Talking Libberish

When I was doing my PhD at Imperial our research group would get many academic visitors from across the world. Not to see me (obviously), but to spend some time with my supervisor who led the group. Most of these were very brilliant men and women (the rest being merely brilliant). It was amazing, and scary, to be able to talk to some super-intelligent people, some of them future Nobel Laureates. It made me realize that, when it comes to academic gifts, terms like ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ are essentially meaningless. Jargon that might sound pretty but cannot even begin to address the profound differences in ability that exist amongst humans.

But we do love our jargon and take pleasure in over-analysing words to death at times. We even get hung up on what certain words ‘sound’ like.

One of those visitors back then was a very charming and lovely man who originated from Malaysia, had been educated in UK public schools (which are a kind of private school. Go figure), and became a successful Professor in the Institute of Optics at Rochester in the US.

He was Professor F.T. Hoie and his surname is pronounced like the name Hugh. His first name is Foek and, yes, this is somewhat unfortunately pronounced in exactly the way you mischievously want it to be. I can only imagine the exchange at school:

Teacher : you, boy, what’s your name?
Foek : Foek Hoie, Sir!

It’s a more comical and benign version of what happened to Prof Greg Patton back in 2020 who was teaching a Master’s course on communication when he was discussing “filler” words like, um, and err, and like. He used the example of the Chinese filler word “ne ga” which sounds like the N-word. You can probably work out what happened next.

Sigh.

And woe-betide any lecturer today who uses the perfectly acceptable word “niggardly” - a word which has no racial connotations whatsoever, except that it has the misfortune of sounding like one of those naughty words we shouldn’t say if we lack pigmentation.

One of the things that has fascinated me over the last 6 years or so (2016 was when I, erm, ‘woke’ up to the weird and wonderful world of woke) is the explosion of terminology. This new jargon was (and is) very strange indeed. Often vague and ill-defined it, nevertheless, managed to get a stranglehold on our public discourse.

In the rarefied world of geek, like physics, jargon has a very useful function. We don’t want to keep having to say “an occupation of a quantized electromagnetic field mode” all the time, so we use the word photon instead. When you get used to it this techno jargon can convey whole chapters worth of meaning and background in a very few short phrases. It only sounds like techno babble to the uninitiated.

A certain vagueness and ambiguity and fluidity has its place, too. The reason I’m not very good at spotting allegories and allusion in artistic works is probably because I’m too long practiced in techno jargon with the expectation that it has a very well-defined and precise meaning. I don’t always pick up on what subtle (or even not so subtle) messaging there is in a movie, for example, and need it spelled out for me.

It’s one thing, however, to use words and ideas that resonate with others and have a certain fluidity to enrich an artistic experience, quite another to use these things to shape policy and society. We really shouldn’t be using concepts that identify as meaning-fluid when it comes to structuring our societies and laws.

One of the things that has become near-universally accepted is the notion of a “hate crime”. You can bludgeon someone insensate with a bat - but it’s much worse if it’s done with “hate”. You’ll get a longer sentence in the UK if your motivation was deemed to be “hateful”.

No, Your Honour, your worshipful judginess, I fractured his skull with love. No hate there at all.

In the UK I believe it is still possible to re-tweet something that is deemed ‘hateful’ to some group - like re-tweeting a joke or poem that is deemed ‘transphobic’ - and get your criminal record updated with something called a “non-crime hate incident” (an NCHI). Although I think as a result of recent rulings where this was challenged in court, police forces are having to delete their NCHI records.

I’m not sure what the current situation is, but that an NCHI existed at all is testament to the ridiculous stranglehold this woke woo woo has exercised on society. And, I’m sorry, if you’re one of those who tries to argue that this ‘woke’ stuff is just rabid right-wingers getting all frothed up over nothing, how much more serious than a criminal record do you want it to get before you acknowledge there have been far-reaching and radical negative impacts?

Whilst I recognize that racially based hatred exists, as does hate inspired by other things (like support for Trump, for example), actually defining ‘hate’ in any rigorous legal sense is very problematic (to use more modern jargon).

Like the words “misinformation” or “domestic terrorist” or “right wing”, the word hate seems to essentially mean whatever we say it does.

Now, you may think there is a place for the notion of a ‘hate’ crime, particularly in a racial context, and I would probably agree to some extent (although would prefer a different terminology - what’s wrong with simply saying a racially-motivated crime?). But when you have serious articles written calling for the criticism of feminism to be classed as as a hate crime then perhaps we should pause a little and wonder whether we, as a society, might have some kind of addiction problem and seek therapy.

