Shorthand

It’s everywhere you look. The handy labelling of anything you like as anything you want it to sound like. Tips are now reframed, gloriously, as ‘life hacks’, imbuing them with a vitality they rarely deserve; all those click-bait pages telling you how you can’t live without them. Since the word ‘essential’ was attached to entirely unnecessary things back in the 80s, ancient artisan lore has been repackaged as if it were newly discovered intelligence from a distant galaxy.

The knowledge that was once handed down in the family now appears as revealed texts from the lost books of ancient cultures, otherwise known as the Internet; the place where everybody goes to slap each other on the back, form cult-like echo chambers and invent ever more ridiculous shorthand for perfectly normal things. Stick an ‘i’ or an ‘e’ in front of a perfectly ordinary doohickie and watch it become an overnight sensation of new-age awesomeness.

Likewise, in social discourse, there has always been an inter-generational disconnect, the young necessarily wanting to confound and conceal from their elders the exciting [perfectly normal] things they are getting up to. The invention of new words, or the recycling of very old ones is nothing new. And thus ‘chillin’ makes idleness sound productive, just as some have convinced themselves that ‘social media influencer’ is a worthwhile way of avoiding a real job.

Words are also used as weapons and an annoying interlocutor can be dismissed as a racist, a fascist, or even go for the jugular with a 'literally Hitler'. One of the interesting ways in which the demented left is currently tackling their cognitive dissonance over the embracing of islam – an ideology entirely at odds with everything they think they believe in – is to pretend that the biggest threat to society right now is far right extremism.

They label everything they can’t comprehend as ‘far right’ without the slightest consideration of what they believe the far right to be. (If you examine the ‘far right’ you’ll find it is, essentially, communism with more tattoos.) This would be absolutely fine, if everybody possessed the intellect to rise above it and see it for the hollow and insubstantial branding it really is. We all do it, by the way, left and right, old and young alike.

Governments do it too, and then it gets problematic. In an effort to communicate with the hoi polloi, government spokesmen and women alter their speech patterns and use words in ways that perfectly illustrate how unfamiliar they are with them. Politicians never look less in control of their brief than when they try to adopt the accents and idiom of ‘the youth’ with whom they are trying to connect. When Tony Blair took off his tie, it was meant to signal ‘look at me; I’m just like you!’, but when he compounded this with his adoption of the glottal stop he just came over as yet another plank trying to con the masses.

And of course we’re doing it all over again with the pandemic. Already today I have seen doctors trying to persuade people to have the vaccination being described as Nazis. Terms like ‘clotshot’ and ‘killer vaccine’ only serve to over-simplify everything while revealing your credentials to all who read. On the other side, it transpires, shorthand such as 'anti-vaxxer' and 'rabid conspiracy theorist' enrages many who may have perfectly legitimate grounds for their caution.

Mind your language!

The truth doesn’t seem to matter in any of this, and the adoption of the right collection of phrases identifies you as being on one side or the other just as readily as does a badge or a placard. It seems to be a default setting for Human Mk 1, to coin a phrase, but I’m not convinced it is all that helpful. I’m even suspicious that some people take up a side based on which has the cooler language, the slicker patois, rather than what that side actually stands for. There’s nowt so queer as folk.

A Little Less Conversation

In the sermon on the mount, according to Matthew 5:5, Jebus H. Christ is supposed to have declared that the meek will inherit the earth. Why go and give those losers ideas? And now look what’s happened; everywhere you go the meek are flexing their muscles and demanding their pound of ground. And what are the bold doing? Cowering before the toothless onslaught, it seems.

Dunno ‘bout you, but I’m getting a bit tired of feeling I have to work out how to address somebody for fear they may take offence. I’ve long thought the lazy salutation ‘all right, mate?’ was crude and assumptive, but now there is a high degree of probability that such a hail-fellow-well-met would be countered by “Did you just assume my gender?”

We’ve all been there; minding our own business and along comes yet another opportunity to demonstrate that we are unthinking dinosaurs, all to ready to wield words as weapons to dismantle the self-esteem of the fragile-at-heart. Actually the phrase ‘self esteem’ has much to do with it, if you think about it. Once, such a fellow – and there I go again with the gender insensitivity – would be a popinjay, a self-regarding, pompous arse. But now it has been decided (by the meek, no doubt) that we should all value ourselves way above our worth.

So, what are we worth? Once we were valued by what we produced, what we did to make things better and how we lived out lives. Nowadays it seems it is the War of the Words as people are most highly remunerated not by economic productivity, which can be directly measured and compared, but by rhetoric, whose true worth is often literally immeasurable.

So many people now appear to make a living from spouting whatever pops into their vacuous little heads. From Ash Sarkar’s ludicrous ‘luxury communism’ to Femi Arseholuwole’s daily invented grievances. The truth, it seems has little value, people preferring to believe comforting lies, or rousing Owen Jones’ style, class-warrior tub-thumping. If only there was a bug going round, a common cold, to lay low these alien interlopers.

I had these thoughts while listening to the podcast version of the superb Moral Maze on the daily commute this morning. But as worthy and considered as are the arguments put forth, they consist entirely of words; words voiced without the problem or responsibility of putting them into action. It’s quite a lucrative business, I imagine, putting the world to rights, one enormous grant cheque at a time.

One of the ‘witnesses’ was David Miliband, the thwarted former Labour Foreign Secretary now making a fortune by anybody’s standards as a mouthpiece for International Rescue. Charity used to be a calling, a vocation; now it is quite the little earner. But for all his grandstanding, all his berating of the nasty capitalists for not doing ‘enough’, it was still all just words.

Don’t get me wrong, a stirring speech, a rousing injunction to go over the top one last time, a call to arms, a rallying cry… these, used judiciously and delivered from the heart, can often spur men to valour. But when you end up in a world where it is all jaw-jaw and not enough war-war; where the battles are fought entirely away from the action, where the men in the field lie listless awaiting leadership which never comes, nothing ever gets done.

This isn't working, is it?

In the words of the Immortal Bard: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger…” Or, as Elvis put it, somewhat more succinctly, “A little less conversation, a little more action, please. All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me.” Common Sense has left the building.