Dear People, Please Stop Saying....

Let's take time for grouchiness!

Dear Friends,

We are in times of world-historical significance, with the whole social fabric fraying and the body politic at real risk, but let’s not be too distracted from ordinary grievances, daily irritations, petty crotchetiness. Here are a few overdue gripes….

Please Stop:

• Saying ‘cringe/based’ — this is a bad one and I don’t know how the world came to be so pervasively divided up along this binary. My sense is that it’s parallel to the obsession in the 2000 with awkwardness and all its iterations — “awkward!”, “awks,” “awkies,” or “awwwkward!” with the consonants stretched out — or to the 2010s’ sudden focus on legitimacy (“that’s legit!”, “that’s so not legit!” — or “that’s sketchy”) like everybody had suddenly become some sort of art fraud inspector. The material culture understanding of this would be that these different gradients reflect technological shifts. ‘Awkwardness’ goes back to the before-times of old-fashioned status hierarchies and exclusions. ‘Legit’ connects to the internet era of trolling and scams — everybody has to keep their eye out for genuine communication as opposed to 419 scams, etc. Cringe/based seems to follow from somebody scrolling through TikTok all day long, hating everything they see (“cringe!”) but with some vestigial idea that certain videos connect to actual feelings in the actual world (“that’s pretty based, man”). But maybe even more than the others, cringe/based is about setting up an inside group marked by its taste and sense of social decorum (the middle school bullies but the bullies now with all the right political opinions along with a contributing writer gig) and rigorously, enthusiastically excluding anything that falls outside their norms.

• Writing ‘No’ as a way of starting your tweet or op-ed. There’s a material culture interpretation of this as well. It comes from Twitter and the sense of proliferating misinformation. Writing “No…” as your opening line is a way of aligning yourself with fact-checking, with mainstream opinion, with the reasonable people. It’s a way of saying that you are the adult in the room and you’re here to put a stop to all the irresponsible rumor-mongering. The problem is that this isn’t much of a discourse — it’s patronizing and elitist, and it’s in the end just a tactic by people who are in the same scrum as everyone else.

  

  Samuel Moyn’s preemptively condescending Twitter profile

• Saying ‘Right?’ at the end of your declarative sentences. This one may have already passed its peak, but a few years ago everybody seemed to turn into some kind of labor leader, punctuating their sentences with “right?” My guess is that it had to do with the Woke Revolution, with an idea that communication should be a way of building assent and that a conversation should ideally end in a call to action. I’m very pleased that I haven’t heard it in awhile. It was a way of preempting disagreement and co-opting a conversation.

• Giving bad news cheerfully. I was fired once by a smiling person trying to sugarcoat the pill. (It didn’t sugarcoat it.) A person who had a habit of missing events would always send her regrets by writing “Rina Potter will not be there!” Why did she think that the exclamation mark made her flakiness somehow fun and endearing? Everybody has long since given up on excising exclamation marks from online communication — I think they’re useful actually, they substitute for the intonations you use in spoken communication, written emails seem cold without them — but the insistence on cheeriness in everything seems to have drifted over from PR and customer service, as well as old-fashioned American sanctimony, and results in something pervasive and disingenuous: a Barbie Land-like, encroaching Southern California where everything is wonderful (!!!) and no one ever knows where they really stand.

• Trying to get away with inconsideration by saying “I appreciate…” This is a magic phrase and it can work wonders (“I take responsibility” is of a similar genre) but it’s been overused and its powers are wearing off. Larry David, who is a real pioneer in this type of social analysis, warned Richard Lewis at least a decade ago that he was “outside the circle of appreciation” and the rest of the society is gradually catching up to him. The move now is to actually give people respect and consideration….or else to come up with a new magic phrase.

• Saying ‘I love you’ for everything. The ship has clearly sailed on this, but social inflation of the phrase “I love….” has made it all but worthless. I’ve heard it said that, in business settings, the phrase is almost always used just before inflicting major reputational damage: “I love the guy but…” I know it’s too late to turn back the clock on this, but I was a bit horrified when I learned recently that Hotmail uses “P.S. I love you…” in its signatures. The general sense is of the language becoming more cheery and automated — with that automation getting into more and more corners of communication. I was very taken when a couple of Serbian movers — guys with real Slavic soul — complained that in New York everybody was “robots.” They had the same conversations repeated over and over again, always enthusiastic and upbeat, never sincere.

• Saying ‘I’m sorry.’ This is part of the same general epidemic of politeness. Overuse of the word ‘sorry’ makes it impossible to talk to most British people, and Americans, I suspect, are nearly there. There are two theories on this. One is that it’s a drift from customer service — in which a person reading from a script or a bot always opens by saying that they’re ‘sorry’ to hear about the problem you’re having. The other is that it’s part of the Woke Revolution, a subliminal way of assuaging national guilt by apologizing for everything. But, as with the word ‘love,’ ‘sorry’ has become badly devalued. It’s become part of our cheery, robotized speech, as individualized as a customer service call — everybody apologizing preemptively, everybody loving this and that, everybody lol-ing, everybody rolling-on-the-floor, and, really, everybody detached on their devices, everybody making their wry judgments about whether something is ‘cringe’ or not.