Column One

Clean up your language

It seems so long ago now that Kingsley Amis said, "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is." How many dispiriting pairings of words have come along since Workshop? Now, instead of artists and makers, we have creative types. As if any 3-year-old weren't naturally creative. Once, we believed we had souls at the core of our being; now we are offered sexual identity. Once, we sought to conserve natural resources and curb pollution; now we ponder schemes to arrest climate change. And in place of good international relations, we seek world peace.

It's all part of a package deal, and if you ask what do all these fuzzy verbal abortions have in common, the answer is simple enough: They shift individual responsibility for actually doing anything to change things to some amorphous blob beyond our power to affect. Because if everyone is responsible for the condition of our world, neighborhood or just the next block, then no one is. You might as well try nailing Jell-O to your kitchen wall.

Goodbye, individual responsibility. Hello, feelings of impotence. Why try to change things when we can just mill around infinitely examining things? This prolonged paralysis can go on forever, and already feels as if it had been going on endlessly. And there's nothing to be done about it. Let's just get out the sackcloth and ashes and pour the whole sour mash all over ourselves.

If language matters, and it does, then our non-language matters even more. If nobody can be gypped any more, does that mean nobody can be jewed down, either? And how come nobody is ever accused of jewing prices up? Which scarcely seems fair. Name your favorite misusage of the language and insert it here.

The terrible truth about stereotypes is they may be based on real human experience over the ages. Is all that folk wisdom, that mother wit, to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness? For the language police are ever on the prowl, alert to any change in usage that might provide a target for their hyped-up reactions. And like the police force in any totalitarian society, its rules are purely arbitrary, subject to immediate change without notice. Like a loan from Wells Fargo or a tag on your electric meter saying your power has been shut off.

All of which reveals a vacuum not just at the core of our language but of our thought, our very being, which becomes a negotiable commodity. For that matter, the whole idea of our very being seems to have been replaced by what, exactly? Answer: nothing exact. Just as the old hierarchy of Platonic values faded away in the face of some nebulous nothing as the High Middle Ages gave way to modernity.

It is this basic evasion of moral responsibility that marks today's ever-shifting groupthink. To dare to be great or even to be small, to risk showing out, to be right or wrong or neither, to change one's mind, offer an apology, and start all over again . . . . All those decent possibilities are foreclosed once we shrink back from individual responsibility for our words, thoughts and deeds, if any. Our language becomes a recipe for moral paralysis, and we find ourselves trapped within it.

Instead, how much easier it is to all hold hands and jump into the same abyss of meaninglessness. How apologize for anything in particular if we take collective responsibility for nothing in general? And if the group is now all, who if anyone leads this charge of rampaging behemoths?

Once upon a time, the world seemed a noisy place, full of jostling for position and clashing hooves. We faced off, pawed the ground, prepared to lock horns in noisy combat, but today? It's as if a cone of silence had descended on all our struggles.

All those nice pictures of smiling young people in high-school yearbooks preparing to embrace their bright futures. What do their bright visages amount to if they all fundamentally agree that nothing fundamental matters? If only they would permit themselves an occasional grimace, an honest snarl, to escape from those ever-pursed lips! Instead they all seem as nice and uniform in their appearance as they do in their patterns of non-thought. Even their poor attempts to simulate being non-conformists conforms to some tinplate pattern they all seem to share. Their tattoos, ear and nose rings all seem sadly the same.

Far better to all look alike and think differently, as in the cool 1950s. It's enough to make some of us old-timers want to shout: "Wake up! Stop being so all-fired alike in your sad attempt to appear different from one another. Better to appear sullen and slouchy in mind than to be so in reality. Why all try to imitate rebels without a cause when there's no cause to be fought for or against? And what exactly would that cause be? And can any members of this coming generation articulate it in any way besides the usual mumbles?"

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but smiley faces plastered everywhere, and bumper stickers and apps galore on our own little computers. And there is nothing that affords real traction, and a real grip on life.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 10/23/2016

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