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Saturday Morning Diversion: Right Wing Clichés
If you perused our Ricochet House Style guide, you may have noticed this item:
- Terminate all clichés with extreme prejudice. The previous sentence, for example, should be terminated. “Social justice warrior” and other right-wing clichés should be replaced. TK: LIST OF RIGHT-WING CLICHÉS ALWAYS TO BE REPLACED
TK is a traditional editorial place-marker for “missing information to come,” by the way. It’s short for the intentional misspelling of “to come.” (Tokum, get it?) The origin of the symbol is shrouded in lore, but when pressed, editors will say that TK never comes up in everyday English, so it stands out; TC might be confused with Table of Contents; and besides, that’s just how we’ve always done it.
That section will probably forever be TK. I put it there because I’d been mentally compiling a list of soul-numbing right-wing clichés that make me itch to whip out the red pen. Yes, yes, I know: Left-wing clichés are worse. But we can only control our own clichés.
And we should, for as Comrade Stalin reminds us,
Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
What clichés do you think we ought to put on that list, if ever we get around to it? I suggested “social justice warrior,” as you saw. Whenever someone uses that one, I want to throw him under a bus.
— Squealing brakes! Shriek! Whooooosh, SPLAT! … 10-4. Area of Social Justice Park, 8th Avenue, 17th Street; stand-by for the other units. Attempt to serve. 10-4, I’ll come up 19th Street onto 8th. 11-41 Ambulance needed, I repeat, 11 41 —
As I do anyone who uses the phrase “throwing someone under a bus” to mean anything but throwing someone under a bus.
— 10-53 road blocked at Social Junction, BOLO Ricochet Copy Editor … Whoa, gonna need a mop out here. Officer Justice, are those … are those … are those Human Social Warrior entrails? I mean, in the tailpipe? —
There are a million yet-unwritten ways to express conservative ideas, ways that might be inventive enough to grab someone’s attention. But every time we use a drab, overused phrase that’s lost its power to change minds, shock, compel a new thought, or even properly to give insult, a fairy dies; a terrorist wins; Orwell’s dust spins below a weathering headstone streaked with lichen, mingling companionably with the dust of Asquith under a rolled lawn of repose at the north end of the Village Green.
He is strewn, from time to time, with a few wilted red carnations.
Published in Culture, General
Welcome back. It’s been too long.
Eric Hines
Especially if the other man cannot express an known concept in a novel way!
Not bad, but I like Keyboard Kops better. It’s less wordy yet still derisive.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
John, in order to use that ATM machine, you have to have a PIN number.
Cliches have a long tradition of existence. What sort of anarchists are all of you that you want to tear down this Chesterton fence without a second thought?
And Yer car has a VIN number.
Elite: pathetic way to say your’re supposedly ordinary
The base: you think you know what’s wrong with democracy
Hard working: who wouldn’t say you are
Multiculturiralism: if you disagree with Tea party people or trumpsters you are an advocate of that
Freedom and responsibility: Required just for minorities
Free speech: Rant what ever you like, just dont Offend the holy base
Eric. Thank you very much. I am glad to see you still haunting these quarters.
It’s not common on Ricochet, but I’d really like to see the death of childish right-wing insults. Chiefly, Obozo and Moochelle. On the first, portmanteaus sound clunky when the combined words only share one letter. The Dead Kennedys’ “Rambozo the Clown” is an example of how to do it correctly. The second is nonsensical as Michelle Obama is fat only in the minds of blind lunatics. Whatever you think of making fun of a person’s appearance, at least the insults thrown the way of Chris Christie and Rosie O’Donnell are rooted in the truth.
The fact that the users of these epithets decry the immaturity and crassness of pop culture, is a source of amusement.
Hitlery is funny, but if she were elected, it would quickly not be.
I remember Andy Levy saying that he was dismayed that grown people actually use terms like “Rethuglican” and “Libtard” unironically.
