I know I am not alone in my loathing for the misuse of the English language. I also know that, in large part, it is the language’s volatility and susceptibility to aberration that makes it rich and useful. The rules can be bent, but never beyond recognition.
I am not sure, but I believe that no other language rivals English in its tolerance for linguistic vandalism. Some lexicographers might argue that the sprawling, malleable nature of our language demands that we must sometimes take a descriptive view of its usage. This view holds that no one person’s idea of what makes for a good sentence is any better or more correct than anyone else’s. Therefore, I should let the whole matter drop and find something else to complain about. And I’m sure that I have my own quirks (such as beginning a sentence with a conjunction) that others may deem to be offensive.
But no. I wish to address more serious matters here - namely, the vapid approach to English that we all sometimes adapt so mindlessly in common social situations, and secondly, the English we are subjected to by those whose motives are political in essence.
I can barely abide certain phrases I hear in everyday conversations. I wonder whether anyone else is so appalled by the remark It is what it is. Dear God, the insightfulness, the veracity of that. I know what it is supposed to mean, all right - that some events and situations are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about them… but can’t we do better than that?
Equally egregious to me is this penetrating parting admonition: Have a nice rest of your day! Stunning. That is so grammatically and syntactically awkward that it makes me nauseous whenever I hear it. It leaves me with existential questions: When does the rest of the day end and the misery of evening begin? And what about tomorrow? Have you no concern for the next few years of my life, and the joys, sorrows, the storms and sunny days yet to be? Am I utterly on my own once the night comes a-falling? If not, then wouldn’t a simple Enjoy! do just as well?
Then we have the brilliant query What’s up? This is only distantly akin to its vernacular cousin Wassup, which has a different spirit altogether. So what is up, exactly?
Full disclosure: I have too often used it myself as a conversation starter. Wags and “cards,” back in the day, had answers for the what’s up greeting, such as the price of tea in China or the cost of beans in Chile. Unfortunately, those responses have mostly dried up, though good old what’s up remains. Thus the typical mundane response: Not much. Not much is up? I doubt that.
Perhaps in modern America, the mavens of English feared that those quaint old comebacks would offend our Chinese and Chilean friends. It is good to be sensitive to those potentialities, but pointless over-sensitivity can lead to the slow death of a language. We must not take the lifeblood out of our words and phrases. This has happened in the realm of government and politics in America and Britain, especially, in various ways over time. I recently re-read George Orwell’s masterful essay “Politics and the English Language,” which is as applicable today as when it first appeared in print in 1946. Many of the examples Orwell provides (from various supposedly respectable publications of the period) would be hilarious were they not so discouraging. In the “dying metaphors” category, he says, are the overused phrases such as ride roughshod over, play into the hands of, and swan song, all of which became trite and lifeless long ago, for the simplest of reasons: we are too lazy to invent new ways of saying things. The same is true for those expressions Orwell calls “verbal false limbs,” despicable euphemistic attempts at making ideas that are simple and clear far more difficult to understand: render inoperative, militate against, and exhibit a tendency to, for instance.
As Orwell illustrates, the most tragic examples of political euphemisms pertain to military operations and domestic unrest. The displacement of a group of people - villagers who have been robbed of their farms, say - might be called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. And within a society, the imprisonment (without trial) and the deportation of individuals or groups has been called elimination of unreliable elements.
In more recent times, the theologian and philosopher Joseph Milne has pointed out that over the past few decades, objective language, or what we had always considered the language of science, has now somehow gained footing in nearly all other areas as well. I can say through experience that this is certainly true in the field of education. The problem is that objectification creates a kind of psychic distance between the reality of something, the actual experience of, let’s say, a walk in a forest, and the words we might choose to describe the walk to someone else. Objective language seems to be inadequate to the occasion, and we feel disengaged from the real meaning and power of words.
Oddly, I think that political language today - that is to say, the language I hear in political oratory and in listening to politicians as they offer up their beliefs and intentions, and also in political discourse among constituents and pundits - is moving (I hesitate to say “evolving”) in ways completely different from those Orwell and Milne describe. Political language today has become quite aggressive, in many instances, and even unnecessarily violent. More discomfiting, though, is the likelihood that over time we have become so accustomed to such language that we are generally unfazed by it. When Donald Trump said in 2024 that he believed U.S. Representative Liz Cheney should have guns trained on her, no one seemed particularly surprised. We had already been treated to eight years of none-too-subtle directives such as “knock the crap out of them” and “fight like hell” and “we’re going to shove it up their ass, okay?” I will add that the opposing party has engaged in its share of threatening rhetoric, too: in 2018, Joe Biden did declare, after all, that he wanted to “beat the hell out of” Trump. And the two attempts on the President’s life and the assassination of Charlie Kirk did not happen spontaneously; violent rhetoric undoubtedly set the stage.
This environment has been created by a number of circumstances: the perception that campaigning now takes precedence over actual governing makes for more vicious exchanges between candidates; also, they no doubt draw some followers who frequent questionable “news” sources and are hungry to have their preconceptions fed; finally, the divisions are made deeper by the contenders themselves with their seedy references to one another, as when “radical leftists” and “right-wing nut jobs” are used as blanket characterizations of all party members. I am reasonably sure that most voters remain somewhere in the moderate range.
But if violent language can lead to real violence, if hearing threatening words can lead to harmful actions, if words are still just that powerful, then there is something else to be learned here - or re-learned, I suppose. It must also be true that kind words can elicit kindness. Good words, if you will - words of praise deserved, of encouragement when needed, of support when the hard times arrive… might bring good things. English lends itself to such; some of our oldest and most useful everyday terms derive from Anglo-Saxon, the original English tongue: brother, sister, welcome, soul…
Too maudlin? Too wildly ideological?
Oh, well. They’re just words.
