I have been flying again, feeling guilty again, deciding again that living on an island and sometimes working elsewhere makes me not-top of the list of people who should fly less. (But then, who else?) It’s always for work, I think, as if pleasure would burn more jet fuel, as if making money justifies what spending money would not.
Anyway, on the plane the cabin crew like to say, ‘On behalf of myself and my colleagues, welcome to London.’ People can use words as they like, and I try to be more curious than critical. ‘On behalf of myself’ is an interesting circumlocution, often heard in announcements. On who else’s behalf might a person speak? Can it not be taken for granted that to say ‘I’ is to speak ‘on behalf of myself’?
A similar move takes place when someone says, ‘I’m the kind of person who checks the door three times,’ or, ‘I’m not the kind of person who gets up at six.’ I’m interested in the impulse to invoke these ‘kinds of people’. The need for them must be real, or the phrase wouldn’t have acquired currency. It’s as if a tribe is conjured into being: to say, ‘I check the door three times,’ or, ‘I get up late,’ is to stand alone in possible neurosis or eccentricity. If there are other compulsive door-checkers, if to check doors compulsively is to join a club, one speaks for a group. Someone who is ‘not the kind of person who gets up at six’ has at once summoned and rejected the ‘kind of person’ who does; getting up at six is no longer a personal habit or natural corollary of having small children or going to bed early but an assertion of group identity actively denied by the speaker.
These fantasy teams or tribes make such statements sound defensive. ‘On behalf of myself’ is nonsensical syntax, but it summons up a host of selves in an ungrammatical double mirror. I, myself, I on behalf of myself, all sharing responsibility for the welcome or the delay or whatever is being announced.
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‘I’m the kind of person’ gestures towards absent others and also relieves the speaker of ordinary responsibility for ordinary action. I do this because this is the kind of person I am, because I belong to a group, even if the group is only ‘people who do this’. Like ‘on behalf of myself’, ‘I’m the kind of person’ is oddly circular: I’m the kind of person who knits in meetings. What kind of person is that? Oh, you know, the ones who knit in meetings.
Underneath the loop: I feel vulnerable or uncomfortable but I’m not alone. Other people are like me, even if none of them is here.
‘I’m someone who’ is another version. There’s alienation built in, an extra loop in the sentence: I’m someone who likes coffee. Obviously any speaker is someone, so to call oneself someone is again to appear between the mirrors of syntax, endlessly repeating. Most of us, to judge by modern high streets, like coffee, but ‘someone who’ at once claims fellowship with other coffee drinkers and rejects those who reject coffee.
I think of Emily Dickinson’s poem I’m Nobody: “How dreary – to be – Somebody!/How public – like a Frog –/ To tell your name – the livelong June –/ To an admiring Bog!”
There is an air of broadcast, of grandiloquence, in these new circumlocutions. The public croaking of Dickinson’s frog can’t but call to mind social media, on which people tell their names the livelong June, amplify and echo themselves, find or invent tribes for good and ill.
It’s odd anyway to be welcomed to a place by someone who has arrived there at the same moment, when really no one has arrived anywhere because you’re all still on the plane and the plane is still moving, but wouldn’t you feel more welcome if the announcer said, ‘We welcome you to London’?
Wouldn’t you feel more friendly towards someone who said, ‘I like knitting,’ than, ‘I’m someone who likes knitting’? I prickle at being categorised as ‘the kind of person who gets up early’ or ‘the kind of person who doesn’t wear make-up’ or even ‘the kind of person who writes books’. I don’t believe in kinds of person. I don’t write on behalf of myself. I just write, not to ‘the kind of person who reads’ but to you.
