Dec 09 2024 Shoptalk, Sloptalk

On the Debasing of Our Emotional Currency

I'm hardly the first person to rail against the tyranny of corporate speak. While some believe it exists only to waste time and syllables, it's obvious to me there's a cultural pressure against directness, both because a definite opinion is bad and because undue bluntness could hurt someone's feelings. I think this manifests first and foremost through structure and word choice and only secondarily through new slang. We got this whole mess because of women's increased cultural power and presence in the workplace, not in the redpilled tatetard sense so much as that women are lower-bitrate communicators, averse to confrontation. This is the consequence of allowing the pendulum of cultural power to swing from "entirely men" to "entirely women" without stopping it at a happy medium. What's more, a woman who speaks or writes in an old-style "businesslike" manner may be seen as frigid where for a man it might be normal. As women increasingly set the tone, men too are now "frigid" for not kowtowing to the tyranny of bubbliness.

I saw this nice graph yesterday showing the rate at which different languages transmit information. Notice English is on the higher side but with an unusually broad distribution; I believe this is because English-speaking women have the largest role of any post-feminist society with global cultural relevance. I'd go so far as to say women now have most of the cultural power and that they now set norms, which is how we get boys doing poorly in schools ("Zero tolerance for fighting!") in addition to corpo-slop. This might also have something to do with the 1990-2020 fall in violent crime, so not all bad. There's been enough fuss about "mansplaining" and such that a level of bluntness acceptable with men is now less acceptable in the workplace. One is now supposed to "make space" for women's opinions and a definite position leaves less "space" for a confrontation-averse person to give his own.

Francofication

Directness tends to set up an adversarial situation. If I make a definite statement and someone disagrees then at least one of us must be wrong, or at least incomplete, in his understanding. I don't see this as bad; the best way to understand something or find a solution to a problem is to build one's best argument on it and verbally joust with detractors until one is unhorsed. Then one updates the logic of one's position or one's priors and is the better for it. For guys it's not that different from the old joke about fighting one minute and being friends again the next. I do not know why, but women loathe this. There were no less than two times in high school debate I remember girls coming to tears; this wasn't due to a personal attack or foul language, it was just a conflict response. I think it's because I was very blunt. So, like the French, we have degenerated to a single answer for all locking of horns: run away.

Plain speech also serves to emphasize a power dynamic when a superior and subordinate interact. "Go do X" fits much better with the old statement that one works "for" one's boss than the neologistic artificiality of working "with" him. The military handles this better: command is explicit but opinions and ideas are given in ascending order of rank. Instead of pressuring people to argue in plain speech one must waffle until the information bitrate is so low it can't possibly have any emotional impact. Of course it's also incredibly difficult to persuade anyone with that, but then again, why would anyone want to persuade? All points of view are equally valid. As we all know. Expostulation must be couched in similarly wishy-washy terms.

Famine Bread

This is how we get the virulent spread of "like" as the perennial qualifier. In the past, it was a "soft word": it described only similarity or added detail with a simile. It did not signify absolutes. Small coincidence, then, that it was the linguistic poison of choice when this new culture needed a filler word beyond the timeless monosyllables "um" and "uhh". There's also the rise of "I feel", slowly supplanting the once-common "I think" or the simple stating of an opinion. No longer are tasks assigned by telling Bob, "Go handle XYZ." Now it's, "Bob, maybe if we looked at XYZing, whenever you have a moment." That common construct in the workplace but isn't actually a complete thought. Even basic sentence structure is omitted to rob words of any impact.

The Russians use sawdust. The Haitians, dirt. Everywhere people adulterate their bread when food is scarce. It fills their stomachs for a moment yet they continue wasting away. Perhaps when I speak of fillers and qualifiers I do so with more venom than others. I consider it a justified response to the starvation of the American mind.

A Beautiful Cast

Every guy has heard the maxim that we receive around one compliment per month and remember nearly all of them. For most, it's true. Women tend to compliment each other more, frequently as the opening salvo of an interaction. This isn't ipso facto bad but it does rob it of its force. When I discussed this with some friends a few months ago, they remarked I am usually sparing with compliments but that they are genuine rather than rote. But they are now like exclamation points, handed out haphazardly, almost on reflex. And so they are often without meaning.

