...for on our planet, the most useful language happens to be English. This is not a matter of the size of the Anglophone world. Mandarin Chinese (900 million), Hindi (380 million), and Spanish (360 million) all have larger communities of native speakers, though English is by far the most frequently studied second language. It has become the international language for business, entertainment, and technology, and its ascendancy—to the dismay of some language partisans like the French—is now so overwhelming that it cannot be challenged. Spread globally in the age of empire by the British, it was left behind as the least ignoble aspect of a dodgy colonial heritage (India, for instance, has more English speakers than the UK). In the twentieth century the rise of English took on an inexorable momentum. The reason, of course, was that it is the language of the dominant culture of the developed world, the United States of America, a linguistic as well as commercial and military superpower.

American English gave the old mother tongue a welcome injection of vitality. Waves of immigration into the United States brought with it rhythms, wit, figures of speech, grammatical constructions, and new words from many sources. In 1918 Theodore Roosevelt asserted robustly that if immigrants to the America had not learned English within five years of their arrival, they should be thrown out.

Promiscuously absorbing, translating, and adapting from every other language, spoken and written English now boasts the biggest lexicon on earth—as anybody can confirm who has risked a hernia by attempting to lift the twenty huge volumes (including supplement) of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. And yet, if you attune yourself to the subtleties, in many parts of the States you can still hear the fossil remains of other tongues like Italian, German, Polish, or Swedish.

One common usage has even borrowed a word order rule from another language. Only a few decades ago hopefully meant full of hope. Now it has become an all-purpose word placed at the beginning of a sentence to indicate that the proposition that follows is vaguely desirable. This verbal asylum seeker snuck into America via hoffentlich in German, which has another word for full of hope (hoffnungsvoll). Interestingly, in German hoffentlich always starts the sentence, a grammatical convention that we English speakers have taken over without knowing its provenance. If you think about it, hopefully reverts to its original meaning when it appears in a sentence other than as the first word. "How do you see the future? Hopefully hopefully..."

The rolling cadences of Garrison Keiller, for example, are quite Scandinavian. Creole contains much French along with other borrowings, and in New York you would need a tin ear not to notice the influence of Yiddish. The latter has given English an appealing vocabulary (nosh, schlep, chutzpah...) that sometimes, like some transplanted bloom, pops up unexpectedly in conversation thousands of miles from its traditional communities.

American English has fantastic vitality and inventiveness, and, like all languages, it is evolving and changing. There is no point in trying, like the Académie in France, to ossify a "pure" version that is somehow said to embody the finest expression of the culture. America has a fine complement of acerbic grammarians such as William Safire or Edwin Newman (in some ways the great H.L. Mencken was the grand daddy of them all) who write witty if melancholy articles mourning the passing of the subjunctive or noting the loss of some subtle distinction. Their efforts are but a pebble tossed into a river of change, and their grief carries no sanction. America has no linguistic policemen whipping out their dictionaries as they handcuff some miscreant. ("Hey, buddy, what do you think you’re playing at putting a nice word like this in a sentence like that? You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—and I advise you to do so...")

Linguistic evolution is unstoppable. What’s more, it is blindingly swift and global. Instant communication, the simultaneous release of films to the international market (in part to reduce piracy), international travel, and the feverish business that is the sale of TV programming all conspire to help local slang or some scriptwriter’s witty turn of phrase to replicate all over the world like a virus. The words of a California Valley Girl trying on a top in the Gap will be on the slips of a teenager in London within weeks. New coinages become ubiquitous at astonishing speed. The lexicographers of the OED cannot find a reference to "pear-shaped" prior to 1973 that has to do with anything other than fruit.

Language will always be shifting because it is used by human beings—an endlessly creative and capricious lot who, despite possessing, according to Chomsky and other theorists, an innate talent for verbal pattern making, are largely indifferent to the more persnickety rules of grammar. Language is our most extraordinary achievement. It differentiates us from the animals and forms the basis of all civilization, for without it the transmission of knowledge and such cooperative endeavors as agriculture would have been impossible. What are consciousness and thought without language to give them form?

Unfortunately language is not only mankind’s greatest inventions; it is also the vessel of an astonishing pitch and volume of bullshit. We humans have a genius for waffle, trickery, self-deception, euphemism, and every kind of verbally camouflaged dishonesty.

