Sunday, January 20, 2013

Weasel Words of the Day: “stronger”; “about”.



weasel word [fr. the weasel’s reputed habit of sucking the contents out of an egg  while leaving the shell superficially intact] (1900) :
a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position
-- Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

Certain terms are, in our society, inherently weasel-words:  pro-life; pro-choice.   Nobody in the debate opposes either “life” or “choice” simpliciter;  to find such factions, you would have to attend a meeting of Death-Eaters (anti-life) or neuroscientists (denying the existence of the faculty of choice -- Free Will).   The resort to these euphemisms  degrades the debate.

For other terms, it’s not so obvious.  Take the expression “Let me be perfectly clear.”   For many people, this phrase seems consumately weasely in itself;  but really, this is only because of its well-known characteristic use by Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who would typically follow up the phrase  with a lie or an obfuscation.  But such infractions do not inhere in the phrase.   Owing to our long memory of its Nixonian misuse, no-one can any longer say it with a straight face  (a snide version of the phrase, "Read My Lips", similarly fell out of favor owing to a spectacular mishap by Bush senior); but in principle, a straightforward and respectable use exists for it.   At the lower end, it would be just a kind of throat-clearing, giving the reporters time to get out their pencils and lend an ear.   (Note to the new generation: Back in Nixon’s day, reporters used these things called “pencils”.  They’re kind of hard to describe.)  At the highest end, the use of the phrase would follow the following pragmatic conditions.  (Note to the laity:  “Pragmatic” in the linguistic sense of pragmatics, the discourse-related partner of semantics,  rather than in the politician’s sense of “yes this is lame but let’s do it anyway  because anything else could hurt our poll numbers”.)

Conditions of legitimate use:

(1)  What I am about to say is no off-the-cuff throwaway line.  I have thought about what I am about to say, and you are free to quote me; I won’t complain, when the outcry arises, that the remark was “taken out of context” or that “that wasn’t what I meant”.

This licenses the expression’s use in a moral and alethic sense;  so used, it is admirable, statesmanlike.

Then further, at the next meta level up,  there is a pragmatic consideration that licenses the speaker even to use an expression (any expression that make such claims as in (1), not just this one) in the first place:

(2)  I am, by general acknowledgement, in a position of some authority;  I am a person whose words must be well-weighed, as they are likely to be acted upon.

~

We earlier analyzed (and excoriated) certain other weaselly expressions that lately have proliferated weed-like in the public square: as, “Well, again, …”    Here are two more -- neither of them obvious weasels, but which reveal their mustelid nature upon analysis.


(I)  “stronger”


This one looks innocent enough, and most uses of it indeed are.   The instance that caught my attention, on the news broadcast this morning on NPR, was not truly weaselly in the sense of wittingly devious, but it was at best intellectually lazy -- and thus, in the event, reprehensible, since the woman who used it is a prominent newscaster for National Public Radio, and should know better.   The subject was U.S. policy towards Syria, and the newswoman asked her interviewee whether, in his opinion, the U.S. reponse should be “stronger” -- point à la ligne;  no indication of what that might entail.
It is a subtle point, but that move already corrupted the terms of the discussion, by presupposing a linear dimension of assessment, running from weaker to stronger.  There are a very few cases in life where so simple an evaluatory topology may be in place:  say,  “This beam is stronger than that one”.  (Note:  I had to rack my brains to come up with a use that would be semantically impeccable; but even here, you would need to qualify:  Are you speaking of transverse bearing-strength; longitudinal bearing-strength;  resistence to sharp impact, from an impact angle ranging from 0 to 180; resistence to compression; resistance to elongation; resistence to torsion; or what.  You see, even the simplest things  are not so simple).    Such a state of affairs certainly does not obtain in the boiling Syrian cauldron:  not statics but chaos theory would be the relevant quantitative handmaid.
But it is worse than that.  The antonym of “strong” is “weak”, and weak is what no President ever, ever wants to be called -- not simply for political reasons, but for socio-psychoanalytical (the President as the symbolic Father of the Country; weak = impotent:  the worst possible thing for a would-be father to be).  Hence, the subtext or subspin offered by presenting the problem in terms of “stronger” or “weaker” politicies, is simply to provoke unconsidered military action -- “Don't just stand there -- bomb something!”   Such an attitude does indeed characterize the premature-ejaculatory public pronouncements (better some jism that falls to the ground, than not getting it up at all, one supposes) of some Republican Vulcan chickenhawks:  but they know not whereof they speak.

Try this experiment.   Ask one of the Congressional sword-rattlers whether the U.S. should ofter “stronger support to the Syrian Christian community than the Obama administration has been willing to offer”;   you are likely to get a forcefully bellowed “Yes!”  But the principle dividing-line at present, in that fractured and ever-shifting Syrian mosaic, runs between, on the one side, the Asad regime and its allies in the religious minorities, Alawite, Kurd, and … Christian;  and on the other, a hodge-podge of ill-coordinated Sunni Syrian rebels, plus an increasingly potent and more tightly organized and more violent al-Nusrah Front, which is run by al-Qaeda.  So, Senator, just what exactly did you have in mind?

