Words don’t come easy…
B ack in the halcyon days of the early 1980s before the internet and social media crashed the party, French Tunisian pop singer FR David released the biggest hit he would ever have. “Words” sold a massive 8 million or so copies and filled the airwaves as a number one smash hit in around a dozen countries between 1981 and ‘83. It was a pleasant enough tune and is easy enough to date by its production values and styling. My sister was among the millions who bought the 7” single and for a little while, although to my ears; an interminable age, it received a decent amount of spins in our house.
FR worked his song around the hook line “Words don’t come easy” and various pleas for understanding of his inability to express himself without the medium of melody. A few exhortations about his sincerity padded out the other 3 minutes and 20 odd seconds of the track before fading out at the end with the hook and eventually from public consciousness.
Release the hounds
Skip forward the best part of 40 years and the picture is quite different. Whatever strides forward FR has made in his own personal struggles with communication, the World has found that words do in fact come quite easy to most. Unlike FR who strove to find a way to make you see I love you, the internet and social media in particular has provided the world with a steroid for the timid and tongue-tied never mind the nefarious and a few million bad actors to boot.
Believe me
Early in the song FR implores the object of his affections to believe him on the simple albeit heartfelt claim that it is true. Today that seems to be the only basis for a great deal of what is posted online or uttered by politicians pushing an agenda regardless of veracity.
Keeping up with everyone
Words have always taken on new meanings over time as the need to express new ideas has stretched and added definitions. English as a non-prescriptive language without an academy to regulate inclusions into the dictionary has been fairly responsive to those needs. Even those many prescriptive languages which do have an academy overseeing inclusions are powerless to prevent the public at large speaking as they wish. Akin to the boy with his finger in the breach of a dam, they try to hold back something much larger than themselves and can only hope to keep the dictionary clean and tidy if not the real world beyond.
Clear as lies
A particular casualty over the past few years has been the word ‘clear’. Uses of clear in a sentence have become something of a throat clearing before the uttering of a barefaced lie or something far more opaque than promised. Just imagine FR David’s real feelings if all the lyrics in Words were today prefaced with ‘let me be absolutely clear about this’. The tone of the song would take on a darker feel, end with a slapped face and a few lonely nights for FR.
Very amazing
Apart from the general ugliness of Donald Trump and most of what surrounds him, language has also been a victim of his assault on truth. The word ‘truth’ itself has been carved up into various definitions sorted by constituency and momentary requirement then whored out like a once great actor forced into tawdry roles on daytime TV. The present incumbent of the Oval Office isn’t a pioneer of linguistic devaluation but his character type means he excels at it. Beyond his limited vocabulary, his use of ‘modifiers’ such as very and extremely with ‘limit’ adjectives such as amazing just adds to the low quality of his verbal output. However, what should be expected from a reality TV star when in that context the word reality has little to do with reality.
Don’t BAME me
Some strains of left politics and in particular identity politics are wind in the sails for the right. However well intended their arguments, they missed the memo that said simple is ‘in’ and nuanced is well um… er… not even an English word so it ain’t worth learning. If English was good enough for Jesus…
A term like BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic) is concocted in some attempt at inclusion but it has the ring of a dromedary about it. The fight is underway elsewhere and it really is just a sideshow. Besides, isn’t grouping everyone together under one banner the stuff of xenophobes and racists? Some parts of the left would probably be better employed de-conflating Judaism and the State of Israel before insisting public discourse is tailored to all their sensibilities. But let’s just see how quickly it grows wings and takes off or, like a battery hen, collapses under its own weight.
Facebook fever
There was once a time when the gaps in our knowledge about distant relatives were adjusted for with the charitable assumption that they were rational and kind because they were one of us. Beyond the odd birthday card and Christmas wishes that made up most of our interactions we just assumed that old uncle was basically a decent sort. All that came to an abrupt end when we came to befriend him on Facebook. There he feels untethered to any assumptions we had of him and regularly reveals himself as an ‘in the good old days’ racist whose opinions dovetail with the latest fears peddled in tabloid newspapers. Words come all too easily to that kindly old uncle when he insists that anyone who doesn’t share his post claiming to be proud of being white is in fact a racist themselves. Ignorance was relative bliss.
Love is
‘Love’ is a classic one-size-fits-all word and comes easy to most although often used with the love afforded a rental car. Whilst being both ethereal and a bedrock of art, it is also elastic, mundane and durable like gym wear. ‘I love animals’, I was once told by a girl who left me in little doubt as she tore into a hefty burger. She waxed lyrical about her pet dog, animal rights and her hatred of bullfighting for quite some time and looked stumped when I interjected to agree that she wasn’t totally anti-cow. Those words probably came too easy to me as I never saw her again. Funny, she said she loved my humour. Love is as stretchy as morality, sanctimony and a fox being torn apart by hounds at the ‘noble’ and ‘traditional’ hunt.
Balancing act
And then there is ‘balance’. Who could imagine the cousin of equilibrium, egalitarianism, equality and other noble concepts would be yoked to a fairground wagon and cheapened by, among others the BBC. ‘In the interests of balance…’ begins the lamentable explanation for the inclusion of a climate change denier on a debate about a subject which by definition they are supremely unfit to take any part in. The Earth is not flat either, creationism is hogwash and ‘equal time’ on any of these brain farts is a waste of time. There is no serious requirement to entertain arguments by fools, it isn’t balance, it is absurd.
Thanks FR the memories
So much has changed since FR David’s early 80s hit and words come far too easily to so many people who in the past weren’t armed with the means to share their thoughts but do so now with unnerving frankness, regularity and disregard for fact.
Time has moved on and I’m going to change track to something more aspirational. Silence is Golden by the Tremeloes.