So what is bullshit? And how can we distinguish it from lying? The key difference is that in order to lie, we must first know the truth. Then—as a conscious act of volition—we may find it in our mendacious little hearts to dissemble. Bullshit, on the other hand, is built into the very language we use. We may choose bullshitty words in order to fib, but the greater danger is that a bullshit-laden vocabulary has percolated so deeply into our thought processes that we can no longer recognize it for what it is. The bullshitter deceives himself as well as others.

This brings us to the definition of bullshit and also a theory. To keep this book to a manageable length, there have to be some limiting criteria. Jargon is a kind of technical slang between members of a group with shared enthusiasm or esoteric knowledge. It is often bullshitty in intention, for it does not exist just to enable information to be exchanged with maximum economy between buffs, but also to dress up technicalities as more arcane than they merit and, more importantly, exclude others. Slang and patois are similar inasmuch as they define a community of users and excludes others. But bullshit is much broader; it permeates our intellectual processes.

Bullshit comes in many varieties. Some are so transparent that we merely sigh. Much advertising hyperbole falls into this category. "Classic" T-shirts, "groundbreaking" bottle-openers—we may want to be spared such claims, but we are unlikely to do more than wince a little. When a realtor describes an apartment as "intimate," we grin because we know it is a code word for a room so small that there can be no sex unless somebody is prepared to stick a limb out of the window. This is just bullshit with a lowercase b. There’s a lot of this, much of it amusing and relatively harmless—and usually comprising everyday words only rendered bullshitty by their absurd context. (These small units of bullshit have been named "coproemes"—a useful term for which I must thank the writer and lawyer Jim Williams.)

Bullshit with a capital B is more dangerous, for it describes words and phrases informed by a worldview that may not be understood by the user. Capital B Bullshit is weapons grade. It is ingrained so deeply that it affects the speaker’s ability to think clearly. That lack of focus is part of the seduction; we don’t always want the light of unforgiving clarity to shine upon our actions. Bullshit casts a deep shadow.

Military language is the best-known example of this attempt to blind oneself from the reality and consequences of one’s actions. "Collateral damage," for instance, has long been a sickening euphemism. More recently "extraordinary rendition," "waterboarding," or "enhanced interrogation techniques" all condense a cloud of verbal fog over torture. Those using these ugly and deval　 ued expressions are not necessarily wicked. They well be honest people who have been desensitized by the relentless use of such terminology or—at worst—completely insulated by it from the reality of what they are describing. Not only does "enhanced interrogation technique" sound better than torture, the phrase allows somebody to think it without all the connotations of agony and cruelty that would be evoked by the more old-fashioned term.

Something similar may happen in other organizations with a strong sense of hierarchy and pressure to conform to a collective goal. Corrupt corporations, for instance, are not inhabited only by villains, yet the circumscribed language that is the norm in many big companies makes it more difficult for those who have a feeling that something is amiss to find the words to express their unease. "Problem" is almost taboo; instead there are situations, opportunities, issues, and challenges—words that are not only evasive but almost always used in a collective context. The "issues" are the property of all—not the individual. Bullshit is the essential language of group thinking.

This is the point abut Bullshit. Bullshit diffuses personal responsibility. Over the years its moral content has leaked away like air from a slow puncture. When Michael Douglass described himself as having a sex "addiction," he ceased to be fecklessly promiscuous. The poor chap became the victim of a medical—rather than a moral—condition.

Of course our appetite for lying to ourselves seems to be built into human nature and is not a unique characteristic of English. Every language on earth lends itself to it. Japanese, for example, is stunningly good at passive constructions. The verb naru—to become—is often deployed in this context. A Japanese manager will not say, "I have decided..." Instead he will note that "it has become necessary..." (To let you all go, perhaps).

Germans has a genius for distancing itself from the immediate by flight into abstraction; nearly every adjective, for instance, can be turned into a noun by the addition of a suffix (...lichkeit...einkeit). Arabic has a multitude of fatalistic ways of saying that Allah wills it, so it cannot be the fault of the individual. Some philosophical concepts sound vastly more engaging in French even though they turn out to be Bullshit after a moment’s thought.

But despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, English, and American English in particular, are great mother lodes of toxic Bullshit, and by its very dominance the United States leads the field.

Doubtless, it is impudent for a foreigner to speculate about why this should be, but with some temerity I would like—with apologies in advance for generalizing too glibly—to suggest some reasons.

