IN THE PAST, WE DIDN’T ALWAYS say what we meant, or mean what we said.
Being able to blur the boundaries, fudge the edges, and employ the odd white lie, fib or obfuscation helped us through many a hairy moment. Certainly, without such pragmatic space, politics as we knew it, and as we continue to know it, would have ceased to exist and martial law would have been invoked to keep the peace.
Fortunately, language obliged us by providing resources that were as subtle and complex as our needs required. We could say and mean when and how we wished, with relative impunity most of the time. ‘As camp as a row of tents’ allowed a speaker to speak their mind without exactly doing so.
Things are different now. Young people today dispense with convoluted comparative constructions or ironic reversals. They prefer the absolute and eschew the relative. If something’s good, then it’s the best. If it’s bad, it’s the worst. It reminds me somewhat of the extremes of adolescence, but I’m trying hard to be open-minded. It would seem that minimal is in, and in a big way, if that’s not a contradiction in itself. Comparisons are clunky and cumbersome. Superlatives slip in comfortably. The relaxed style makes exaggeration acceptable, renders precision uncomfortable. The net effect may be monochrome, but no one seems to mind.
Language choices in the past seem to have had greater texture. They allowed for more than a simple gap between intention and utterance. Sometimes we would fall back on an expression and use it rather as we do the pragmatic cliché—a set piece that helps us say what we say without fully engaging or committing the self.
Set phrases and clichés, after all, are what they are because they’re owned by everyone. No one who uses one claims originality. And maybe that’s part of the point. We don’t have the time or energy to commit to individuality all the time. I do find very tiresome the schoolteacher’s unilateral condemnation of the cliché. There’s an irony in the perennial put-down (‘hackneyed’)—I wish I’d had the courage at school to write next to the teacher’s neat inked ‘hackneyed’ my own scrawly ‘cliché!’ But I didn’t.
Language affords us some very convoluted ways of not saying what we mean, probably because the words are too stark or volatile. Yet, as the words unfold, we end up with something so graphic it’s probably more shocking than it would have been had we said it simply and directly. The fact that many such utterances have hardened through use into conventionalised, even formulaic phrases, testifies to their one-time utility.
Take, for instance, the phrase ‘about as useful as tits on a bull.’ The image projected is so graphic that the irony of speaking of ‘usefulness’ is immediately apparent. It’s the co-positioning of two unlikely elements that makes the concept absurd. So we have ‘as useful as an arse on an elbow’, ‘as a bucket under a bull’, ‘as an ashtray on a motorbike’. They’re all totally and undeniably useless, and rarely if ever used any more. Probably a good thing, too.
In these constructions, the comparison focuses on a practical tool, aid or implement that in any regular circumstance would be quite handy. However, at least one crucial component in the mix is changed, and it is this fact that reverses the putative utility value from high to zero. Consider ‘as useful as a road map in the desert’, ‘as scooping water with a fishnet’, ‘as a chocolate teapot’, ‘as a screen door in a submarine’, ‘as a suede umbrella’. Again, all totally and undeniably useless—in fact, as useless as tits on a bull.
Oddly, one-leggedness seems to come in as the favourite for that single unsuitable ingredient. For example, ‘as useful as a one-armed juggler’, ‘as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest’, or ‘a one-legged cat trying to bury a turd in a frozen lake’. Like the earlier examples, the graphic element is often heightened by an injection of taboo terms. Unsurprisingly, body parts associated with sexual and elimination processes are a favourite.
Part of the convoluted processing contained in these comparative statements hails from the fact that, prima facie, the comparison does seem to be a genuine comparison, at least when it starts off. Even the fact that it’s constructed affirmatively—‘as useful as’, rather than negatively ‘as useless as’ —contributes to the initial innocuousness which is about to be overturned. That said, most if not all of the ‘as useful as’ phrases have been replaced with the more explicit ‘as useless as’—for example, ‘as useless as a dry thunderstorm’.
Whether it’s a useful-as or useless-as construction, such language has slid out of popular use. Occasionally you’ll meet an individual who has held onto a favourite one, making it part of their idiolect, with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In general, however, the colour and shared cultural knowledge that go into phrases like ‘as friendly as a black snake’ are absent.
Such phrases, while condemnatory in a convoluted kind of way, nonetheless maintained a quality of the affectionate, the good natured and the forgiving. The exact meaning depended, of course, on the context and the way the words were uttered. So, the tone counted. It allowed you to say in a jocular way what you may not have said more seriously. And where there was humour, its cut-and-dried nature granted its own kind of licence. Linguists who analyse workplace humour, especially that which characterises social banter with the boss, have shown that jocularity can sometimes allow you to get across messages that would otherwise be impossible to convey.
All told, the new style of communication is closer to what-you-see-is-what-you-get. The pragmatic space between thought/intention and expression has lessened. Inference is less convoluted, more straightforward. Less energy is required for the interpretation of meaning. ‘Poor as a church mouse’ is now ‘poor as’. And perhaps with church attendance down and improved pest management, who can say anything has been lost?