In Support of Snobbery

“The work of totalitarianism takes a lot of muscle, but most of it is done by just one: the wooden tongue.”

As Armenia and Azerbaijan exchanged mortars last September, we were made to read the following officious drivel: “We strongly condemn the use of force and regret the senseless loss of life, including civilians.” This was offered by the spokesmen of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). One hopes the group would have regretted its wording, too, but it had committed the same crime against grammar in 2016 and in 2010. Yes, it is a miscarriage of syntax, but the mediators since 1994 should have also known that there is rarely anything “senseless” about war. Azeris consider the disputed land historically and legally theirs and are prepared to die for it. Their enemies are, sensibly, glad to help them with that project. Last week, the United States recommended settling things “urgently and peacefully.” It is a little late for that. And the Minsk Group was probably not trying to be funny with “the Co-Chairs stand ready to assist…” All italics and regrets are mine.

Cliché offers the illusion that mentioning a problem amounts to grasping and even doing something about it. This is clearest in cases of “raising awareness,” a platitude that conveys ardor and activity (redolent of raising children or raising an army) while that which it usually describes is terrifically banal. It is the dialect of the lazy and sloppy and boring, but the noisy and pushy and boorish, too, are fluent in it. Cliché deepens soundlessly like dental decay, and irreversibly. Once a word or phrase is spoiled, it should feel painful to use and nag us to treasure those we have left. This is an open call for linguistic snobbishness, snootiness, smuggery, and snot.

Authority is naturally attracted to cliché: It is a signal that the speaker is inoffensive, impressionable, docile, or unlikely to protest uniformity.

The hollowness of Newspeak rings louder as one gets closer to the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but every reader by that point understands, as does Orwell, that the lexicon must have preceded Big Brother. The work of totalitarianism takes a lot of muscle, but most of it is done by just one: the wooden tongue. (The French term, langue de bois, was transplanted from a Polish trade union that in the 1980s bore the most formidable anti-communist standard in Europe.) Winston Smith is fully subdued when he finds his feet writhing under the table at the Chestnut Tree Café, responding mechanically to the stimulus glaring from the telescreen. He had previously winced at catchphrases like “war is peace”; now, as he sips Victory gin and watches the news, piffle like “bring[ing] the war within measurable distance of its end victory” is to him perfectly intelligible. Language is not only a medium: It reflects and informs the characters of the interlocutors.