Firstly, the American genius for Bullshit reflects a paradox at the heart of American society—for Bullshit thrives on contradiction. They are surely no other country on Earth that tells itself such a positive story about its place in the world. (Of course it is absurd to personify a vast and diverse country, so please take the caveats as read.) Britons know that we have a long history—inter alia—of degenerate monarchs, fearsome snobbery, bellicose colonialism, and grim mistreatment of our workers. America, on the other hand, thinks of itself as a good guy—the country with the white hat. The history of the extermination, more or less, of its original inhabitants was sanitized into myth even as it happened. There’s even an American dream. (Who would talk of the Belgian dream, or the Romanian dream, without a smile?) But human nature does not change with geography. Americans desire as fallible as the rest of us. It is the tension between the American desire to "tell it like it is" and actually how it is that has generated so much Bullshit—especially in politics, business, and the military.

Just like the imperial powers of history, the U.S. is pursuing its interests around the world with the finesse of a hand grenade. With a sleight of hand akin to the way the nineteenth-century Brits exploited the planet under the guise of brining civilization to the dusky natives, American foreign policy talks about police actions, sanctions, the domino effect, international law, peacekeeping operations, the Monroe doctrine, and maintaining spheres of influence—all of which are invoked to justify "interventions," often of a military nature, in the name of liberty. Some of these overseas excursions are genuinely generous. Others are not, and the hurt and bewilderment of the American public when the locals resist are all the more poignant because the language drafted in to cover these adventures wears the cloak of nobility.

American corporations offer another rich seam for lexicographers chipping away in the Bullshit mine. The USA is a huge country. Its very scale has a romance of the bleak for someone from a somewhere small. (A British road movie, for instance, even with a soundtrack of Bob Dylan singing rambling-on songs through his nose, is risible.) On average an American will move houses seventeen times in a lifetime, three times as often as a European. The population is restive and is imbued with the idea that work is hard and that to get on, you must get up off your backside and hustle. Despite—or probably because of—this, American corporations place extraordinary value on belonging. ("We value teamwork here; we all gotta sing from the same hymn sheet.") The pressure to "share the value" is intense; mavericks may be sidelined. TV series portray the office as a haven of good-natured joshing, flirtation, and warmth, almost a surrogate for the family life that eludes so many (and not just Americans). In organizations with this strong sense of ethos, the display of anything other than a breezy optimism and a conviction that the company comes first, right or wrong, may be construed as disloyalty.

And here lies another paradox: American business is ruthless. It always was. The nineteenth-century robber barons like Gould, Vanderbilt, and Astor (whose pursuit of self-interest helped to build the nation) would have regarded the reinvention of big companies as pillars of the community as purest humbug. Corporations are not only wily and predatory in dealing with their competitors but also in their treatment of their own employees. Wall Street commentators will describe an executive as aggressive in the most complimentary tones, and the appointment of a flint-hearted toughie with a record of hacking away at the costs (usually the humans) will be rewarded with a fillip in the share prices, something especially gratifying to those with share options. U.S. labor law, for example, offers little protection to the workers, many of whom suffer the anxiety of "no cause" termination clauses in their contracts of employment.

The dismal fact is that in many corporations, dear old Chuck and Biff, your neatly suited colleagues with an affable manner and those dazzling teeth that are the envy of the world, are trying to knife you between the shoulder blades. Far from frowning on this kind of behavior, CEOs may encourage it. Divide and rule is the old adage; besides, perhaps it keeps everybody sharp. This contradiction between the corporation as the damn setting for feral in-fighting is hard to contemplate unflinchingly. Corporation-speak—with its human resources, rightsizing, relationship management, through-put efficiencies, overheads, and so on—avoids this unpalatable truth by using language entirely bleached of any hint of emotional or moral color.

Management theory, a largely American invention, has a similar function. Management is presented as a science or at least a technical discipline. Control that inventory, fine-tune the supply chain, structure the line management efficiently, research the market, and you’re laughing. How many management books say there is a moral dimensions to the process? That if you treated people decently they might reciprocate?

