Opinion: Amped-up and dumbed-down - the words dulling our politics

By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Allow me to propose a New Year's resolution that will cost you nothing: dump superlatives like "absolutely" and "completely" and encourage others to do likewise. Banish these flabby verbal elaborations from your daily tongue.

Why? Because English is a beautiful language with vast expressive scope.

And if you start counting, you'll quickly realise that what I'll call "hyperbolisms" are now legion in our conversation even as they undermine the adjectives to which they are breezily attached.

"A hundred percent," I hear you enthuse? Err, quite.

Social media is already a write-off, but broadcast media and politicians - professions paid to use words - are hardly helping. Both groups have heavy influence through the sheer number of people they communicate with. Influence, I say, that comes with a heavy responsibility.

I heard one otherwise articulate MP say on radio the other day that "there absolutely could be other options". Sadly, this fits the iambic pentameter of our speech but means nothing, even if it sounds like it does.

Frequently you'll hear people say it is an "absolute honour" to receive this award, or perhaps "I hope, absolutely, to be back in the finals next year". Who knew honour and hope could be so quantified.

We are always being told what the government is "completely focused on" - driving energy prices down, housing affordability, community safety, national security. But which? We're left to conclude it is focused on all of it, all the time. Both "completely" and "focused" are thus rendered meaningless.

For oppositions, it is no longer sufficiently forceful to claim that the government is incompetent, which, let's be clear, is already a serious charge. Instead, it can only be "absolutely" incompetent, "absolutely" negligent, and, of course, an "absolute" disgrace.

You can see the problem. The condemnation is the same for a minister whose airfares are excessive (even if unavoidable) as for one taking a bribe, or deceiving Parliament.

Why does this matter? Because once your standard political dialogue is salted with endemic overstatement, you're left with nowhere to go when real problems demand public engagement. The language suddenly feels insufficiently expressive and you're into the territory of "thoughts and prayers".

Besides, these exaggerations add nothing. They do to conversational English what the Crown-of-thorns starfish has done to the Great Barrier Reef. They bleach a richly layered and articulate language of its kaleidoscopic colour, variety, and nuance.

Like the famous guitar amps in the movie This is Spinal Tap, our conversation is being turned up to 11. It is the triumph of rhetoric over reason.

Not so long ago, an observation such as "it was an absolutely superb speech", would have been conveyed just as powerfully as "it was a superb speech".

Another casualty is authenticity.

Simply ordering a coffee now invites a friendly "awesome" in response. "Oh, you'll take a croissant, too? Amazing, just swipe there (pause...), beautiful."

Are we even stopping to ask what these sentences mean? If a routine transaction inspires awe, is amazing and beautiful, what descriptors remain for the big moments in life? Oh, the humanity, you might lament.

Another word which has swamped the language is "impact", and its inelegant extension, "impactful". On the latter, let me simply say that if a sentence concludes with the word impactful, it began in the wrong way.

Predictably, "impact" has smashed the purpose-built words, "affect" and "effects" out of existence in millennial communication.

Reporting on the tragedy in a Swiss bar on New Year's Eve, one report on ABC radio described the horror of the fire which had killed at least 40 people adding that "authorities were yet to determine how many others have been impacted". Impacted? Here it emerges (astonishingly) as euphemism when surely "harmed" or "injured" would be clear and accurate.

There is a more serious side to this than a bunch of politicians and no-longer-sub-edited journos routinely saying things like "there 'are' a range of options".

Autocrats and their propagandists have never doubted that the tone and lexicon of public-private discourse is existential. As signifiers of shared meaning words are inherently powerful, even transformational. Potentially, they are as seditious as bullets. Limit them, or disarm them, and you have control.

Cannot the hollowing of the centre-ground in many democracies - the local casualty being the once-dominant Liberal Party - be at least partly ascribed to a shouty public square which has stopped hearing nuance, stopped noticing subtlety?

If so, it provides a tail-wind for the polarising populists, nationalists and fascists.

As the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in a 1973 interview, if we allow our words to be stripped of meaning, we're on the way to surrendering truth itself.

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge."

Do the belligerent authoritarians like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage understand this mechanism?

Of course, I'm tempted to say "Yes, absolutely", but let's just go with, very likely.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.