IF SIDNEY BAKER IS RIGHT that all languages are amply supplied with ways of referring to the good and the bad in life, then he’s also right that the stupid are not left far behind.
Making reference to people or behaviour that is perceived as stupid brings us very firmly into the terrain of euphemism, which allows us to talk, usually indirectly, about what we’re no longer comfortable talking about directly.
Every generation seems to develop its own lexicon for managing talk about stigmatised or taboo topics. These get recycled or replaced every so often because, sooner or later, and increasingly sooner, the stigma catches up to the euphemism and makes a new and fresh word necessary. It’s hard to believe now that ‘senile’, like ‘geriatric’, was once a euphemism for ‘old’, introduced because ‘old’ was considered too blunt and in-your-face. Well, eventually the stigma caught up and re-infected both ‘senile’ and ‘geriatric’, and it may take a few more generations before they can be recycled successfully. Meanwhile we’ll have to manage with ‘aged’, as in aged care (not aged beef), and ‘senior’ as in senior citizen, the latter having been first used in 1938.
The cluster of euphemisms that develops around a concept provides ample linguistic evidence of uneasiness. Consider our dis-ease with the concept of old age: we have ‘retirement village’, ‘advancing years’, ‘the golden years’, ‘the grey vote’, ‘the twilight years’, ‘dependent living’. And we have plenty of jokes of the Paul Newperson character—such as the name-changing by the non-ageist press of Hemingway’s classic to The Senior Citizen and the Sea, and Coleridge’s famous poem to The Rhyme of the Chronologically Gifted Mariner.
What euphemisms do is allow a compromise between the needs of expression and politeness. Very handy, in other words. Linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, for instance, devoted an entire book to the staying power of taboo topics that require a constant generation of new euphemisms to outstrip the pace of stigma.
It’s not surprising to find, then, that words that were used in the past for any area that falls within cooee of a stigma would be likely to have changed somewhat over the years. For a while back there, ‘a late bloomer’ was someone who didn’t keep up, who would, one hoped, be able to flower later, at their own pace. Today we might say ‘developmentally delayed’ for someone whose mental level is below that of their age-peers; or you can avoid the topic even further by mentioning that the person goes/went to a ‘special school’, or has ‘special needs’. That ubiquitous ‘special’ says it without saying it.
Stepping around difficult topics is nothing short of an art form. Consider the expression ‘not the sharpest tool in the shed’. This is a beautiful example of a phrase having evolved to allow a speaker to say something perceived to be unpalatable while in the very same moment demonstrating the required tact. Even though the remark is generally third person—said about someone rather than to the person being described—it still displays evidence of a perceived need to step around the topic rather than go at it head on. Ultimately, it’s evidence that we live in a social world and that we need to be on our guard about how our choice of language might impact on others around us.
In fact ‘not the sharpest tool in the shed’ achieves its attenuating quality in three ways. First, through the convoluted negative. Instead of a possible ‘the bluntest tool in the shed’, it’s inverted to become ‘not the sharpest’. The negative has a distancing function, moving the proposition from here under our noses to over there, in the shed. Anywhere but not here. It also allows the speaker to avoid the word ‘blunt’ which is too direct and uncompromising. Further, it facilitates an indisputable quality of imprecision—‘the bluntest’ is definite and precise, being right at the bottom of the hierarchy, while ‘not the sharpest’ is anywhere on the hierarchy except right at the top.
Second, the very use of a metaphor (sharp tools in a tool shed) removes the issue (mental acuity) from the centre stage of attention. It enhances the distancing function of the negative by locating the issue elsewhere (Where? In the tool shed of course!). The metaphor, at least momentarily, risks being obfuscatory, because it is literally false (a human being is not a tool) and, as a result, its central proposition is potentially up for grabs. All this befuddlement helps in the attenuating process. The unclearer you are, the less likely you will be to cause offence. In fact, verbal dithering is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of those whose job or life requires copious, if unpredictable, amounts of deniability.
