Skip to main content

Okay

    What would you think if, when you asked someone how they were, they replied "OK"? Would you take that at face value, or regard it as being indicative of deeper problems? 

    I ask because this has been on my mind a little of late. Mrs Coastaltown asked me how I was one day. I was okay, I said so. Whats's up? She said. Nothing's up, I said, I'm okay, I'm fine. Reader, I was, I was fine. 

    What would you think if, when you asked someone how they were, they replied "fine"? Would you take that at face value, or regard it as being indicative of deeper problems?

    I'm being slightly facetious here, but I have been wondering a little recently about how we perceive language, and how we place too much weight on hyperbole. You can't simply be fine, you have to be amazing, so good, living your best life. Things aren't bad, they're a disaster. Eminently believable events become unbelievable. The comedian Gary Delaney has a good line about the word "legend", once meaning "goes on quests, fights dragons" now meaning "has come back from the offy with crisps." (I'm paraphrasing slightly, but you get the gist). 

    Back in another life, when Mrs Coastaltown was a teacher, I was often irritated by the way that Ofsted grade schools. It is not enough to be "Satisfactory", schools must strive for "Good" or "Outstanding". This is, to my mind, imprecise. Surely, if a school is satisfactory, then everyone should be satisfied. Likewise, if all schools are outstanding, then surely none of them are.

    It would be fairly reasonable to characterise this as the grumblings of a middle aged man, and a big fat mea culpa to that. But there are some more serious problems caused by this quantitative easing of language. Back to the world of education. You, well read, engaged human that you are, are probably well aware that the teaching profession, like many of the public services, is groaning under the strain of trying to do too much with too little. What you may not be aware of is that there is an institutional term for this. Academy trusts refer to it as "above and beyond." Now, to my mind, the term "above and beyond implies a baseline level of effort being exceeded, it means an extraordinary (in the strictest sense of the word) effort. However, when teachers are being instructed that their efforts must be "above and beyond" all the time, then this simply a weasel-wording for we expect you to do twice the work for the same money, constantly. "Above and beyond" is a real terms pay cut.

    I'm as prone to hyperbole as the next man, provided the next man isn't a cast member of Made in Chelsea (is that still a thing? I'm old, subs please check), so I'm not trying to pretend that I haven't called a day where I've been mildly inconvenienced the worst of my life, but I do sometimes wonder if this dizzying rush towards constant amazement isn't robbing the world of nuance. There will undoubtedly be far cleverer people than I wondering about this who are able to draw links between our accelerating culture and the changing nature of our language. For myself, I worry that words are slowly leaching their meaning. Sometimes okay means precisely that.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creepy old men

I note, somewhat wearily, that creepy old men are back in the news, being creepy. Creepy old men, and their apologists and enablers, who argue that their creepiness is somehow the natural order of things. Old men would have you believe that it is difficult to not be a creepy old man. That it is a task of epic proportions. It is not that difficult. It is a matter of intention. As yet more of the grimness of Epstein unfolds, creepy old men are, sadly, a flaccid topic once again. Whether it be pursuing students thirty years their junior, or simply not asking too many questions about the background of the probably legal young woman who you've just been introduced to by your good pal Jeff. To be clear, I am not referring to criminal creepy old men, the ones who actually committed statutory rape, the ones who fucked trafficked hirls. That is not something which is allowed to get away merely with the contempt of the observer.  That deserves prison.  No , I'm referring to the hinterla...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more

The five best things I ate in Newcastle

 I have had a brief holiday.  This isn't an entirely remarkable turn of events, it happens from time to time. Not as often as the happy, gilded folk who occupy my Insta feed, it would appear, or the University acquaintances whose lives would seem to be one long roundelay of chic European mini-breaks but, nevertheless, holidays occur though, perhaps not quite with the frequency with which, in an ideal world, I would wish In this instance, in an even rarer turn of events  we were sans offspring. Oh yes. Sorry lads. Thus is because Mrs Coastalblog and I went away to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary (Miracles, etc, less for murder, etc, if you could just dump all the jokes within these parentheses and then we could all get on with our lives) and because we're the sort of perverts that like going to places by train, and going to places we're not overly familiar with, we wound up in Newcastle. A fine, handsome city with much to recommend it, but what I wish to consid...
Post a Comment
Read more