Gypsy Scholar: Linguist to Diplomats!

Rama and Lakshmana Receive Envoys
Page from a Dispersed Ramayana Series
Between 1630 and 1638
17.5 × 15.9 cm (6.9 × 6.3 in)
Brooklyn Museum
Wikipedia

This morning, I received a somewhat humorously worded distress call from a friend in the world of international diplomacy concerning how to decipher the language of an important email from a VIP in the international organization that she works for:

As a person with a really good grasp of the English language, [you can perhaps] . . . help with this. I am having trouble understanding diplo-talk. Can you please tell me what the statement

While remaining true to our professional and ethical standards, we hope to avoid the encumbrance of idiomatic conformity in order to inform more widely and to elicit greater recognition for the importance of the . . . [international agreement]; and appreciation for the work of [our organization].

means in this e-mail? Particularly the part about "encumbrance of idiomatic conformity".

I tried google.translate, but that failed. You are my only hope.

The email sent to my friend offers some context, namely, an intention to revive the organization's magazine:

You are familiar with both the reasons and the objectives for restoring the periodical. It is a vehicle to show case our work; to bring out its essence; to make it more accessible. It affords an opportunity to provide depth to our outreach efforts. While remaining true to our professional and ethical standards, we hope to avoid the encumbrance of idiomatic conformity in order to inform more widely and to elicit greater recognition for the importance of the . . . [international agreement]; and appreciation for the work of [our organization].

As a noble knight of the linguistic realm, I could not but heed the call of a lady in distress, so I immediately replied:

Good to hear from you and even to have a chance to be of help! Like you, I understand every word, but I'm going to have to guess a bit as to the meaning. Let's look:

While remaining true to our professional and ethical standards, we hope to avoid the encumbrance of idiomatic conformity in order to inform more widely and to elicit greater recognition for the importance of the . . . [international agreement]; and appreciation for the work of [our organization].

The key term here would appear to be "idiomatic." We both know what idiom means -- a standard expression whose meaning is not reducible to its semantic elements, e.g., "to make a stab at," which means "to guess somewhat blindly." (I'm not consulting a dictionary, so my remarks are a bit rough.) But what does "idiomatic" mean in the email you've inquired about?

Assuming that the term is what the speaker actually meant to say, I'd suggest that he wants the magazine to use fresh language and thinking and avoid falling back onto fixed expressions that might imply conformity to fixed thinking, as an overuse of idioms might do. He might therefore be making a similar point as George Orwell in his essay on "Politics and the English Language," which can be found here . . . . One of Orwell's points is that the reliance on overused expressions, e.g., dead metaphors, kills original thought.

There's also the possibility (and I am checking the dictionary now) that another definition is intended, i.e., the definition found here:

4. a. A specialized vocabulary used by a group of people; jargon: legal idiom.

If so, the author of the email means for those submitting articles to the journal to avoid jargon, which would fit with the aim stated, i.e., "to inform more widely."

However, I wonder if the author actually meant not "idiomatic," but "ideological." If so, he might have meant that . . . [your organization] needs to avoid being perceived as the branch of some Western government or as an instrument of Western interests generally. If this is his meaning, then he might have chosen the word "idiomatic" over "ideological" in order to be 'diplomatic.' Or he may simply have confused the two terms.

Perhaps my musings on this conundrum will inspire some insight of your own that clarifies what the writer meant since you know the issues better than I do.

Those were my thoughts, but perhaps readers might have other suggestions . . .