A cast is an unsightly thing. It distorts the symmetry of one's body, is indicative of a temporarily crippling injury, and often smells after a few weeks. It excites pity but certainly not aesthetic admiration. And yet, I once heard one woman say to another, "Oh my gosh, that's such a cute cast, it looks so good."

Boy, I'll Take Soap to Your Mouth

The beast rears its head again when you examine the rise of cussing. Words that were once the strongest of oaths are now somewhat common. "Bombs" one would never utter in the presence of a lady or a child are heard on the street. This sort of verbal degeneracy is accepted in polite society.

Why Use Many Word?

A 2016 study showed that over forty years, when controlled for education, the vocabulary of Americans has fallen over eleven per cent. 1 This decline appears mostly confined to "literary" words and has most sharply impacted people with a bachelor's or master's degree. I have always found English to be a marvelous language with an unparalleled depth of meaning. Those dozen synonyms you hated learning each have a unique connotation that lets every American choose not just the base meaning but also the emotion that a word carries. That level of intentionality, while hard to learn, obviates the need for five exclamation points, four smiley emojis, three happy gifs, two "awesome" slides, and a "so psyched to sync up at three!"

A Mouthful of Rocks

At one time, we learned not just to talk but to speak. We controlled our voices better and used the arts of cadence and tone to augment our words. Our language was spoken more slowly so people had time to flip through their mental thesaurus, select the right option, and articulate it well. Inability to add shades of meaning through word choice and time-honored rhetorical technique forces one to resort to "awesome!!!" for positives and "@!%*(#)#!^" for negatives.

Every year this problem gets worse. The Wall Street Journal ran an excellent piece on "exclamation point inflation"; or, why the (likely female) intern just sent a business e-mail with no fewer than half a dozen of the accursed things. The expectation is no longer to convey mere politeness but bubbliness, a constant cheer. Without the tools to communicate emotional state, interaction invites a constant need to subtly reassure the other party that one is happy. Enjoying this. Everything is good. There is not and will not be a confrontation.

It's no longer enough to simply feel "fine". Although fifty years ago that word, in a normal or upbeat tone, would convey that one was having quite a good day, it's now the customary way to inform one's interlocutor that one has been scalded by hot coffee, had his fender dented three times, and was just placed on a performance improvement plan, and this conversation is ever so tiring, and one really wishes to be left alone. "Alright" - a once-optimistic contraction of "all [is] right" - has traced an identical trajectory. A routine document is now pronounced "awesome", putting it roughly on par with the Colossus of Rhodes. This in addition to the long-standing tendency of English to maintain only the negative form of a word; when was the last time you said something was "couth"? I see English becoming a more depressed and depressing language.

English Has Fallen, Billions Must 🙂

And so we are left with the last resort of fools, zoomers, and the palsied: the emoji. We have entirely abandoned any pretense of conveying tone through word and now resort to sending little smiley and frowny faces with everything.

Old Man Yells At Cloud?

I don't believe this is just a case of someone raised traditionally raging at the march of progress. Any self-respecting Sapir-Worf maximalist must agree that such a linguistic shift is nothing short of terrible. A reticence to openly share ideas for fear of contradicting those of others, an inability to do so in plain speech, the mental overhead of constantly reducing the intensity of one's thoughts, and the depressive burden of "happiness inflation" combine to suck the soul from the average American. Rabbit Angstrom is now not just discontented with his humdrum life, he must hide that beneath a pastiche of happiness. Only happiness. All other emotions are bad, for all other emotions invite confrontation.

Joy is our interpersonal reward system. We pay it out in dribs and drabs with kind words and a smile. We seek it, some more than others, by sticking to pro-social behaviors and working to please people. We share in it to make our relationships stronger. Joy is not a glass of white whine at five, the marginal like on your insta story, or twelve women in a Bentley. Joy is fleeting but common. Reclaim it. Be direct. Use words that reflect your emotions. Give praise only when it is earned.

We need evil Noam Chomsky who is actually cool and interesting. He could figure this out.

1.

^ https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2019-twenge.pdf