Words and Stuff
‘You have a wonderful evening,’ she said. I muttered something in reply.
Then it hit me. A wonderful evening. Me? A corpulent old man without much hair, trying to pay my bill in a petrol station with a carton of milk in one hand and nothing in the other, because it was covered in diesel, at half past eleven on a Sunday night? What sort of wonderful evening did she have in mind for me? A musical soirée in an opulent drawing room – at midnight? A few drunken friends round to discuss the meaning of life, as we might have done at university half a century ago? A trip into the West End for an oo-la-la night out? At my age? Stinking of diesel? And £75 lighter after filling up the car? Would there be no end to the idiocy and insincerity of the utterances of total strangers?
An Oldie reader, Roy Shutz, shares my irritation. When you hear ‘Unfortunately, we cannot give you a refund,’ he writes, you know there is nothing unfortunate about it: it is a deliberate policy that could be easily reversed. I would add some others. ‘Sorry for interrupting, but...’ is a simple lie told every morning on the Today programme by interviewers who are clearly not sorry at all. Equally untruthful, in two respects, is ‘We regret any inconvenience to the public, but we have no alternative except to take strike action.’ And then there is the ubiquitous ‘Your call is important to us...’ Grrr.
But perhaps ours is not really the age of insincerity – or at least not the first. It was standard practice for centuries to end letters with such greasy fibs as ‘I beg to remain, Sir, your most humble and obedient servant’. And perhaps a wonderful evening is not such a terrible thing to be invoked. I was living in America in the 1970s when every waiter, shop assistant or switchboard operator ended the conversation with a ‘Have a nice day’. Russell Baker, a columnist for the New York Times, remarked, ‘“Have a nice day” has replaced “This is a stick-up” as the most frequently spoken four-word sentence in the American language.’
Some people began to wear badges saying, ‘Have a shitty day.’ I bridled at that. In those days, whereas their British counterparts could be gloomy, surly or plain rude, Americans were notably cheerful and polite. So what if they didn’t really mind about your day; they meant well. Their valediction was just an updated version of ‘Good-day’ or ‘Goodnight’. One should not complain about good manners.
Yet neither should we mistake self-serving untruths as mere politeness. The clichés of modern business-speak and officialdom are easy to decode. ‘We take this very seriously’ means ‘We’re going to do nothing about this.’ ‘We are experiencing an exceptionally high volume of calls’ means ‘We’re going to keep you hanging on for another 15 minutes.’ ‘You will receive care in the community’ means ‘You’re on your own, boyo.’ ‘The plane’s gone technical’ means it has broken down. ‘I hear you’ means ‘I’m not listening.’ Even the employer who says, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go’ is being dishonest. He does not have to emulate Lord Sugar and snarl, ‘You’re fired!’ He can say, ‘I’m sorry but I’m asking you to leave.’
The slide from insincerity to dishonesty slips easily into the language of the internet, where words are stolen and given new meanings. ‘No’ has become ‘Cancel’ or sometimes ‘Later’. ‘Dear’ has become ‘Hi’ and to ‘search’ is no longer to ‘explore all over with a view to finding something’ but, as Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, puts it, ‘a finger tap to already existing answers’. A ‘friend’, she adds, is not ‘an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart’ but an unknown person on Facebook. I’d sooner have a dog.