In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis uses precise and subtle strokes to draw the ludicrous pretension in characters like Bertrand, whose automatic deployment of an absolutely empty phrase exemplifies his affectation. I love Dixon’s baffled response: “Why shouldn’t they pardon the expression?” Why indeed.
Over time I’ve become painfully allergic to nonsense in language, and not merely such automatic, stock phrases as “if you’ll pardon the expression” as used above. When they’re not merely purposeless, their principle effect is problematic enough: what is clichéd lulls us into stuporous imperception; in not awakening us, though the freshly smart shock of novel language, to the reality beneath it, it isn’t merely uninteresting: it conceals beneath the banal what ought to be striking.
(This has to do with the evolutionary basis for human cognition, incidentally: something must be new for us to see it, and dead language is therefore actually obscuring. When people say something “is a cliché because it’s true,” they’re right, but the truth of it isn’t the point: what is needed is a way for us to see and feel the truth, and clichés cannot help with that).
But worse than cliché is the senseless phrase: the adjective coupled to the noun that seems to modify it absurdly, the journalistic trope that reduces a very specific disaster with specific victims to just another disaster, the sentence structure that betrays that the author wrote as the thought coursed through him, without pausing to interrogate it for meaning, symmetry, clarity, mere logic. And so many little pairs of words that are never separated! So many objects destined never to be subjects (and vice versa)! So much automatic grammar, automatic diction!
My own writing is no different: gibberish filler, unexamined passages, modifications that make little sense or detract from the point, the lies of transitions and conclusions, lumbering language that is directed by habit and not consideration. I find these pitiful little clumps of thoughtlessness everywhere and I feel like Dixon, perplexed and irritable and scornful: Why? Why?
It always makes me laugh. I have a fantasy that someday, at a cocktail party, I will give voice to Dixon’s question when someone says something like, “Well, to be perfectly honest, I…” Were they otherwise to have been imperfectly honest? Or perfectly dishonest? Or imperfectly dishonest? What is perfectible about honesty?
Etc. etc. etc.