Count me as one more apologist for the use of SJW. Like others have said, it was a term they created for themselves. Unlike feminazi, it’s not purposefully derogatory. The negative connotations are the result of the terrible behavior of those who advance social justice. (I contend that feminazi is an apt term, though generally unhelpful.) Maybe, you could make an exemption for me as all the other terms I have for SJWs are CoC non-compliant.
Tearing down fences is allowed as long as you face East while doing it.
Just great. First I have a bunch of left wingers telling me what words I must use and what words are taboo, and now it seems the right wings wants to do the same. So much for that 1st amendment freedom of speech concept. More and more it seems that after you scratch the surface there is not a lot of difference between the sides / parties / ideologies.
“ramming same sex marriage down our throats”
I’ve always thought it was hilarious, but I guess it’s a cliche…
Also “mushroom cloud over New York/Tel Aviv/Des Moines/Tehran”
bleagh
Seriously?
Nobody’s talking about freedom of speech. Nobody’s banning them, even under the Ricochet Code of Conduct. Nobody’s talking about taboos.
We’re talking about how to be good writers. If that’s in opposition to the 1st Amendment, so is the Chicago Manual of Style.
I’ll plead guilty to probably having used some of the cliches on the thread, and will probably be guilty of some of them and of others in the future. But I’d be a better writer if I didn’t.
Bullseye, Claire!
“Politics and The English Language” is a comparatively short essay by George Orwell. Ever since I read it I have said I would gladly exchange it for all the rest of the literature of the subject. I stand by my words.
Ricochetti, our discussion so far has been mainly of cliched *epithets*; the subject is a good deal broader.
My own candidate for oblivion is “–any time soon” which infects political prognostication like athlete’s foot. Not particularly Right Wing, though.
Agreed. And almost any pun on the name of a person or organization, if it is funny at all, is funny once.
I also have a thing about calling the president by his title. The man is “President Obama,” for the most part, at least on first mention in an article — I’ve no objection to last name only for casual reference. What you think of his performance in office is irrelevant. That’s his job, and that’s the title that goes with it.
The quality of our political insults these days is really very sad. It would be improved by a little touch of Churchill.
SJW is a well defined and useful category. Would you get rid of the words ‘rat’, ‘weasel’, and ‘cockroach’?
Personally I’d get rid of the word “cockroach” in reference to a certain Senator from Mississippi, even though I particularly do not admire that Senator.
As for the word itself, I’d love to get rid of it if only that would likewise rid us of the loathsome creatures themselves.
Regardless of Y’all’s conclusions, I’m keeping “hippies stink.”
Disagree. The Presidency ain’t royalty. Where I come from respect is earned. He’ll always be Barry to Me (Barry Hussein if I feel like typing more).
That’s exactly what I was getting at — Churchill was capable of clever insults. Compare to what Boehner allegedly said about Cruz, or Trump’s style — they’re not remotely funny. It’s just name-calling. Come on, surely they can do better than that.
See, that’s actually funny, and there’s a point to it.
(And yes, maybe some people would say it’s disrespectful, and our context is different. Unlike Attlee, the President is Head of State. But it’s not petty name-calling, which is what I really object to.)
Churchill also once described Ramsay MacDonald as having “the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.”
And on another note, I always appreciated Churchill’s letter to the Japanese Ambassador:
Perhaps only a British leader would politely sign himself “your obedient servant” as he declares war in a conflict he fully intends to win. As Churchill put it, “Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
“Libtard” is another groan-worthy one. “Rethuglican” is at least, sort of, clever, but not anymore.
From the other side, I hate “freedumb” and “Faux News”. Do they even know how “faux” is pronounced?
“Ramming anything down our throats” is an annoyingly hyperbolic phrase.
Leigh wasn’t asking us to bow down before Obama, just to refer to him as the president, which he is. The presidency isn’t royalty and therefore we shouldn’t be reticent to call Obama the president.
Another cliche to kill: respect is earned. As if we should be jerks to everyone until they prove they’re worthy of our respect.
Further, it’s entirely appropriate that we use it because while they use it as a mythic description of themselves, we use it as mockery. And they so deserve mockery.
You’re free to say “Obozo” to your heart’s content. I kindly submit that doing so makes you look dim.