I had last week the pleasure of lunch with Mark Mason. Between or perhaps while walking (overground) the route of the London Underground for his latest book, Walking the Lines, he has been writing occasionally for The Spectator. I had wanted to discuss with Mark his piece (‘It’s so annoying,’ 5 November) about the viral spread of the word ‘so’ as a pointless means of starting a sentence or conversation. Dot Wordsworth, too, has been confounded by the fashion, and I reported the phenomenon many months ago in the Times; though on this magazine’s letters page a weary reader has reviewed the great debate and concluded ‘So what?’
So – well, what? Our lunch led me to a whole new speculation about language. If I’m right then I’ve wasted most of my life in a permanent Vesuvian eruption of indignation about meaningless words and phrases. I’ve missed the point. They’re supposed to be meaningless. Only now, late in my life, have I come to understand this important function of language: to say nothing.
Even as a teenager I was railing against the How-do-you-dos, Beg-your-pardons and Your-good-selves that could so much more efficiently be conveyed by Hello, Pardon or You. In my twenties my bugbear was prolix Americanisms that gave us the redundant ‘currently’ or the sloppy ‘at this moment in time’ (or, worse, ‘as of now’) in place of ‘now’ or even just the present tense.
My thirties, as I was introduced to parliamentary life, were spent in a waste of fury at ‘I hear what you say,’ ‘at the end of the day’ in place of ‘understood’ or ‘finally’; or berating ‘I really must, if I may, with all due respect, Mr Deputy Speaker, take issue with the Rt hon, Learned and Gallant Gentleman’ in place of ‘I disagree’. My forties, introduced to the journalist’s trade, found me equally scathing about the way things had always ‘emerged last night’ when they hadn’t emerged at all, and certainly not last night. I earned my crust as a sketchwriter and columnist in my fifties wondering why Tony Blair thought ‘It’s time to move on’ was a better way of saying ‘No comment’; or why ‘What I will say, Mr Speaker…’ needed to preface the saying of it.
My sixties began in no less explosive a rage against ‘issues around’ (meaning what?), ‘going forward’ (meaning, presumably, that we were not going backward) and hearing that a colleague was ‘across the piece’ (meaning, presumably, ‘informed’). And even as I write I sense the formation in readers’ minds of further examples of pointless words and phrases.
Well (why ‘Well’, incidentally? What does ‘Well’ add?) please don’t write to me, reader, because you and I have been missing something. Two things, in fact (what’s the role of ‘in fact’ here? Search me). The first is that all this verbiage has a function, but the function is not to add anything new, but to act as a kind of bubble-wrap for the more valuable and often more brittle things we do want to say.
And (no need for that ‘And’ – is there?) the second is that mindless, voguish verbal padding and circumlocution are not unique to our times, but as old as language. The forms differ, and as we grow older we become allergic to the new forms replacing the old; but we are only noticing something that was already there in other forms. The vital part that padding plays in human communication remains constant.
The reason is simple. Thought must race around, and language must dawdle while it does. Either because we are trying to think of something to say, or because what we have to say is difficult and we do not want to misspeak, we get our minds darting ahead of our tongues, mapping out the verbal trail. Like in those Bugs Bunny cartoons where the rabbit is trying to construct a railway bridge across the water just ahead of the advancing train, we have to make some detours.
There are so many ways of doing this. Um and er are the worst way. My mother, a former broadcaster, taught me young to avoid both. ‘Never be afraid to pause,’ she said — and nor should you be afraid. Try silence. Nobody dies. Over the years I’ve gained a reputation for speaking in a thoughtful, measured and deliberative way, when the truth this is I’m desperately picking my way through a series of mental blanks. Chris Patten is demon at this, and so was Michael Foot, and I learned from both when young. A useful tip here is to anticipate the famine while still in mid-feast; stop in the middle of a sentence which is jogging easily along; plan what’s going to happen after the full-stop; then resume — so when you reach the full-stop you can run on, and never sound as if you’ve run dry.
Or you can puff a pipe: by this ruse Harold Wilson contrived to appear wise. You can scratch your head intelligently, rock on your heels, stroke your chin, glance significantly around. But, easiest of all, throw in an ‘if you will’, ‘if I may’, ‘by your leave’, ‘if I’m honest’, ‘I cannot but observe’ or ‘I have to say’.
‘So…’, ‘Now …’ and ‘Well …’ (George Osborne’s favourite) are ways of easing oneself into a sentence while thinking ahead, without a jolt. ‘At this moment in time’, ‘any time soon’, ‘going forward’ or ‘when all’s said and done’ are ways of slowing meaning down while working out what you mean — and avoiding the different kind of jolt that would occur were the flow to be interrupted. They give speech rhythm and pattern. Call them polystyrene, call them cotton-wool, call them padding — but where would we be if speech were all meat and no mashed potato?
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