AS you know, we live in peculiar times. Actually, all times seem peculiar at the time, but none more so – surely – than our time, which calls for the expression “as you know” to be banned, because it makes those who don’t know feel inadequate.
Connoisseurs of peculiarity know where to look for their prize examples, and first among such locations will normally be universities, where the ivory tower has become a “safe space”, far from the madding crowd.
I witter thus after shock news that academics at Bath University, down in yonder Englandshire, have been urged to avoid using the now controversial expression. The advice comes from the uni’s equality and diversity network, who sound like the sort of people with whom it would be fun to have a game of darts and a pint.
To be fair, if I can say that, reading beyond the headline in one of our more prejudicial public prints, it appears to have been one person who advocated this at a meeting. But, you know, where there’s smoke there’s vaping.
At any rate, this blowhard’s call caused the same public print to note that former alumni of the university included former RAF Chief of Staff Sir Stephen Dalton, former Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King, and former Vodafone chief operating officer Sir Julian Horn-Smith.
I’m not sure why these particular names were adduced. Probably because the RAF, the knighthoods, the double-barrelled name and the regal one spoke eloquently of an establishment that is no more. Note, too, how they’re all “former”, as if they’d given up on the modern world.
Certainly, it is difficult – here come my favourite Fifties touchstones again – to imagine Sir Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden twirling their patriarchal moustaches and fiddling nervously with their sock suspenders at the agm of the Bath University equality and diversity network.
To be fair to the modern world, former university lecturer and author Joanna Williams criticised the advice, which she blamed on administrators and academics justifying their ill-earned salaries by creating this increasingly demanding and fantastical culture.
She said, too, that most students were “far more sensible and would not freak out” if a lecturer used the phrase. Predictably, elsewhere, the derisory term “snowflake” came up in relation to today’s allegedly over-sensitive young persons.
But Ms Williams is right when she hints that it’s the older generation, once rebels but now in positions of influence, who are creating all this uber-sensitive, politically correct absurdity. Senior police officers today, for example, sound further to the left than militant Marxist students did in the Seventies.
It’s not that they’re calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat, but they’ve adopted all the wider liberal tropes of so-called cultural Marxism, which leaves an illiberal socialist like your columnist bewildered and uncomfortable. I wasn’t always illiberal. I remember chastising – the essence of liberalism – my elders for using expressions that were racially dubious, though these were innocently deployed epithets based on abbreviation.
I was telling them what they could and couldn’t say. There may have been some justification for discomfort at terms that had become derogatory but, today, when my generation controls society’s narrative, I’ve never known a period in which you have to be more careful about what you say.
In the beginning was the Word, but it was later banned. Meanwhile, other terms like “fascist” and “Nazi” are liberally bandied about to describe anyone to the right of Jesus.
Is this the fault of today’s younger generation? At least some are fighting back and, in general, though I tend only to meet them when they’re serving me at Pizza Express or on the till at Markies, I believe them to be better, kinder people than my generation had been.
I am more mellow now, even if I believe most people should be imprisoned. I haven’t gone the way of my peers and, consequently, I control nothing and have no influence.
Distance may be lending enchantment to my memories, but I seem to recall that, in my day, waiters and till jockeys would frequently shout obscenities in your face and sometimes even throw objects at you. Coming to the head of the queue in the post office, instead of a number coming up, one would be enjoined: “Hoy, big nose, you’re next. And you’d better be f****** quick about it.” Those were the days.
We live in gentler times, though they encourage over-sensitivity, perhaps because we’ve had no character-building wars and because trusted, authoritative and admired people like mainstream media journalists no longer monopolise the narrative.
I realise I’ve run the risk of offending some people here, with my brutal deployment of language and cavalier deployment of improperly curated words. For that, I apologise. However, my apology is insincere. As you well know.
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