It’s never a bad time to retire idiot words and phrases, and the new year is an especially good time for it. My approach to this is different from Howard‘s, I think, in a few ways. Let me be brief, limiting myself to two several-thousand-word posts. This one identifies some points of disagreement and general discussion and offers a couple of recommendations. The other will focus on a few suggestions, more specific than the points made here, for deletions from the academic and judicial lexicon.
The first point of distinction is rather unclear or uncertain. Howard’s list, with one exception, focuses on phrases he associates with people who are right of center. (I would say “right wing,” but as I read it he does not limit himself to undisputed right-wingers and their particular evolving lexicon.) Kudos for the exception–“delta,” like “top of mind,” is a term of no-one-in-particular’s art that reminds us why management consultants tend not to be poets. The question is why it is the only exception.
I assume the reason is innocent: Howard simply used examples that are, um, top of mind for him. But it should be obvious that degrading the language actually is one of those activities to which the phrase “both sides” fully applies. If we’re going to pick up a broom, we might as well sweep the whole floor. Again, I assume his focus on the right of center is incidental rather than a specious association between linguistic abuse and any particular political orientation. If I’m wrong, however, I would suggest that this is a problematic position that needs to be called out, and that he needs to check his privilege and do the work. (And I would suggest that all four of those words and phrases, happily rarer than they used to be, all belong on the list.)
Another difference is that I don’t think every phrase that is subject to confusion or misuse is due for retirement. Of course the word “censorship” is routinely misused or over-applied. Or–a common problem, especially when a word or phrase is useful for politicking and fundraising, which are the same thing–its user deliberately capitalizes on most listeners’ association of the word with a core meaning, while using it in a way that he or she knows full well lies in more peripheral territory. Long before Marco Rubio became the de facto deputy under secretary of the State Department, Project Censored built a nice little nonprofit business off of this tactic. To use another overused modern term, it’s a kind of verbal motte-and-bailey tactic, and it’s even more prevalent these days. (For a current scholarly variation on this approach, see “abolition, use of in article titles.”)
That’s a reason to monitor the use of the word, demand clarity when it is used, and be wary of those who use the word when seeking to persuade, cozen, beg, or exploit your anger. It’s not a good reason to retire it. “Censorship” is a real word of long standing, not a junky neologism (like “mansplaining,” which Howard casually uses in his post about retiring words and phrases, with what I assume is ironic wit) or bumper sticker slogan. We should keep it.
I’m inclined to say much the same thing about the phrase “civil discourse.” It’s a term that has long been of value to specialized interpretive communities and relatively stable within them. The fact that it can be poorly or strategically deployed by generalist speakers, or by specialists using it outside of those communities, doesn’t eliminate its original value. I might add that a phrase like “civil discourse” is perfectly capable of legitimate contestation over its meaning even within the specialized interpretive community. That means that even within that community and even under conditions of good faith, we must demand clarity on the part of its user. I don’t think Howard quite says this; but lest there be any misunderstanding, it should be clear that words and phrases that are potentially ambiguous or even essentially contested are not for that reason alone bad or due for the scrap heap.
I am sympathetic to claims that public debate suffers from a debate-club problem. I would add that in odd and harmful ways, the debate style has become the dominant one for social media discourse in general. But that issue is somewhat different from the question of what constitutes “civil” discourse or debate, or the issue of “debate for debate’s sake,” in a way that crosses political lines. One problem is the simple fact that social media treats political and cultural debate as a cheap form of entertainment, like television-watching or self-abuse, and as a viable, low-cost source of income.
I don’t much mind debate for debate’s sake over the merits of blank verse or the Fast and Furious series; no one does, really. The problem here has more to do with the trivializing effects of people choosing to spend their time talking about important issues. Public and political discourse would be better off, on the whole, if we used the Internet to talk more about dumb things, and husbanded our words about important things more carefully. The other problem, also prevalent on and off of social media, is the way in which people using debate-club tools overestimate the value of logic. In particular, they overestimate its value when it comes to drawing conclusions about human and social motives and actions, especially when they reason or reverse-engineer their way to a confident conclusion about human conduct from a highly limited number of facts.
