More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Incredibe
Announcing A Death
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It’s been a 40-year slaughter, but this beautiful word is now dead. It lies on the floor of our vocabularies, hacked to pieces.
I remember the early days of this massacre. Or rather my first awareness of it, of my participation in it, actually. I was in a meeting, and when I used the word, the director rebuked me for using it, saying that what I was describing was not incredible at all, that it was, if anything, quite believable, which made it so dangerous. It was a rough reproach, but I felt grateful a few hours later.
And I’ve been listening ever since. I’ve been careful with my use of the word. But I’ve also been keeping an ear out for others’ misuse of it, seeking company in my humiliation, I guess.
And they have been there, misuse after misuse – everywhere. Eventually I could not keep track of the hackings. “Incredible this,” “incredible that.” People seemed unable to find a single other word for whatever they found unusual or implausible or shocking or dazzling or staggering or unthinkable or half-baked or stunning or gorgeous or outlandish or or or or. Everything was “incredible.”
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Last week I had had it. Some of the finest minds in journalism, including Rory Stewart, used it multiple times in one brief interview, and that was it for me. I had to write about it. I had to protest. I had to do something! So here I am.
And here you are. Might we do something together? Might we follow the three-part directive for change: 1) stop, 2) breathe, 3) act? Could at least you and I 1) never say “incredible” again unless the thing we are describing truly cannot be fathomed by the human mind? Can we just otherwise stop saying the word?
Then can we 2) take a breath and think about this winsome word. Can we gaze at its etymology and breathe some more?
Then 3) can we act? Can we use “incredible” only to describe things like the 93-billion-mile diameter of the universe, or the “zero-size” of a quark, or the sudden emergence from a two-year coma, or the way a smile changes a whole day, or the voice after death of someone we love? But otherwise, could we leave the word, this most meritorious and meticulous word, alone?
Because maybe it is not dead. Maybe it is just waiting for the Prince of Moderation to blow a kiss and put the pieces back together. Maybe one day it can stand before us again in all its golden glory. Maybe we can actually mean it when we say it.
Isn’t that the least we can ask of ourselves, the only word-gifted sentient beings on earth?
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PRAETERITIO
“I Pass Over the Fact”
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I have used that rhetorical device, Cicero’s favourite, before. I wasn’t going to use it again. But. It is the only way to let myself condemn. I am not usually a judger.
So, I will not say that I am sad. I won’t tell you that I wail, out of ear shot, at mendacity’s madman (for surely he/it is, or else what is sanity?). And that I wash my face and try again to get through the day without the sadness. I should rail. But I don’t. I weep.
I will not tell you that my sadness bears embarrassment for my beloved country, 5,000 miles away.
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I will not say to you that I am incredulous, even though I predicted it all. I knew that America in just enough states was not ready for a Black female president. And yes, I know that incumbents of any race and gender are doomed, and she was that, too. But mostly I knew that Black/female would never, not yet, win in America. And so at first I stiffened and kept my eyes, like a sentry of sense, on the passing of one day and then another, noting at one point that we had only 1,450 days to go. Then only 1,431. Then.… I stopped. The cruelty drowned out the counting.
I know I should be sad about the cause, not about the calamitous creature that is the effect. And I am. I revile the features of our systems that alienate, oppress, exclude, denigrate honest labor and exalt unearned earning. I also loathe that the entirely justified rage leads almost axiomatically to an unjustified raising up of a base bully to believe in. I also understand that just enough single-issue voters voted against abortion, or immigration, or trans people in sports, or this thing or that thing, regardless of the massive and predictable consequences for the country at large. Many, nearly most, did not vote expressly for a vapid vindicator as raptor in chief. I know that.
So I will not tell you that all of that saddens me because there is no rapture in being right about wrong.
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That is all. I just wanted to let you know that I pass over the fact that I am very, very sad.
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A Principle of Good Conversation
You are telling a story. You think it is funny. So you laugh as you tell it. What could possibly be wrong with that?
You laughed first.
In effect you said, "I think this is funny, and you must agree with me and laugh, too. If you don’t, you will embarrass me."
I find this dynamic intriguing because if you had said it was funny but not laughed, my silence would not embarrass you. But your laughter takes me prisoner. It deposits me between your reaction and my own.
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Here’s the point. In good conversation there are two parties: the talker and the responder. Both parties are equal. The talker generates content; the responder reacts to content. But when the talkers suddenly become their own responders, they turn the real responders into a mirror of the themselves. Abruptly there is only one person in the conversation.
To be on the receiving end of that highjacking can be agony, at least for me. While you are laughing at your own comment, I have to decide in a flash whether I think it is funny, and if I don’t, whether to humour you by laughing, too; or to stay quiet and let you stew in this reciprocity abyss.
Recently I agreed to spend a day with a long-time friend, but by 2pm I had had it. I just couldn’t take any more of her predictable laughter at her own stories. She often even guffawed at what she had just said, drawing in a great loud wad of breath. And each time, I dangled in the unseemly gulf she exhaled while she laughed.
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So I long for a time when talkers stop being responders, particularly first-laughers. Surely it can’t be that hard for talkers to say something and let the responders decide whether it is funny.
But I have no idea how to make that change. I don’t seem to have whatever it takes to point out this habit to people. But I guess we could all take a look at ourselves. When we are the talker, we could, the second we start laughing, notice whether the responder laughed first. If they didn’t, if we were the first-laughers, we could stop laughing right that second. And after about eight times of catching ourselves, or maybe twenty, we might stop it before it happens. And maybe after twenty times of preempting it, we would be cured. We will have become good conversationalists.
Of course, it is possible that right now you are scratching your head. Maybe you have never encountered first-laughers. Maybe there are only four of them in the world, the ones in my life. But I doubt it.
There is precedent for my concern. Similar advice free-floats in every culture: “Don’t laugh at your own jokes." That maxim recognises something similar. But I would argue that “Don’t laugh first” is in a league of its own.
So I will go ahead and publish this little piece. Just in case.
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