Paradoxically, another aspect of American life, rightly seen as attractive, can lead to Bullshit. It’s this: the U.S. is the most technologically advanced and innovative country on Earth; historically, its industrial and technical superiority has served it well. The best American universities are the best on the planet. Venture capitalists are constantly on the lookout for the smart MIT graduate equipped with a bright idea and the expectation of making a serious wad. The uniquely favorable American regulatory framework (in part courtesy of senators Bayh and Dole) gooses that ambition. In the great market for free-for-all, anybody can succeed if he or she can come up with the equivalent of Emerson’s better mousetrap. It’s an integral part of the American dream, and it is predicated on a very potent idea, one held in almost superstitious awe: every problem must have a solution.

The Bullshit arises when this appealing notion is allowed to ooze beyond the technical. Yankee know-how will prevail—even in those messy corners of life in which competence is hard to define. The pressure for success is relentless. An American must succeed not just in business, but also as a lover, a parent, a dieter, a spiritually fulfilled being, a healthy person, an investor, and in many other roles—for as an American you are entitled to the best life has to offer. Naturally, for every vexation there will be an answer—preferably one embodied in a paperback costing not more than $9.95. Twelve steps, three rules, seven habits, thirty seconds, EQ, bell curves, S-curves, five minutes a day, F plans, GI indices—the huge American self-help industry, the biggest on the planet both in volume and pro rata, reads with the matter-of-factness of a manual for self-assembly furniture. Fundamentally, it seems to be saying, we are all okay. If we are still assailed by grief and frailty, there can only be some pesky technical glitch (poor communication perhaps) that will soon be fixed. The human condition, in all its ambiguity, joy, and insoluble tragedy, is medicalized and reduced to bullet points. Just follow these instructions, and you will be once again on the sunlit uplands.

This profound fib generates huge quantities of Bullshit and surely is the source of much unhappiness. Some problems do not admit of solution, but unimaginable quantities of Bullshit are consumed in the belief that they are. Religious certainty and New Age mysticism also furnish means of not contemplating the human condition without blinking, and in these respects too, America—though not alone—is one of the world leaders.

No matter how suspect our intentions, language can dress them in noble finery. However depraved in fact, a speaker with a good script can be disguised with a sympathetic voice and spurious authority. In that regard, we should listen out for words, especially technical ones, appropriated from other contexts. When a politician uses the term "parameters" instead of "limits," she is misleadingly borrowing a precision from another discipline. We must never forget that a fancy vocabulary is the dazzle camouflage of Bullshit.

The fluent have always exercised power over the inarticulate. Even George Washington had help with his oratory from Alexander Hamilton. The growth of radio and then television, which happened first in the U.S., enabled politicians to reach over the heads of well-informed local critics to a national audience. It is no accident that, with the scurrilous exception of Dr. Goebbels, American movers and shakers woke up to the power of the media before the rest of the world. American presidents employ the most talented wordsmiths; the brightest graduates compete for an internship in the White House’s Office of Speechwriting. President Reagan, for instance, went to some trouble to avoid sounding like "a pointy-headed intellectual" and, thanks largely to Peggy Noonan, his supremely gifted speechwriter, managed to sound lovably twinkly most of the time. Would President Kennedy’s inauguration speech have lived on if Theodore Sorensen had not written it so well? Just occasionally, however, the linguistic conditioning goes awry. President Bush has practiced his own down-home persona so rigorously that in his anguish after 9/11, he fell back on the word "folks" to describe the Al-Qaeda attackers—a jarringly false note.

So all this is not mere pedantry. Aside from a few grammarians meeting secretly in seedy bars, we don’t desperately care if people say "we’re doing pretty good" as opposed to "we’re doing pretty well." Will legions of men in tweed jackets with elbow patches march on Washington carrying carefully worded placards? "Save our adverbs! Now, please." Grammar is formalized from usage and is helpful to the extent that it aids clarity of meaning and the ease of reading or listening. But language itself can be beautiful, vivid, and comprehensible even with a quasi-criminal disregard of the rules.

No. It’s not about elegance or nitpicking niceties. The vital point is that Bullshit lies at the very heart of executive power. At the beginning of his great novel 1984, George Orwell quotes a slogan: "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." He is telling us that if you can control the language, you control the means with which we think about the world.

This book is dedicated to all those who wish to keep their Bullshit detectors in combat trim.


SOURCE:
Nick Webb
The Dictionary of Bullshit: A Shamelessly Opinionated Guide to All That is Absurd, Misleading and Insincere
Sourcebooks, Inc. 2006