For God's Sake, Stop Talking Like That!
The author enters the verbal and literary space and reflects on the use of sub-optimal and procedurally unnecessary information distribution vectors and mechanisms within and outwith his community.
There is something deeply annoying about the way people speak at the moment.
Before I end up in The Guardian, I don’t mean slang or colloquialisms. This is not a rant about those darn kids and how they wear their words too low.
I’m fine with people admiring others’ “rizz” when they’re attractive, declaring truth with a pithy “no cap”, or doing whatever is needed to “secure the bag.” All’s fair in slang and war.
(Yes, I did have to look those up! I’m a 36-year-old working in politics and the media, how cool did you expect me to be?)
My gripe is not with Gen Z or any other generation for their linguistic peculiarities and signifiers.
They are charming, clever, and useful.
After all, as a Millennial, I’ve done my fair share of “high key” criticising of “basic” behaviour while “throwing shade” and being “salty” about it.
It’s all very “lit” and so on. “Fire, giving, mother” etc.
I’d be a hypocrite to have a go at that kind of thing and so I’ll stick up for all the “skibidi”, “stan”, and “sheesh” users.
Go forth and confuse and confound your elders, I say!
Language evolves, develops, and changes through use and is often a way for minority groups, particularly sexual and racial minorities, to influence and to carve out and maintain an identity.
The bottom-up, free-market world of slang and dialect is beautiful.
Consistently, without design or planning, society agrees, one person at a time, on what certain words, phrases, or noises mean and how they are used.
Then, once they are finished, they are disposed of as a new generation comes through with its version.
It’s the perfect capitalism for words and is as stunningly, brutally elegant as that suggests.
It also gets more fun the further back you go.
A quick trip to the bookcase for a copy of any of P.G. Wodehouse’s essential and wonderful Jeeves and Wooster stories, without which one cannot truly be literate, will reveal a pirate’s bounty of amazing slang curios.
Bertie Wooster will regularly sit down to a plate of “eggs and b.” of a morning, glug down a few “b- and s-” before dinner, and he greets everyone and everything in life with a cheery “what ho!” or an “I say!”
He’s even been known to show his frustration with a fruity “dash it!” on occasion.
What I’m saying is that I believe usage rightly holds the whip hand when it comes to language, but only when it acquires it through this unplanned, organic, and bottom-up process.
Let me illustrate what I mean with a few examples.
Have you noticed, for instance, that everything is now a “space?”
Bars, clubs, cafes, book groups and other events and venues that are for and by gay people are no longer those things, but are, instead, all part of a franchise called “LGBTQ+ spaces”.
Supportive and welcoming environments are “safe spaces,” with the implication that all other spaces are dangerous rather than mundane, which would be more accurate.
Even if one is in the business of inventing some clever new doohickey or gizmo, one finds oneself in the “tech space,” whether one wishes to be or not.
It has gotten to the point at which the word “space” really should speak to its shop steward about improper working conditions… or “enter the workplace grievance space” as it would presumably, and horrifically, be put.
Numerous other offences and blights abound.
For instance, whenever some corporate monstrosity, hideous quango, or dreary government department wants to tell you about its plan, it never uses the word “plan.”
A quick Google will vomit up no end of “strategic frameworks”, “developmental toolkits,” “roadmaps,” “templates,” “guidance,” and other such documents that look, smell, and function largely like a plan but god forbid one uses that simple, elegant, four-letter word when this obnoxious HR speak is freely, and compulsorily, available.
HR or “human resources” is not only the origin of a lot of this rot but is also a victim of it too.
The job of working on behalf of management while pretending to be on the side of the employee (the true nature of HR) used to have a lovely little name.
It was called “personnel.”
That was, of course, before employees were changed from being “persons” into mere “resources.”
Examples of this, what I have come to call the political correctness of language, are all over the place.
There are no job losses, only “corporate restructurings.”
Talking” and “debates have been replaced with “dialogues” and “discourses.”
Struggle is now “liberation.”
We are “made redundant” or are “party to a termination agreement,” rather than being sacked or fired.
Fat people are “in plus-sized bodies.”
We are cajoled to “reflect” rather than think and are ordered to engage in something called “centring” which to my naïve ears sounds a lot like talking about something.
If you think you have a relationship with someone or are in an organisation, please reconsider.
What you now have or are in is a “partnership.”
So sayeth the new language police.
It is only a matter of time before words become “linguistic information delivery options.” Orwell and Hemmingway, if either man was still alive, would be wondering what the point of publishing their rules on good writing was.
Neither of the great men needed a reason to drink, but they would have one regardless.
What’s the difference between this corporate euphemism and the slang that I slobbered all over previously?
Surely, they are the same in that they represent the evolution of language as it is used in day-to-day life?
Aren’t the “space” and “community” enjoyers of today the same as Bertie Wooster and his love of “tinkerty tonk” in place of goodbye?
No, they are not!
The difference is a matter of enforcement.
With slang, it’s not imposed. It can be policed but it’s not dictated by authority.
Words fall into and out of favour with the passing of the seasons and the common, unspoken agreement of common use.
This corporate jargon is backed by people in authority, from the CEO of a multinational and his “restructuring” to the spotty student union president and their “inclusion spaces.”
It is about power; slang comes from among us all and survives based on popularity, usefulness, and memetic appeal while the political correctness of language comes from on high and is, therefore, intrinsically worth resisting.
The whole sorry abuse is made worse by the constant pretence that the sanitising of language that is the goal of this strain of political correctness is done to protect marginalised groups and out of some benighted aspiration towards egalitarianism.
It is not.
It’s about control and anyone who tells you otherwise probably draws their stipend from some HR department or has reason to control how you and others speak.
Eye them suspiciously and keep tabs on them.
I mentioned resistance above. I wish to return to it in closing.
It is understandable, but never ok, if, for the sake of career or education, one plays along with this mindless piffle designed to cover up for the fact that many in influential positions have all the linguistic grace, creativity, and ability of a glace of water with a toenail floating in it. Survival is as surviving must be.
But please, in your heads, hearts and, most importantly, in your casual language life, in the pub or café or at home, spurn this rot with all you have while you can.
Your living room is not a “relaxation and entertainment space”, the pub is not a “networking and alcoholic beverage conveyance mechanism,” and date night with your spouse must never be a “strategic pre-intercourse interpersonal development opportunity.” If this idiocy must be in the workplace, it must be kept there and, like the Communism from which the term “political correctness” originates, “contained.”
Our language is the most important in the world and is our strongest link to the past and future.
In it, most of humanity’s great works of literature, theatre, and poetry have been penned. From King Lear to the “I have a dream” speech, English has been the vessel for beauty, truth, power, and elegance throughout our history.
The very least we owe it is to protect it from becoming a mere tool of human bloody resources!