Suddenly we’re surrounded by ‘narratives’, all endowed with equal status. Here’s a good example of its baneful penetration into the language, in a Reuters news story: “[Senator] Rubio initially cast himself as the US-born son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. That narrative ran aground when records surfaced showing that his parents actually had left Cuba years earlier.” Rubio is caught telling a big lie, and it gets demurely tricked out as a “narrative”. Into the tumbrils with it.
Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse pointed out in one of his books that the Pentagon had given up on verbs. The dialect known as Pentagonese consisted of clotted groups of nouns, marching along in groups of three or four. Verbs, which connected nouns in purposive thrust, were regarded as unreliable and probably subversive. They talked too much, gave too much away. Despite the Pentagon’s best efforts, linguistically the Sixties were a noisy and exhilarating era. The Seventies gave us the argots of feminism and queerdom and then suddenly we were in the wastelands of Political Correctness, where non-white people were described as being “of colour”, cripples became “less-abled” and sexual preference (non-heterosexual) became LGBTQ, though another capital letter may have been added while my back was turned. Where are we now? Irritating words and terms spread across the internet like plague through a European town in 1348. There’s something very passive about the overall language and a look through one’s daily inbox is like walking along a beach piled with decayed words and terms. There’s much more ill-written prose than there was 30 years ago. Here’s my check list of degraded words and terms that should be loaded into the tumbrils and carted off to the guillotine. First up: sustainable. It’s been at least a decade since this earnest word was drained of all energy, having become the prime unit of exchange in the argot of purposeful uplift. As the final indication of its degraded status, I found it in President Obama’s “signing statement” which accompanied the whisper of his pen when on New Year’s Eve – a very quiet day when news editors were all asleep – he signed into law the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for 2012 which handed $662bn to the Pentagon and for good measure ratified by legal statute the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die, abolishing habeas corpus. As he set his name to this repugnant legislation, the president issued a “signing statement” in which I came upon the following passage: “Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustainable framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists…” So much for sustainable. Into the tumbrils with it. Next up: iconic. I trip over this golly-gee epithet 30 times a day. No warrant for its arrest is necessary, nor benefit of counsel or trial. Off to the tumbrils, arm in arm with narrative.
These days everyone has a narrative, an earnest word originally recruited, I believe, by anthropologists. So we read “according to the Pentagon’s narrative…” Why not use some more energetic formulation, like, “According to the patent nonsense minted by the Pentagon’s press office…” ?
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