Try an experiment during the next political speech you happen across. Listen for a sentence that makes a specific, checkable claim about something that will happen.
You may be waiting a while. This is a genuine craft, and it is worth appreciating the skill involved.
The Art Of The Committed Non-Statement
Consider the standard constructions, which appear across every party and every country with remarkable consistency.
- "We're looking at all the options." No option has been selected. Looking has occurred.
- "Mistakes were made." A masterpiece. Something went wrong and nobody did it.
- "That's not who we are." Whatever happened, happened. It simply does not count.
- "I'm glad you asked that." They are not, and they will not be answering it.
- "Let me be clear." Reliably followed by the least clear passage of the entire speech.
- "We need to have a conversation about this." Instead of doing anything about it.
Every one of these is grammatically flawless and semantically empty. That is not incompetence. That is engineering.
Why It Is Built This Way
A specific promise can be checked later, and being checked later is the entire risk of the job.
So the language evolved to carry tone without content. It sounds decisive, conveys concern, occupies the required airtime, and commits to nothing that can be produced as evidence in eighteen months.
It is genuinely impressive. Most people cannot speak for four minutes without accidentally saying something.
The Passive Voice Deserves Its Own Award
The single greatest tool in the entire kit, and worth admiring properly.
"Errors occurred." "Funds were misallocated." "The decision was taken." Each describes an event with no available participant. Something happened, apparently on its own, in a world where nobody was present.
No other profession has extracted so much value from a grammatical construction.
How To Listen Better
One useful habit. After any political sentence, ask quietly: who, specifically, will do what, by when?
If all three answers are available, something real was said, which is genuinely worth noticing. If any is missing, you have heard a sound rather than a statement.
Most of the time you will get none of the three, and once you start counting you cannot stop.
Written by Orange Liar. Thanks for reading.
