

We'll quote a few before we talk about the grandma implications.

'Cordial talks' are not positively acrimonious, 'wide ranging talks' cover several topics, of which many are irrelevant to the problems in hand. 'Full and frank discussion' or a 'full and frank exchange of views' imply some degree of ill-feeling. 'Both positions were stated clearly' means there was no agreement; 'some progress towards agreement' means that miniscule concessions were made on either side.

Incidentally, this paragraph is all you ever need in order to correctly understand diplomatic negotiations.

Now, the author, Simon Hoggart, says that professionals (diplomats, politicians, journalists) are not fooled by the cited 'expressions in single quotes'.

But grandmother likely would be as perplexed as the naive blogster.

It may be several centuries too late to ask newspapers to add a short translation for ordinary people but what about TV, can we get them to do more explaining? Grandmother did not have a TV, but in a few decades you may be that grandmother or grandfather, so, think about it.

Where would grandma go for an explanation? In Europe, neither British nor German public television are much help. It may not be very important to grandma to understand international diplomacy speak, but the same language use abounds in domestic politics and affects grandma's meager social security benefits as well as all other areas of her life.

You did notice how we slipped in the emotional qualifier "meager", right? Just to make a point.

We will probably spend much of the rest of Sunday trying to figure out if and how we could steer grandma to one of the two remaining useful news shows we know of, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

The moral and ethical implications of steering grandma to become an unwitting test subject do pose some concern to us, so we will start gently by having cordial talks with granny.

[Update 7/29/15] The Colbert Report is no longer, sadly.