Third, ‘not the sharpest tool in the tool shed’ is attentuating because, even while being disparaging in its implied meaning, the ‘tools in the shed’ concept suggests warm-and-fuzzy notions, like collaboration and team work. There’s the added nostalgia for a time when every house had a shed and real men retreated there to fix a range of items, and not just mechanical. That was before men’s groups or Jungian therapy. An additional layer of inference is a world view that offers a place for everyone. People are different, not worse (not every tool needs to be sharp). Diversity, equality, fraternity, humanity. Definitely warm and fuzzy, even, in the right context, bordering on endearing.
Of course, metaphorically speaking, varying degrees of sharpness of shed tools is one of many such expressions. Like our less-than-optimally-sharp tool, these now-fading expressions allow one to point indirectly in the direction of a deficit. Consider ‘a bob short of a pound’, ‘not the full quid’, ‘one snag short of a barbie’, ‘a sausage short of a picnic’, ‘a shingle short of a roof ’, ‘a joker short of a deck’ and ‘a couple of lamingtons short of a CWA [Country Womens’ Association] lunch’. In fact, when you survey these expressions, the impression is that hardly an aspect of life is excluded in these elaborate ways of highlighting deficit. It goes on and on: ‘a few ants short of a picnic’; ‘one rose short of a bouquet’; ‘a few stubbies short of a sixpack’; ‘a fortune cookie short of a Chinese dinner’; ‘a pane short of a window’; ‘a clock that’s missing some numbers’; ‘a few trees short of a forest’; ‘a couple of eggs shy of a dozen’; ‘not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree’ (or ‘the brightest light in the harbour’); ‘not the sharpest pencil in the box’; ‘some bacon short of a BLT [bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich]’; ‘a golf bag without a full set of irons’; ‘a few bricks short of a wall’; ‘a few pages short of a book’. Or ‘not having all one’s dots on one’s dice’. Or ‘all wax with no wick’. Sometimes deficit is more like absence: ‘If you stand close enough, you can hear the ocean’; or ‘If he had another brain, it’d be lonely’; and ‘If brains were taxed, he’d be getting a rebate.’
At times, the deficit is alluded to by implying some kind of malfunctioning. We have expressions like ‘the cheese has slipped off the cracker’; ‘the mouth’s in gear, but the brain’s in neutral’; ‘doesn’t have both oars in the water’ or ‘both oars in the water, but on the same side of the boat’; ‘the elevator is stuck between floors’; ‘needs a few screws tightened’; ‘the lights are flashing and the gate is down, but the train isn’t coming’; ‘the belt doesn’t go through all the loops.’
Other times, the expressions make implicit reference to the head as the source of the problem, like saying someone is ‘not all there in the top paddock’ or that they have ‘a leak in their think tank’. Or perhaps their train is ‘missing an engineer’; ‘the porch light isn’t on’; they ‘have two brains— one’s lost and the other is out looking for it’; or they ‘forgot to pay their brain bill’.
Then there are the times when the hint is that the problem is congenital. Such as describing someone as ‘swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool’; having ‘too much chlorine in their gene pool’; having ‘got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t looking’; or as being ‘the result of years of careful inbreeding’. And if not a birth defect, then a childhood misadventure—such as ‘played too much without a helmet’; was ‘not quite strapped in during lunch’; or ‘fell out of the family tree’.
These phrases are vividly inventive, sometimes graphic and colourful, with varying degrees of obliqueness built into the mix. Some are blindingly unambiguous ways of referring to matters of reduced mental acuity. For instance, there’s not much that’s attenuated about ‘thick as a brick’, which stands as contrasting evidence of how cleverly contrived some of the euphemisms are. Of course, much depends on whether you’re saying the expression to the person or about them, behind their back. Used directly, that is, hurled at the face of the person being abused, they constitute verbal assault. On such occasions, the very indirectness would be salt in the wound.
Whether they’re employed euphemistically or dysphemistically, they’re fading. My impression is that we’re hearing less and less of this kind of colourful language. It’s rather as if the expressions have all got run over by the PC train. If so, it’s an irony because so-called political correctness was intended, as we have seen, to bring caution into the language about ways of expressing oneself that are potentially hurtful to others. The indirectness and circumlocution of the colourful expressions were intended to do precisely that—to say ‘stupid’ without saying ‘stupid’. These days they seem all to have been swept under the ‘special’ carpet. The last time I can remember anyone using the gene-pool metaphor, for instance, was by way of explanation following a particularly loopy anti-science remark made by Prince Charles.