Our recent celebrations were muted, what mattered were the family groupings. I found myself taking a back seat, reflecting rather than yapping. Thinking about the way things had turned out over the years, when bad times had evolved into good times and then into unexpectedly even better times. With flaws of course.
A slow process which cannot be caught in the brevity of a
celebration. Worse still is, how the language of celebration undermines the
good that is being celebrated. Ah that tired vocabulary, unimaginative syntax
and vain attempts to emphasise phrases that have long since lost their ability
to connect with people. The pathetically dried-out husk known as cliché, in
short: dead language.
Theoretically dead language is no threat. “But we knew what
he was trying to say,” is the cry of those who see no harm in the cliché. Arguing
that the speaker had tried to articulate no doubt genuine feelings, had failed
and was simply “making do”. But if those feelings were truly genuine shouldn’t
we be ashamed of under-selling them? After all this might be the only occasion
we will have to express an important sentiment. And yet we’ve sent our listener
away with the echoes of a fifty-year-old ad slogan.
No doubt the first person to say he was “over the moon” got
a laugh. These days not an eyebrow rises. Unsurprising since the phrase dates
back to the 1700s. Unlike cheese and decent Bordeaux jokes don’t mature with
age.
But clichés may hide another grievous shortcoming: laziness.
People who believe themselves to be reasonably literate often resort to their
equivalent of the bovine lunar leap. It is, of course, difficult to put words
to feelings of sorrow or joy. Fact is, many don’t try. Or only as far as coming
up with a single word, usually an adjective, less desirably an adverb, most
abominably the catch-all “very”. Take heed: all the single-word solutions were
used up at about the time we went from BC to AD.
Significant happenings deserve effort, especially when
addressing, say, a recently bereaved widow or a five-year-old who has come last
in the sack race. Internally we may want to gush but gushing doesn’t parse
well. You could always try the initially unexpected:
To the widow: Jack
was hopelessly wrong saying no one would mourn. I, for one, am completely
gutted.
To the five-year-old:
I’m not at all surprised. Billy may have won but I overheard his parents say he
has a third leg. Hides it up his bum.
At my post-mortem
piss-up: That should shut him up.