<\/p>\n
The World of “Absolutely” – and Other Clich\u00e9s<\/strong><\/p>\n In the surprisingly hermetic world of Anglophone communication, original language is as rare as a horned toad in the Antarctic. Ralph Nader once observed that clich\u00e9s stop people from thinking. Not only that, the cessation of original argument is reinforced by \u201cpre-owned\u201d expressions, either a single word such as \u201cabsolutely\u201d or a string of easily summoned constructions such as \u201cat the end of the day\u201d or \u201cgive me a break\u201d or \u201cday one.\u201d For example, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria \u2013 a Harvard-trained social commentator \u2013 uttered \u201cat the end of the day\u201d eight times in less than an hour, indicating that an Ivy League degree does not always protect against hackneyed phraseology. During her 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s arsenal of clich\u00e9s included \u201cday one\u201d repeatedly. When her campaign began to implode, this and other banalities became much more frequent, her tone of voice exponentially strident. Since then, Barack Obama has used \u201cfolks\u201d ceaselessly in an effort at bonhomie <\/em>egalitarianism when he wants higher approval ratings for both his programs and his re-election odds. He has been demonstrably successful.<\/p>\n Others in the public eye have been just as careless. PBS Newshour\u2019s Jim Lehrer utilized his own program to be interviewed about his moderating of presidential debates in past cycles. Lehrer, who has written several well-received and quite readable novels, detailed his experiences in a new memoir. Talking with Jeffrey Brown, Lehrer responded more than once with \u201cAbsolutely!\u201d after being tossed softball questions designed to elicit self-affirmative encomiums. \u201cAbsolutely\u201d permits only the briefest relief from needed reflection before speaking, but it neither ennobles the answer nor edifies the listener. Then there is a gadfly modifier, \u201cnuanced:\u201d \u2013 sounds very \u201cwith it,\u201d but it is more of an adjective based on its noun origin and adds little to nothing in a sentence. An otherwise sophisticated public servant such as Gary Hart in writing a brief biography of President James Monroe employed \u201cnuance\u201d and \u201cnuanced\u201d too often for this indulgence not to be noticed. Conversely, in his short biography of Abraham Lincoln, the late George McGovern refrained from any slipshod language and produced a superb book in the same series. The sixteenth president had only a year and a half of formal education. Mr. Lincoln acquired his eloquence by steady and varied reading, and having seen cajolery with irony in his life constantly since his birth in rural Kentucky.<\/p>\n Avoiding clich\u00e9s and triteness in casual conversation is up to the speaker, obviously, but if one doesn\u2019t respect the language, why should what you write get published \u2013 or, one might venture, into broadcast media? In the latter, of course, it happens every day. With the Internet diffusing language as a massive, unstoppable flood, the quality is naturally very uneven. Recently, other buzz words, clich\u00e9s if you like, have crept into common usage without much complaint: \u201ctransparent\u201d and \u201ctransparency\u201d; \u201cgoing\/moving forward\u201d; \u201criff\u201d; and \u201cfun\u201d as an adjective not to be outdone by \u201creference\u201d as a verb \u2013 these have become ubiquitous in the last fifteen years or so, just as \u201csurvivor\u201d delineated a wide span of conditions during the 1970s and since then. More voguish words \u2013 \u201cnarrative\u201d as one example \u2013 have been part of this avalanche lately.<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely\u201d is a convenient word, emphasizing the affirmative, despite the lack of anything being \u201cabsolute\u201d in human experience except treachery, abandonment, and death. \u201cAbsolutely\u201d is now pervasive in broadcast media by the well educated who should know better but are careless, even indifferent, to fresh expression, much less correct syntax. A simple \u201cyes\u201d would be sufficient. Another clich\u00e9 or common-word construction such as \u201cat the end of the day\u201d is just as obnoxious. Zakaria is not alone in his verbal profligacy.<\/p>\n Take the adjectival concoction I mentioned earlier: \u201cpre-owned.\u201d It sounds less tawdry than \u201cused\u201d but means the same thing. One glib commentator on the air recently described a divorced person looking for a new relationship as \u201cpre-married,\u201d as if to mitigate the implication of a failed marriage. Then, of course, consider \u201cpass\u201d or its grammatical variants \u201cpassed\u201d and \u201cpassing\u201d \u2013 meaning the act of dying. As one who is skeptical but respectful of religious beliefs, when I think of death, the phrases \u201cit\u2019s over\u201d and \u201cend of life\u201d come to mind. \u201cPassing\u201d or \u201cpassing away\u201d suggests going to another existence, not finality as we know it. As a Woody Allen character once put it unsentimentally, \u201cWhen I\u2019m dead, I\u2019m dead!\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t use \u201cpass\u201d or its variants as euphemisms for the act of dying, or \u201cimpact\u201d as a verb, or \u201cabsolutely\u201d or \u201cat the end of the day\u201d or \u201chaving said that\u201d or \u201criff,\u201d or indeed \u201cfun\u201d as a modifier or \u201creference\u201d as a verb. I cannot do so because my parents never did \u2013 and I sense viscerally that they are aware of everything I do and say. I do not want to disappoint them any more than I already have.<\/p>\n Language, as Eric Arthur Blair once said, is a tool but it is also an art form and can be so used \u2013 or misused. In a \u201cfree society,\u201d the debasement, thus misuse, of language is an active danger.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n James Naiden\u2019s<\/strong> third novel, The Chafings of Mortals, <\/em>was published in 2011. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a regular reviewer for IS&T.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The World of “Absolutely” – and Other Clich\u00e9s In the surprisingly hermetic world of Anglophone communication, original language is as rare as a horned toad in the Antarctic. Ralph Nader once observed that clich\u00e9s stop people from thinking. Not only that, the cessation of original argument is reinforced by \u201cpre-owned\u201d expressions, either a single […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3863,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861\/revisions\/3863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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