National Post (National Edition)
Birth of a winning COVID motto
In the long-running annual series Oh, The Humanities! National Post reporters survey academic scholarship at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which has gone entirely virtual this year, hosted at the University of Alberta from May 27 to June 4. Over the coming days, Canadian academics will share their insights on such diverse topics as the origins of English names for sushi rolls and new techniques in student cheating.
Swearing can be useful in political rhetoric, even charming. But salty language is like salty food. Good taste depends on restraint.
Two sociologists at St. Francis Xavier University investigated a famous case study in political cussing for a presentation at this week's Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, about how a premier's use of a quaint, archaic expression with a minor swear word struck a fine balance between paternalistic orders and good-hearted appeals to the common good.
Last April, outraged that Nova Scotians were disregarding the order to limit unnecessary travel, then-premier Stephen McNeil closed a news conference with a line that became his province's pandemic motto.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is stay the blazes home.”
“It was that nice moment that people latched on to. It's like Dad caught us,” said Lynda Harling Stalker, who has researched the sociology of this expression and its use with colleague Patricia Cormack. Nova Scotians were in trouble, but they were in it together.
It was not a spontaneous wisecrack, nor a strained effort at folksy diction. It was scripted political poetry. And it worked. In a few days, the government itself would start making posters that said Stay the Blazes Home. Photographer Len Wagg did a book, now in its third printing. Feet started tapping on Nova Scotia kitchen floors. There was a lyrical quality to it. The Stanfields recorded a song setting McNeil's words to music. (“We don't need online graphs to tell us what we need to do. We need to stay the blazes home. Stay the blazes home. Stay the blazes home.)
“He's demonstrating restraint in the language that he's asking us to embody ourselves,” said Cormack. The restraint is in not saying the more obvious stay “the hell” home, and instead replacing a mild swear with an even milder one.
“What's funny is `hell' is not a serious swear word,” Cormack said. It was like saying “H, E, double hockey sticks,” except that would have sounded too self-consciously clever. “Stay tf home” would have been cringe.
But “Stay the blazes home” sounds like a kindly grandfather telling you, quite rightly, to smarten up. It was the epitome of McNeil's image with his province's chief medical officer Robert Strang, who have often been compared favourably to Statler and Waldorf, the two old Muppets in the gallery. As Harling Stalker and Cormack describe it, “Stay the blazes home” was the high point for two old men successfully indulging in paternalistic stereotypes for the good of a community in crisis, and still somehow getting laughs.
The expression is not particularly maritime. It is certainly not original. It is more of a generational marker. It turns up in Dickens and Disraeli, Cormack said. She grew up out west and remembers her father using the expression just as McNeil did, as a “civil way of swearing.”
“It references the fact you are not swearing,” Cormack said. Her father was Scottish-born, though, so maybe there is a Caledonian sensibility in it, as there was in the Nova Scotia Strong campaign that arose barely two weeks later, in response to the province's grief at the Portapique shooting rampage.
Faced with this other sort of communal adversity, the messaging to Nova Scotians was to get your tartans out, put up a flag, and hearken back to the ideal of the stoic Scot, a diasporic Highlander forging a hard life in New Scotland, the sort of man who wants to swear, who may even deserve to swear, but who does not swear because he is strong, with his good manners reflecting a good heart.
“The idea that there's care behind this mild swear is also what's going on,” said Cormack. McNeil and Strang wanted “to mark an idea of paternal care that they imagined would resonate with people. And it did.”
“Stay the blazes home” was cast almost instantly into the realm of nostalgia, and it kept reappearing like a fond memory. When the Atlantic Bubble was set up to promote local tourism, McNeil urged Nova Scotians to get the blazes out there.
Like the Ottawa Public Health social media manager who earned huge online exposure with self-deprecating humour, McNeil and Strang managed to amplify public health advice by going viral on social media.
The strategy turned up more recently this month, as N.S. is dealing with a pandemic wave. “It is not the time to go to Costco for sandals that you heard were in stock,” Strang said to emphasize a stay-at-home order, referring to a sale on Birkenstocks. That's not health promotion advice. Not unless you follow it. The joy at this comment, which was also scripted, prompted McNeil, no longer the premier, to tweet a photo of his feet in battered old Birks, saying “listen to the Good Doctor.”
To pursue their research into the social dynamics of this kind of messaging, Cormack and Harling Stalker have assigned graduate students to build a database of social and mass media mentions of “stay the blazes home,” Strang's sandals, and other similar memes. There is a theoretical context too. For example, their work draws on the writing of Norbert Elias on the social functions of gossip as either praise or blame, and on the demarcation of groups.
Health is so often spoken of as an individual concern, Cormack said, but McNeil and Strang turned that on its head to great effect, with appeals to the common fate of Nova Scotians. “The idea that health is now a collective responsibility, that came out of nowhere,” Cormack said.