And what about even more nebulous ideas like “offence” - something that can also land you in legal hot water in the UK? If I’m a comic and 2 people in my audience of 100 find one of my jokes offensive, does that mean it was 2% offensive? In what objective sense is something offensive?

This is the problem when we try to make laws based on subjective notions, on woolly jargon. Or try to make laws based on some ESP-like divination of what a person is thinking.

Another phrase I have no real understanding of is that of emotional labour. Sure, I get that things can be emotionally draining or exhausting - but labour? You’ll even see some people wanting to be paid for this ‘labour’. The term was originally coined in 1983 and applied to the ‘work’ involved in suppressing one’s emotions with regard to a situation one might face in your job. As one academic put it

The original concept spoke about the work that many women had to perform in workplaces, to muster up the emotions needed to perform their jobs – now that’s emotional labor

Fuck me. I must be a woman because I had to do shit like that all the time. To be fair to the originator of the concept it was meant to be entirely gender-neutral - but, of course, it very quickly became another of those things that impacted women more than men.

Do we have to pay people extra for the emotional ‘labour’ of smiling when serving a coffee instead of saying “fuck off and get it yourself”?

Notice, again, just how ill-defined this idea really is. How can it be measured? If you’re happy one day and, presumably, not expending as much emotional labour, should you be paid less, and by how much?

Even back in 1983 it seems that people were beginning to cast their net around more widely for ridiculous things they could gripe about.

Today, of course, the sheer number of things we are able to gripe about is mind-blowing. Many of these things are similarly ill-defined and nebulous but we are expected to take their alleged existence every bit as seriously as electromagnetism.

What in the ever-loving fuck do any of these terms really mean? How can they be assessed or measured? Here’s just a very few of them

White privilege (or any of the other kinds of privilege we hear about)?

Microaggression : sadly, I still haven’t been accused of one of those so that I can, hand on heart, offer my sincerest microapologies.

Cultural Appropriation : stop eating sushi, you racist appropriating bastard

Any of the various new ‘phobias’ that have arisen

Systemic Racism : OK, maybe, but can you show me precisely where in the ‘system’ you’re talking about this racism can be found? Is it in the processes and procedures that define the system, or is it in the people that operate the system? If it’s in the people then in what sense is it ‘systemic’? If it’s in the processes and procedures then can you tell me which ones, specifically, are racist?

De-colonizing : apart from the fact that this always reminds me of an enema, just what does this even mean, other than trying to eliminate/downgrade any historical contribution from white people? I talked in a previous article about people involved in a “decolonizing light” initiative (and because I have a tendency to use flippant titles I can’t remember which article this was) which is the height of absurdity - but taken very seriously by the people involved.

All of this musing about meaning and jargon and the meaning-fluid nature of much modern terminology came about because I was trying to understand what the “queer” bit meant in the LGBTQ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ thing.

Wikipedia is actually pretty damn good when it comes to maths and physics, but I find it somewhat less helpful for other things. It seems that the word “queer” in modern gender woo woo speak is somewhat vague and ill-defined too. But at least I learned there is something called “queer heterosexuality”

Queer heterosexuality is heterosexual practice or identity that is controversially called queer. "Queer heterosexuality" is argued to consist of heterosexual, cisgender and allosexual persons who show nontraditional gender expressions, or who adopt gender roles that differ from the hegemonic masculinity and femininity of their particular culture

And of course, I had to look up what an allosexual person was. It seems to be a synonym for asexual. In other words, a person who isn’t all that much interested in getting their rocks off, but who (obviously) needs their own gender woo ticky-tacky little set of identity boxes to go in.

As I’ve said before, trying to actually understand any of this modern jargon is a futile task. All sorts of illogical, incoherent and mutually-inconsistent stuff gets thrown up and you could probably spend the next few years on Wikipedia clicking on links for words you’ve never heard before.

But, hey, it’s all part of “exploring” the wonderful, unique, special, joyous creation that is you. It’s so important to be able to find that particular set of several thousand identity boxes that identify you, as a person. Your life will then be complete.

We’re awash, these days, in meaningless jargon. We’re not so much talking gibberish as gibbering talkish. It sounds like words, it sounds like something that has meaning - but as Eric Morecambe said to André Previn after playing piano “you’re playing all the right notes - just not in the right order”.

Or when you go up to the band after a gig and compliment them “that was a really good set - you should set it to music some day”

I think too many people these days want to ‘identify’ as the building on the left in the opening picture - something special and extraordinary. The truth, however, is a little more mundane (but still cool) as evidenced by the picture on the right taken from a different angle.

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