Tuesday, September 16, 2008

I should have said this earlier.

I'm sorry for everything I've said and done during my fifty years and I'm even sorrier for everything I will say and will do in the future.

In the world today if you speak your mind, use language that has grit, emotion, truth, the guts to be candid and perhaps the wit to breakthrough--in business, you are an HR problem, in politics, you are finished before you start, in a relationship, you are an anathema.

America today is linguistically Soviet. We speak in ways that don't reveal true meaning. Lee Atwater remarked when he ran Ronald Reagan's campaign, "You can no longer say: nigger, nigger, nigger. So you say states' rights, states' rights, states' rights." No one can call you a racist because you have "coded" your speech.

Today we say, "______ isn't fulfilling the exigencies of the changing dynamics of our employment modality." That's how we code that someone's a lazy slug.

Those who refuse to make their language bland--who refuse to comply with obfuscatory delicacy--must become what were called in Stalinist Russia, "whisperers." Don't let anyone hear you. You'll get in trouble with HR.

1 comment:

Tore Claesson said...

hear, hear. well, i am banned from my kids school because I voiced corned over how it's managed.