"Mistakes Were Made" (by Whom?)

"Aha! I know who made the mistakes!"


In the wake of the financial crisis, in which so many are at fault, once again, we are hearing the old political phrase, "mistakes were made.". Sound familiar? Why is this phrase so popular among political figures and their spokespersons when they screw up?

At the risk of writing a pinhead essay on this topic, I would like to throw in a linguistic perspective of this all too useful phrase.

English, like many languages has two alternate sentence structures. We call them active voice and passive voice.

Active voice involves the traditional subject-verb-object word order. Thus:

John wrote a book.

Passive voice uses the object noun as the subject of the sentence, incorporates the appropriate form of the verb "to be" with the past participle of the main verb, and generally includes a "by phrase" to state who or what performed the action. Thus:

A book was written by John.

This choice of sentence structure is useful for several reasons. The use of passive voice, which is more common in writing than speaking, can give variety to one's writing style and make his/her writing more readable. The writer can also use the passive if the focus is on the object noun more than who or what performed the action. For example, it might make more sense to say, "The Mona Lisa was painted by Al Gore", if your focus is on the painting more than the painter.

If you Cleveland Browns fans are having trouble keeping up with this, I'll take a pause to let you catch up.

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OK, let's resume. On occasion, we are forced to use passive voice when it would be awkward to use active voice. For example:

"Rice is grown in Thailand."

True, one could say, "People grow rice in Thailand", but that is obvious. The only exception would be if you were pointing out an unusual fact like, "American male tourists grow rice in Thailand (when they are not in the massage parlors").

Similarly:

My house was built in 1980."

Do we care who built my house? Not really-unless George Bush built my house-then I could use active voice.

In both of the above examples, we would normally omit the "by phrase" because it is not important who or what performed the action-or it is obvious. ("Spanish is taught in that school.") By whom? By teachers, of course.

In addition, there are occasions when we cannot use passive voice. This happens when the main verb is intransitive (which means it cannot be followed by an object).

Example, "An accident happened yesterday."
"Harry died last night."

Therefore, since there is no object in the sentence to be transformed into the subject of a passive sentence, the statement must be made in active voice.

So, with all that pinhead stuff out of the way, why do you think this phrase is so popular in Washington? Because it eliminates the necessity to state who made the mistake. (For example, "fill in the blank made mistakes.")

So my suggestion to all those Washington journalists who listen to this language everyday from various spokesholes, why not ask this,

"Excuse me, Mr. Spokeshole, could you put that in active voice, please?"