There is nothing wrong with toughness per se;  it is simply a socio-rhetorical fact about America that, frequently, the call to “get tough” is made in blithe independence of the facts on the ground.    Thus, if you maintain that the Obama administration have been panty-waisted pussyfoots in dealing with Iran, you are free to do so;  but intellectually you are in arrears if you do this in ignorance of things like the Stuxnet attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet), or the affects of our increased sanctions against that steaming, simmering, and suffering land.  To take one item at random from the morning’s news:

In Iran, two muggers caught on video are hanged
The death sentences are seen as a get-tough message from Iranian authorities alarmed about escalating street thuggery amid a sanctions-driven economic downturn.

Students of history are familiar with the sometimes unfortunate effects of harsh sanctions, for instance against the Weimar republic, which paved the way for National Socialism.

(II) “about”

A new rhetorical formula has sprung up, now everywhere to be heard on broadcast political discussion (I say “broadcast” because the formula is more characteristic of speech than of writing):  “It’s not about X, it’s about Y.”
There exists, of course,  a perfectly valid use of this formula:  but it crucially depends on what the meaning of “it” is (to coin a phrase).   If, say, It here refers to A Tale of Two Cities, then the following are pragmatically impeccable statements (the first false, the second true):

(i)  It’s not about London and Paris, it’s about Minneapolis and St. Paul.
(ii) It’s not about the Franco-Prussian war, it’s about the French revolution.


Whereas, the characteristic of the new use which we wish here to put beneath the magnifying-glass (and upon the rack), is that now the word “it” … does not actually refer to anything;  it is more like the “expletive” it (again, I use the term expletive in the sense of grammarians, not in that of the Nixon tapes) in expressions like “It’s raining” or “It’s a shame the way things worked out””.    In the latter instance, the “it” is non-referring, but the copula still has some work to do, having the same value as it does in the non-cleft relative  “The way things worked out is a shame.”   Whereas in the new use -- “It’s not about profits, it’s about America” or “It’s not about moving forward, it’s about the environment”  and so forth -- the copula too is emptied of all significance, having (so to speak) nothing left to copulate with.   The resulting formulae mean almost nothing, and are virtually impossible to paraphrase.

The context of this morning’s use -- again from “Weekend Edition” -- was a discussion of the proposal to put armed guards in every school.   (My own alternative proposal, to put an etymologist in every school, did not come up for discussion.)  The person being interviewed said:

“It’s not about romance or drama,
 it’s about protecting our kids.”

Almost nothing else was offered by way of argument;   the above statement was allowed to ring over the airwaves unchallenged, as a genuine argument in the debate.
Now, take out your pencils (ask Gramps what that means) because this is a test:   Does that statement present an argument in favor of the proposal, or against it?  And, in the event that the statement is semantically vacuous, with no “cognitive content” at all,  was it intended, as a rhetorical move, to support or refute the proposal?

[The exciting answer will be revealed tomorrow.   Meanwhile, tell your friends.]


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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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Footnote:   There is an interesting -- and telling -- meta-pragmatic condition-of-use here, basically opposite to that in (2) above for “Let me be perfectly clear”.  The latter is a Winner’s phrase;  whereas “It’s not about X, it’s about Y” is used either by, or when addressing, subalterns.   The very vacuous semantics and collapse of syntax, dissected above, are badges it wears on its sleeve.   The warrant-for-use condition would go something like this:

(3)  Me’m jist folks here, as are y’all -- never did have much of a head for grammar, or argumentation, or cogency, or exposition -- but b’dang this here thing comes from m’heart!

The kinesic equivalent of the phrase would be a plaintive look from a puppy basset-hound.
[Note on the note:  Another linguistic technical expression.  Kinetic is already a twenty-dollar word, whereas kinesic will setcha back a fitty-bone.
For those fond of words costing upwards of a hundred dollars, click here:
Logophilia. ]

Historical bonus:


Over a century ago, the psychologist and philosopher William James  already adverts to the weaseliness of “about”:

All dumb psychic states have … been coolly suppressed; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that,  the stolid word about  engulphing all their delicate idiosyncracies in its monotonous sound.
-- William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (in Mind, 1884)



[Update, 24 January 2013]   This morning, NPR interviewed a woman who was trying to get gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered  covered under the Violence Against Women Act.  Her concluding statement:

"This is not about identity politics; this is about where the unmet needs remain."


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~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update later that evening]  You needn't listen long to NPR, before being exposed to yet more semantically vacuous tricks of syntax.  Just now, with reference to the Newtown shootings:

"It's the commission's job
to allow victims to be victims."

This echoes the brain-damaged slogan of the '80's, "Let Reagan be Reagan."   It's not a question of weasel words, since any word can be used in this structure, which we dub "Triumphalist Tautalogy".  It's weasel syntax.  Other examples:  "Business is business" (used by someone screwing you); "Boys will be boys" (excusing bad behavior), "War is war" (excusing even worse behavior).


[Meta-update]  I have pondered deeply a wealth of examples of such Sappy Syntax,  and extracted this pearl of wisdom from its oystershell grip:

~  The Meaning of Life  ~
~  is to live  ~
~  a life full of Meaning … ~

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