First Draft #23: a newsletter on public language
Love language; the State of the Union; “community”; "guardrails"; Sturgeon
The strange language of modern love
The modern dater risks more than a broken heart. You can be ghosted (left without warning). Breadcrumbed (deceived by non-committal flirtation). Zombied (ambushed by the ghost). If things go well, beware: it may have been “trauma bonding”. Or perhaps you are being “love-bombed”, all too often a precursor to “toxic” emotional manipulation.
What the new language of love lacks in romance, it makes up for in vividness and wit. “Breadcrumbing” is a verbal upgrade on the age-old practice of leading someone on. “Ghosting” describes well the unkindness of leaving unannounced. And “love-bombing” gives useful shape to something that, according to my straw poll of friends in the pub, is real and sinister.
But is something else going on here? Between the lines, some read an over-eagerness to pathologise the slings and arrows of ordinary experience. Novelist and cultural critic Rachel Connolly writes of a particular kind of confessional — and often viral — online writing that hints, in “shadowy or suggestive terms”, that careless or nasty behaviour is equivalent to “abuse”. This “minimises the seriousness of actual abuse,” she writes.
The quasi-psychological language of modern love reflects the sudden cultural ascendance of therapy. Pre-loaded conversation prompts on the dating app Hinge now include: “Therapy recently taught me___,” “A boundary of mine is___” and “My therapist would say I___.” Fluency in the language of “boundaries” and “attachment styles” is a new status symbol, reports the New York Times; one which, for men, has the added benefit of subverting assumptions about masculinity. “I’m not like them,” it says, “I’m sensitive.”
A strange thing about the growth of therapy speak in culture and dating is its arrival at a time when therapy is out of reach for so many. Private treatment is expensive and NHS waiting lists are longer than ever. Yet TikTok and Instagram overflow with videos from “therapists” offering advice about “boundaries” and “self-care”. The “therapist” hashtag on Tiktok has over 3.1bn views. Or perhaps it is to be expected: at a time when people struggle to access real treatment, they have no choice but to settle for a meme-ified version of it.
Either way, the new language of love is as much a product of online culture as it is dating culture. Social media, like therapy, relies on disclosure. But unlike therapy, there is an incentive to fit experiences into categories, so others can more easily engage with them. Give these experiences a zany name and watch them fly, via trending lists, into the lexicon. @AlexDymoke
The State of the Union: speechwriting’s greatest ordeal
“It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done”. So said Don Baer, a White House speechwriter in the Clinton administration, about the process of writing the President’s annual State of the Union address. Nixon’s speechwriter called it a “national embarrassment”. One aide used the term “death march”.
The first problem is the huge scope of the thing. In his most recent State of the Union, President Biden spoke about policies ranging from “replacing poisonous lead pipes” to “making airlines show you the full ticket price upfront”. Each is crucial, no doubt. But to unite a continent’s worth of work under a single theme is futile. Jeff Shesol, another former Clinton speechwriter, put it best: “the most common complaint is that it is a laundry list,” he writes, “which is an insult to laundry lists”.
A second problem is the sheer number of government agencies, interest groups, lobbyists and committee chairs whose job it is to try and get their language into the speech. Obama’s former director of speechwriting, Cody Keenan, came up with an ingenious solution: when the speech was going well and he was open to meetings, his assistant, Susannah Jacobs, would put a smiley face on the office door. When it was not, hopeful visitors would be met with a skull and crossbones.
Finally, there are the long, sleepless nights. Under FDR, speechwriters at least benefited from all-nighters “catered by the White House chef”. Later, Michael Waldman - another Clinton staffer - describes having to make do with “quadruple espressos from Starbucks”. The most punishing ordeal, however, goes to Raymond Price. Assisting Nixon with his 1970 State of the Union, Price wrote the speech in a “sleepless, hallucinatory three-day binge” driven not by caffeine, but by “greenies” - amphetamines prescribed by the White House doctor. As one memoir noted, “even months later he got occasional echoes of the experience”. Nixon’s verdict on his draft? “Good god, most of this isn’t worth a damn.” @_alice_elliott
Jargon buster: Community
Last year, “community” was uttered more often in the House of Commons than “justice”, “economy” or “education”. The social critic Raymond Williams once observed “community” is a “warmly persuasive” word, never used to mean something bad. And therein lies the problem. For politicians left and right, it is such an uncontestable good that it now rings with bland sentimentality. The author Geoff Dyer observes “community”, in all its worthy goodness, is often appealed to as a way to convey “how bad things have become”. He offers “neighbourhood” as an alternative. Whereas community feels airy and abstract, neighbourhood feels concrete. Dyer writes: “Even if they live in the midst of [community] some are always excluded from it… Everyone who lives in a neighbourhood belongs to it, is part of it”. The principle is “geographical, not demographic”. @ZachdHardman
Bacharach, music and lyrics
The death of Burt Bacharach raised the question of the balance in popular music of the melody and the lyric. Bacharach worked with some great writers – Hal David, Carole Bayer Sager to whom he was married at the time, Elvis Costello – but barely wrote a word himself.
