The primary meaning of the noun “expression” – though not its most common meaning — is the forced evacuation of a substance from a container: We express toothpaste from a tube, for instance, or water from a wet towel, or air from a balloon. Or air from someone’s lungs. We express air every time we exhale or speak, actually, but that’s not saying much. Because in order to say something, to articulate words, we need to do more than express air – we also need to bring our vocal cords and lips and tongue into play. In that way, we process the raw air that is expressed from our lungs into refined words, which we can use to express the thoughts coming to life in our brains. Ultimately, then, words represent something expressed from a person’s brain – and they’re tools for transferring a thought from one person’s brain to another’s.
But that explanation doesn’t always ring true, does it? Words don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Some people express words that don’t make sense, and while those words do gain entry into our brains, they don’t take up permanent residence there. Consider delusional people, for instance: We hear their words, but we can’t comprehend what the words are meant to express, and the words soon dissipate into the ether. Or consider politicians: An expression of opinion by a politician – Donald Trump immediately comes to mind – often doesn’t make any sense. For instance, the repeated pronouncements from the Trump White House during the covid-19 pandemic that “We are winning the war against the virus” — when statistics told us the opposite — just didn’t lodge comfortably in our brains. Nor have pronouncements that “climate change is a hoax,” inasmuch as we have witnessed, year after year, vast forested regions in the West consumed by flames and many towns in the Midwest and Northeast submerged in flood waters. We didn’t grasp any thought behind the words, only whimsy, and we rightly expected that the words uttered by Trump and his confederates would quickly dissipate. But we soon came to realize, to our consternation, that many Americans did somehow divine esoteric truths in those words, responding as though Trump were the high priest of a mystery religion and they – gullible true-believers all — were his acolytes.
So, we might wish to adopt another term for the verbal expressions that are regularly issued by politicians like Donald Trump, a term coined more than a century ago by art critics: Expressionism. Just as an abstract work of art isn’t a realistic representation of a thing but an alternative, imaginative representation of the real thing, so with Donald Trump’s verbal expressions: He presents us with “alternative facts,” i.e., assertions that are highly imaginative and not a realistic expression of anything, assertions best understood as the verbal equivalent of artistic Expressionism. We are bewildered by his meaningless expressionisms. But we have to concede that many listeners do find Trump’s alternative facts to be more meaningful than the real facts, and his words do lodge in their brains. Trump-talk is indeed an art form – Verbal Expressionism — and it’s best appreciated by other cynical politicians, or by any con artist in the mold of Trump, or by any person who is already disposed to believe in an alternative reality. Such people, we have learned to our surprise and sorrow, do exist in abundance in the United States and elsewhere — and Verbal Expressionism may yet become the lingua franca of our age.
Words are, in every society, the currency of thought, the means of communication between human beings, and we must carefully examine the words that we hear and read each day because there are all too many counterfeit words in circulation. Counterfeit words are not backed by a deposit of truth. Gresham’s Law of economics — which postulates that “bad [i.e., counterfeit] money drives out good [i.e., legal] money” – applies equally well to political speech. Counterfeit words are indeed liable to drive out truthful words, with the outcome being literary bankruptcy and the triumph of Verbal Expressionism. And the debasement of our language will inevitably lead to the debasement of our society.
The vendors of Verbal Expressionism will no doubt continue to find, for the foreseeable future, lucrative markets for their word-work. We can only hope that popular tastes will change in time, as they regularly do, and that Verbal Expressionism will eventually come to be viewed like, say, Dadaism or Theosophy – as a weird relic of a bygone, misbegotten era. In the meanwhile, caveat auditor: Let the listener beware.
DoubleSpeak 