Americans don’t like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse.
“Facilitate” is typical of the case. A generation ago only sissies and bureaucrats would have said “facilitate” in public. Nowadays we are a nation of “facilitate” utterers.
“Facilitate” is nothing more than a gout-ridden, overstuffed “ease.” Why has “ease” fallen into disuse among us? It is a lovely little bright snake of a word which comes hissing quietly off the tongue and carries us on, without fuss and French horns, to the object which is being eased.
This is English at its very best. Easing is not one of the great events of life; it does not call for Beethoven; it is not an idea to get drunk on, to wallow in, to encase in multiple oleaginous syllabification until it becomes a pompous ass of a word like “facilitate.”
A radio announcer was interviewing a doctor the other day. The doctor worked in a hospital in which he apparently—one never really hears more than 3 percent of anything said on radio—controlled the destinies of many social misfits. The announcer asked the purpose of his work.
The doctor said it was “to facilitate the reentry into society as functioning members”—the mind’s Automatic Dither Cutoff went to work at this stage, and the rest of the doctor’s answer was lost, but it was too late. Seeds of gloom had been planted.
The doctor’s passion for fat English had told too much. One shuddered for the patients at his hospital—“institutional complex,” he probably called it—for it must be a dreadful thing to find oneself at the mercy of a man whose tongue drips the fatty greases of “facilitate.” He doubtless, almost surely, says “utilize” too, when he means “use,” and “implement” when he means “do.”
Getting his patients out of the hospital and back home has become for this doctor “the reentry into society,” a technological chore of the sort performed in outer space. Having facilitated their reentry into society, he will be able to greet them as “functioning members.”
How dreadful it must be, caged up and antisocial in a beautifully sterilized container for misfits, for a patient to find himself at the mercy of men whose English is fat, who see him as an exercise in engineering and who are determined to turn him into “a functioning member.”
Peace, doctors! Of course it is merely a manner of speaking, although the “merely” may not be quite so mere as it sounds.
We are what we think, and very often we think what we say rather than what we say we think.
Long words, fat talk—they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned? We associate plain talk with the age of national confidence. It is the stranger telling the black hat, “When you call me that, smile.” It is the campaign of 1948 when a President of the United States could open a speech by saying, “My name’s Truman, I’m President of the United States and I’m trying to keep my job.”
Since then campaign talk has become fatter and more pompous, as though we need sounds that seem weighty to conceal a thinness of the spirit from which they emanate. But politicians are not our corrupters here; we are all in love with the fat sound.
There is the radio disk jockey who cannot bring himself to say that the temperature at the studio is “now” forty-five degrees but must fatten it up, extend it, make more of it, score it for kettle drums, by declaring that the temperature at the studio is “currently” forty-five degrees, and often, carried into illiteracy in his passion for fat talk, “presently” forty-five degrees.
Newspapers seem to be the father and mother of fat. The bombing is never the stark, dramatic “intense,” but always the drawled, overweight “intensive.” Presidents are rarely allowed to “say” the weather is improving; the papers have them “declare” it, “state” it, “issue a challenge for the Weather Bureau to deny” it.
Why do we like our words so fat but our women so skinny?
One of the CIA’s few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world’s most fully headlined secret agency. —Our Uncle Is Now Dorian Sam
Inability to get results back at the plant doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Nowadays, to get results you go to Washington.
Can’t-do guys do all right in Washington, perhaps because lobbying is one thing the can’t-do guys almost always can do, and magnificently. Detroit may not be able to dispose of exhaust very neatly, but it can build a beautiful lobbying machine for selling Government the story of its own inadequacy.
What is it in the Washington air that restores the energies of these once dynamic American manufacturers? Something there is that brings out all the old latent half-forgotten ingenuity that seems to have abandoned them back in the home plant.
—The Can’t-Do Guys
The decent thing for an inanimate object in America to do is wear out. Most inanimate objects understand and do their duty. Light bulbs are particularly good about it.
—Wearing
Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated “the lesson of history.”
—All Right, Jerry, Drop the Cookbook
The truest Pentagon stories are never believed until it is too late. Remember the C-5A? Remember TFX? Remember the electronic wall around Vietnam? Remember Vietnam?
—The Honker at the Pentagon