I’m not really sure what the problem with the phrase “North star” is, except that it reeks of cliche. Howard’s specific issue with it seems to be that it is used by hypocrites, or at least by individual hypocrites that he doesn’t like. But so is every synonym for “principle” or “priority.” The phrase is not being misused; it’s being used correctly, but by liars. At least “North star” is rather a self-curing phrase: Like the phrase “Trust me” or beginning a sentence with the word “honestly,” its primary communicative purpose is to instruct the listener to distrust everything that follows it.
I do have a few positive suggestions for additions to Howard’s list, some general and some particular. One is effectively already being followed, in the inevitable march of particular linguistic and cultural moments from modish to irrelevant: Shedding much of the fashionable lingo that characterized the left-of-center side of the 2015-25 cultural moment, the side that I occupy at least as a matter of circumstance, even if I did not particularly occupy the moment. It is not a fantasy or an invention of the right to say, for instance, that the word “problematic” was used with an almost manic energy during the past decade, or that all sorts of words and phrases formerly kept largely in captivity in the academy, where they belonged, ended up escaping into the wild. I should add that in light of current events, one of the standard overused words of that era merits a reprieve from the junk pile: “colonialism.”
While I personally found much of this language unusually annoying, I think one must generalize from it rather than treat it as sui generis. One possibility is that we should generally distrust academic lingo that creeps beyond the gates. Although this would disproportionately affect the language of the left, there are analogues involving the right and its semi-academic or semi-elite institutions: little Claremontisms or Vermeulian bits and bobs that have also slipped their bonds, so that they are increasingly present among the unwashed and not just the unwise.
Perhaps the broader lesson here is that little good can come of allowing or encouraging academics and intellectuals–using both words extremely broadly–to talk to strangers, seek wider audiences, “influence” the “discourse,” curry fame or favor, explore various “platforms,” and so on. Whether the desire to be more broadly influential or popular is theoretically compatible with academic and intellectual values or not (I have my doubts), as a practical matter both seeking and attaining that kind of popularity is routinely corrupting. And that’s true even when the object of popularity didn’t especially go looking for it. I’m glad that James Hankins, for example, found a wider audience for his great work on virtue politics, but his popularity has fairly ruined hm. Especially in the present culture, which is tailor-made for grifting and hustling, we should assume that every “public intellectual” is a huckster who happens to have a graduate degree.
Or maybe the problem is slightly different, albeit still closely related to the overlap between culture, politics, and social media. It’s that the porousness of the borders between Internet or social-media speech and speech in other forums, however inevitable, has been detrimental in both directions and should be guarded against and retarded rather than cheerfully or resignedly embraced. This would be obvious enough if we were talking about more ancien regime channels of communication. TV news anchors used to torture the language to fit their particular context by going heavy on present-tense gerunds and skipping words like “is,” as in, “Top government officials today adding their voices to the call for Americans to remain vigilant.” Perhaps they still do. But no one thought to make this the stuff of everyday speech, perhaps because most people don’t write for or anchor TV news. On social media, alas, everyone is his own network star, and the linguistic creep back and forth has been much more widespread and precipitate.
The style that fits the social-media context is very, very heavy on bumper sticker slogans. And not just social media. Before that, organs like Slate, at least after its first few halcyon years, eagerly adopted breezy, attention-getting lingo like “nothing-burger.” (A word, incidentally, that originated in the 1950s, and that was popular for TV panelists both left and right.) So perhaps the broader recommendations are that a) we should preserve the language of civilized people from the language of social media and the Internet, even if we are part of both populations, and conversely should fight social-media breeziness with more careful and fustian talk even on social media, and b) we should retire as much bumper-sticker speech and writing as possible. People love coining phrases because of the potential personal gain, heedless of the externalities. But the net result is the relentless devaluation of the currency of our language and thinking. “Cancel culture” is one such phrase, and it should probably be eliminated. But it should go not because it is imprecise or a fiction, but simply because it’s a slogan or label.
That’s a nice place from which to pivot to law and the legal academy.