The hyper-inflation of language has out-stripped even that of money in modern culture, writes Fintan O'Toole.
INFLATION IS much on our minds these days, though at least we have the European Central Bank to keep it under control. But there's another kind of inflation, and it's rampant. It's the inflation of language, the hyping-up of the ordinary into the extraordinary, the mundane into the epic.
This process has been going on for a long time now, fed by the insinuation of advertising and marketing into every crevice of our culture. But it reached a pinnacle last week, when the head of soccer's global governing body, Fifa, intervened in a dispute between two clubs over which gets to pay obscene amounts of money for the services of a player, Ronaldo. "I think," said Sepp Blatter, "in football there's too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players . . ." Blatter's spokesman subsequently refused to back down in any way from his comparison of multimillionaire footballers, whose biggest worry is whether to drive to training in their Porsche or their Ferrari, to slaves.
At one level, this tells us nothing other than what anyone who has followed Blatter's pronouncements over the years knows already - that he is a very stupid man. But it is nonetheless striking that someone can rise to, and retain, a position of global power while having so little sense either of history or contemporary reality that he can throw around a word like "slavery" with such crass fecklessness. And the problem with using "modern slavery" in the context of very rich young men who have voluntarily entered into lucrative contracts with football clubs is that it vitiates a phrase that we need to describe a profound and urgent reality.
If expecting an overrated, wildly egotistical footballer to honour a contract is "modern slavery", what phrase do we use to describe the condition of the young women in Zimbabwe who are currently being held in camps and repeatedly raped by Mugabe's thugs? How do we describe the circumstances of a girl trafficked into Ireland, beaten, raped, locked up and forced into prostitution? What words do we have left for the lives of seven- and eight-year-old children making clothes for us in sweatshops in India? By abusing language in this way, Blatter is also implying that none of this really exists, that "modern slavery" is just an empty linguistic vestige of a dead world, like "Spartan conditions" or "Trojan work".
Blatter's outburst could be dismissed if it were not merely an extreme example of a wider phenomenon. Over-statement is becoming the default mode of much public discourse. Take, for example, the genuinely sad death last week of Séamus Brennan. He was a very nice man and a decent politician. The Taoiseach got it right when he described him as first and foremost "a brilliant political strategist", which is to say a backroom handler and organiser of great energy and ability. But what did the President, Mary McAleese, call him? No less than a "self-effacing architect of modern Ireland". This is pure hype - not even Séamus Brennan's most devoted admirers would actually class him as an architect of modern Ireland. The politician about whom that phrase has been widely used is Seán Lemass. What are we now to call Lemass? An ineffable genius? A godlike visionary? And when, God forbid, we have to write the obituaries for Ken Whitaker, who really was the architect of modern Ireland, will there be any superlatives left in the lexicon?
Journalism, of course, has a lot to do with all of this. The tabloid thesaurus in which every murderer is a monster, every rapist a beast and every piece of celebrity tittle-tattle a sensation, is becoming the vocabulary of the mainstream media too.
To take an example at random, the Sunday Independenton Sunday carried the headline "Relatives of Rolling Stone Ronnie in mercy dash to halt bender". That "mercy dash" is pure tabloidese. But even within that language, it used to refer to an international emergency - urgent aid being delivered to earthquake victims, for example. Now, it's about an ageing celebrity on the lash.
Words like "awesome", "epic" and "iconic" are conferred as freely and lightly as air kisses at a fashion show. The Oxegen website reports that "Sugarbabes' awesome cover still has fans talking". Every close sporting contest is an epic. The birthdays column tells us that "Tony Danza [who?], Seventies television icon, is 55". In which case, even "icon" becomes too weak, and must be coupled with another superlative like "ultimate" or "legendary". We learn of "two legendary 20th-century icons" or that "Carlow women have voted Cameron Diaz as their ultimate style icon". Ordinary reality struggles to catch up: "Gallagher's news agency, a much-loved icon business for decades on Arklow's Lower Main Street, is widely rumoured to be closing down in the coming days."
This relentless hyperbole is corrosive. It eats at the sense of proportion that is crucial to any set of values. It creates an anti-historical mindset in which petty contemporary problems are placed on the same level as slavery or the Holocaust. It is horrific, cataclysmic, disastrous and apocalyptic and if it doesn't stop soon, we'll all be at it.