A Call to Arms, or Whatever
Where Words are Concerned, No Effort is a Waste
In these hectic days, the Prudes are opting to recycle some older scribblings. This impassioned rallying cry by Charlotte Collins (slightly edited) was first published by the boys of The Broken Binnacle.
My first year in art school, I became acquainted with a fellow student named Hunter (known as “The Super Hipster,” among the members of Drawing I). Hunter’s wardrobe consisted solely of autumn-hued flannels and shredded skinny jeans, and as the more personable of the two males in our class, he was usually surrounded by a bevy of admirers.
In conversation, Hunter could be counted on to do two things. He prefaced every anecdote (and he had many) with an extended,“sooooo…”
“Sooooo I bought my friend Katie a vinyl for Valentine's Day; they last way longer than flowers, am I right?”
“Sooooo I was taxidermying a ferret last week?…”
“Sooooo I’m reading this book about eastern spirituality?”
Secondly, he tacked, without fail, one of three phrases onto any noun: “And whatnot,” “and such,” and “or whatever.” It did not matter whether the noun in question was furniture (“they make chairs and whatnot”); principles (“it’s all about morality or whatever”); or mass murder (“genocide and such”); Hunter could be depended upon to render indecisive even the most rock-solid fact. Genocide doesn’t sound so bad when it’s genocide and such—just another one of those pesky war crimes!
Many years later, the sudden rise in usage of perhaps the most appalling phrase ever uttered aloud brought thoughts of Hunter galloping to the forepart of my mind. Your ears, no doubt—unless favored to a high degree by Heaven—have bourn the wounds of this phrase’s assault. Maybe you were in a local coffee shop or quirky boutique. Maybe you consulted a food blog for an eggless muffin recipe. Or maybe you’ve locked the memory of the hellhole where you encountered this scrap of insipidity deep in the darkest recesses of your subconscious, for which I would not blame you.
The phrase I refer to is, of course, “all the things.”
If you are one of the fortunate few who have not been aurally abused, allow me to give an example of its usage:
Scene, a coffee shop. Enter a couple in their mid-twenties.
Barista: Welcome in, what can I get for you today?
Woman: What’s in the Very Berry Smoothie?
Barista, with a cackle: Ohmygosh All The Things!
What is it about “all the things,” that is so deeply offensive? I have pondered long and hard on the question, for it seems that the answer is felt more easily than it is named. After all, it is a simple, innocuous little phrase, it might even be described as “fun.” Yet there is a potent menace lurking beneath the words, and at last, while perusing William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s Elements of Style in a fit of self-improvement, I hit upon a clue.
Strunk’s ninth reminder about style is “Do not affect a breezy manner.” He goes on to lambaste the “hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.” While he refers specifically to writers, one wonders what he would make of the breezy style applied to conversation. His analysis of its cause is blistering and brilliant. “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.”
It is a short jump from this “uninhibited prose” to pure laziness of language, as we see with “all the things” and its foul cousins “it’s whatever” and “because—insert noun” (e.g., “I got a Hershey bar, because—chocolate”). All these phrases carry with them a fluffy, indefinite suggestion that the speaker is quirky, fetching, endearingly unconcerned with such trivialities as grammar.
But this casual dismissal of the rules is not as harmless as one might think. George Orwell, in his essay Politics and the English Language, says, “It [language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
If it is true that sloppiness of language leads to foolish thoughts, what abysmal mental processes can we expect from a population which unblinkingly allows a person to express their inability to contribute to the world by: Can’t adult today?
Orwell’s major complaint related to the prose of the time’s reliance on overblown, empty phrases, tired metaphors—too many words. And especially in the sphere of politics and school handbooks, that bloated spirit is alive and well. But in the colloquial world, the trend seems to be a neo-primitive one, a high-tech return to caveman conversation. However, whether the writer (or speaker) is barraging their audience with empty, indecisive words, or assassinating a critical verb, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness,” writes Orwell. Nothing is certain. Fact is obscured in a cyclone of linguistic debris, neutered of crucial syntax, or hobbled with a hesitant addendum.
Lest my readers think I am pontificating from a throne of rhetorical spotlessness, I will humbly admit that habitual indecision has invaded my own speech as well. I rarely offer an opinion without the feeble preamble, “I feel like,” or describe a dialogue without a healthy dusting of “she was like”’s. At times—after a particularly vapid stretch of conversations, or the completion of a beautiful literary work—I wonder if anarchy and a hail of brimstone is not the best solution to the problem; it is so daunting and far-reaching, and failures are guaranteed.
But Orwell offers hope:
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
His thought is almost primly expressed, hardly, at first glance, a rallying cry. But read it again. Read it out loud. If your tendency is towards the dramatic, by all means climb the nearest tower and shout it until you’re hoarse. In its elegant, truthful simplicity, it contains the ring of spears and the cries of warriors; the champions of language, and thus of the human race. Who would not discard “it’s whatever” in a heartbeat if societal renewal was the reward?
Well, what if it is? At any rate, it would be a fine place to begin. Where words are concerned, no effort is a waste, for, as Patricia MacLachlan says, “They’re all we’ve got.”
And that’s, like, literally so true.
—CC
😂😂😂 I LOVED this because… you know… WORDS.
Love this! Now do the new phrase my children have reported in use at work: “It’s giving…(insert adjective here).”