There seems to have been a welcome decline of late in the frequency of public figures prefacing comments with the words “I want to be very clear about this”.
For a while there, no political interview was safe from the dread phrase, although actual clarity rarely followed.
The preamble was more often just another form of obfuscation, all the worse for making listeners feel stupid in then missing the point that the speaker claimed to be reducing to terms comprehensible even by idiots.
Good riddance to that, if indeed it has finally died of shame.
In the meantime, however, a new and related plague has arisen. This one involves people in public life claiming that their words or actions are “very significant”, without explaining why.
Now you can understand why the term “significant” is so popular with politicians (and – whisper it – with some journalists). For not only does it sound important, it means important too.
But it also means nothing, unless the speaker goes on to elaborate on the reasons the thing in question is considered significant – or “very significant”, as has become increasingly standard now thanks to inflation.
Listening to Morning Ireland one day recently, I was mesmerised by an interviewee who resorted to this usage at every turn.
I counted at least a dozen instances in total, although when I started running a stopwatch on him at one point, he clocked up five in just over a minute.
And it’s possible that the man did elaborate on the alleged importance of at least some of the things mentioned. If so, unfortunately, I didn’t catch it, distracted as I was by the little bell that had started ringing in my head every time he said “very significant” again.
The most significant thing about “significant”, arguably, is that it includes the word “cant” (meaning the “expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments”).
At the risk of turning Joycean, we could even break “significant” into its component parts and suggest that cant is what, if anything, the speaker is signifying.
But like those empty promises of clarity, this is just another cousin of that old rhetorical scoundrel, still with us after all these years: condemning or protesting about things “in the strongest possible terms”.
There, now, is a cliché that should long ago have been banished from respectable discourse. Yet as recently as yesterday I read of somebody wishing to protest about something in such terms.
Then, as usual, they didn’t even try. The wish went unfulfilled, yet the writer seemed content just to have said it. In this context, apparently, ambition and achievement are the same thing.
The Irish Times archive has some 700 instances of people promising the strongest possible terms, dating back to 1860. And in all that time, not one person seems to have followed through.
Mind you, there are those who do not even frame it as an ambition. Also this week, I read a British police spokesman saying: “I condemn [named criminal activity] in the strongest possible terms”.
Of course, he did no such thing either. And how could he? No offence to the law enforcement community, but if he had the strongest possible terms in his vocabulary, he would probably be writing novels – Nobel Prize-winning ones - rather than doing police work.
Yes, we all want to express ourselves in the strongest possible terms. Unfortunately, we are not Shakespeare, or James Joyce.
And I doubt if either of them, while writing Hamlet’s or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, believed their terms could not still be improved in the next rewrite.
Maybe it’s just as well that the SPTs are so elusive, because the people in command of them might not settle for mere literature. They would just as likely become political speech writers, if not powerful orators themselves: both dangerous vocations.
Never mind the strongest possible terms. I think of the Ems Telegram, a cautionary tale in which Bismarck provoked the Franco-Prussian War merely by editing out some of Kaiser Wilhelm’s polite qualifiers from the text.
Among modern politicians who aspire to using the SPTs, meanwhile, is Donald Trump. Luckily, he of all people is unlikely ever to find them. His tiny vocabulary is dangerous enough as it is, God knows.
I’m reminded that back in January 2021, after the Capitol Hill riots, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the previous day’s violence “appalling, reprehensible, and antithetical to the American way”. She added, on behalf of the President and his administration: “We condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”
The rioters did get some strong terms later, as it happened: prison ones, deservedly. But last month, on the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned them all.
It now seems significant - very significant, even – that, three years earlier, his spokeswoman had prefaced her condemnation with the ominous phrase: “Let me be clear”.
In that case, at least, the clarity has eventually followed.
