It’s unbelievable how often we’re told that things are unbelievable
How did the man from Northern Rail characterise the way in which everyone in Manchester has stood sideby-side? As an unbelievable way. How did the BA pilot describe the situation that led him to drive a sick old man home? As an unbelievable situation.
The Catechism of Cliché now bulges with entries beginning with U for unbelievable. It is used of things that are very good, such as Huddersfield Town winning the Championship play-off at Wembley, or very bad, such as attending a wreath-laying ceremony for a Palestinian terrorist.
It’s unbelievable that unbelievable has done so unbelievably. Surely this must be peak unbelievable. Yet these things can change unbelievably quickly. In the meantime they can become unbelievably annoying. My Roberts radio has a dent in its goldy mesh loudspeaker grille where I knocked it off its perch by throwing a slipper at it when three unbelievables had emanated from its innards in as many minutes.
We have been this way before. Words do not mean what they say; they act like the bell in an old-fashioned ironmonger’s, alerting the hidden proprietor to the incursion of a customer. Words such as so, at the beginning of answers by experts on Today, have no meaning at all. They are just like a little cough or the hitch of his tie by a public speaker.
More frequently, words mean the opposite of what they say. They start off in one sense and end up facing the other way. In Shakespeare’s day a writer warned of impenitent sinners “drawn down to hell most terribly”. Today the local vicar is a terribly nice man. Unbelievably nice.
When Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven (after using as a pillow a stone said – I’m not saying it is – to be the Coronation Stone, now absent from Westminster, having been abducted by the Scots) he woke and said: “How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God.” By dreadful he meant “full of dread”. Now, if your husband had to stand on the train all the way to Peterborough, you sympathise by saying: “How dreadful!”
There is a constant process of devaluation in language, a sort of quantitative easing, by which words exhausted of their force pile up around our knees like dried leaves.
If you can’t say dreadful of something full of dread, nor can you say awful of something full of awe. We used to get round that by saying awesome instead, but that has been exploded by casual abuse and left like a flaccid bit of burst balloon.
It’s fantastic the rate we get through words, sucking out their content like nectar from a dead-nettle flower and throwing them down shrivelled and empty on the ground. It’s monstrous to take fabulous monsters and reduce them to something cuddly and fab. Shocking, really. Incredible.
Even stranger is the way British speakers of English have taken a neutral term and made it into a self-authenticating term of criticism. This word is typical. It is uttered every time a bus splashes through a puddle, drenching pedestrians, or when Waitrose has sold out of coconut-milk just on the afternoon that you were planning to make a Keralan curry. Typical!
It was with just that accusatory tone towards the universe that Victor Meldrew, played by Richard Wilson, used to exclaim: “I don’t believe it!”
Well, you’d better believe it now, especially when, for good or ill, it’s unbelievable.