Lyrics, though, are not really poetry. Christopher Ricks treated Dylan’s lyrics in Visions of Sin as if Dylan really were the next Arthur Rimbaud but anyone who has ever heard the song Handy Dandy will soon tire of the analysis of it. The great poetry imprint Faber have clearly decided that lyrics deserve the full treatment. They have recently published the collected lyrics of Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading, Bryan Ferry, Van Morrison, Billy Bragg, Lou Reed, the Fleet Foxes, Robert Wyatt and Shaun Ryder.
Yet the lyric is a genre unto itself, inseparable from the way it wraps around a melody and rarely of the calibre to which the poet must aspire. Simon Armitage is a big Dylan fan but made it plain in one of his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford that Dylan is a prolific troubadour, not a poet. This was certainly true of Bacharach who, as Adam Gopnik pointed out, was the master of the broken musical phrase which could be a difficult template for a lyric. And that is surely the best commendation for the lyricist who writes poetically in a different style, the work of musical theatre. In any case, there is no doubt there would be something missing if Burt Bacharach had merely written instrumentals and Hal David had never added the memorable words Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and What’s New, Pussycat? @PhilipJCollins1
Jargon buster: Guardrails
Meta’s Nick Clegg writes that Facebook will add “guardrails” when welcoming back America’s 45th President. These “new guardrails” are to “deter repeat offences”, so we can hear what Mr. Trump wants to say without allowing him to say absolutely anything.
But there’s a problem. Guardrails boomed in the 1980s as the world became safety-conscious. In bowling, guardrail “bumpers” are introduced to boost performance, usually for a child. On yachts, they stop you falling into the water off West Palm Beach. They direct you to safety.
Meta doesn’t intend to boost, direct or protect Mr. Trump. It’s pointing out its rules and what happens if any politician breaks them. If Mr. Trump praises violent protests, he will be suspended for anywhere from one month to two years. So why “guardrails”, which are gentle and benevolent, the lightest of light touch regulation?
It’s possible Nick has simply been swept up in bowl-o-mania since swapping Parli for Cali. One in five Americans, or 67 million people, hit the bowling alleys each year. Perhaps Nick is among them, and now spends his weekends sorting his ten-pins from his candlepins and marching up the San Mateo County league tables. A much simpler explanation: it’s a case of corporate jargon.
Better to call these measures “rules” and “penalties” as, to be fair, Clegg does in the rest of his announcement. Trump advisers wrote to Meta pleading for his accounts to be reinstated because the ban dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse. Regardless of whether a ban does these things, using ill-fitting metaphors certainly does. @James_Carroll
Farewell the best communicator in British politics
Nicola Sturgeon has been, since she became First Minister in 2014, the best communicator in British politics. She has been the best in the business since Tony Blair, and that is not a close call. Ms Sturgeon’s resignation statement was eloquent, dignified and persuasive. It was so good, in fact, it made you wonder why she didn’t just carry on. We need politicians who are that good.
The reason she won’t carry on tells us something important about the gap between rhetoric and reality. Nicola Sturgeon can glimpse total failure on the horizon, so leaving in the midst of partial failure seems like a triumph. She is leaving, in other words, because she has failed to convince her country of her cause and she knows it. The numbers on independence have not shifted for years. A referendum today would probably fail. There is no likelihood, in any case, of the current government conceding an independence referendum and no chance either that a Labour government would do so.
This has been the pivot of Sturgeon’s career. To demand a referendum but not to be granted one. To be close to victory but still to have plenty to campaign on. Eventually, though, the appeal of this runs out and Nicola Sturgeon has sensed it. The high water mark of independence might have gone and if she cannot talk it into existence then it is probable that nobody can. @PhilipJCollins1
Language and beyond
The questionable rise of “imposter syndrome” and why the psychologists who first wrote about it regret its hold on today’s culture, arguing it is not a “syndrome” but a phenomenon.
An interesting discussion on how AI chatbots will soon change how we search for things on the internet.
An extract from On Writing by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in which Ludwig Borne tells us How To Become an Original Writer in Three Days. The advice, written in 1823, reads thus: “Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head.”
The New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe on the death of the centre right.
An interesting peek inside the writing of Biden’s State of the Union address: “he marked up his speech with subtle lines and dashes that he has long used as a signal to take a breath, pause between his words or steer through a tricky transition.”
In July 1969, the world celebrated as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and hailed “One giant leap for mankind”. But what if the mission had failed? President Nixon prepared a speech for this eventuality which thankfully was never delivered. However, a recent art installation uses deepfake technology to rewrite history – watch Nixon give the speech here.
The unexpectedly fascinating history of car paint.
A brilliant FT magazine feature on London’s most prolific graffiti artist, 10 Foot, in which the journalist accompanies the tagger on his night time missions. “The shifting line between what is and isn’t ok to tag is more important to 10 Foot than he’d like to let on. There’s an unspoken graf precept which prohibits doing damage or writing on cars, trees, churches and people’s homes.”
New from us
"Writer's block should be illegal. Punished by death. Thinker's block, however, is permissible." This and other, equally sophisticated thoughts, in Phil's recent talk: How to write a speech to change the world.
Zach on our fascination with guru figures.
Phil on why Starmer means business.
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