A couple of months ago I wrote a piece for this blog titled “How to write the shortest joke in the world”. It was meant to be a diversionary lunchbreak read, breezy of subject and light in tone. I had certainly not set out to offend anyone. But despite these intentions, my blogpost riled the comedian Andrew Lawrence enough for him to use his Facebook page to describe it as “genuinely the worst article I have ever read, about anything, ever, in my life”.
Now, Lawrence’s criticism didn’t sting me all that keenly. It wasn’t specific enough to induce paroxysmal self-doubt. (Was it my predilection for baroque verbiage, Andrew? Or the clumsiness of my peroration? Perhaps you felt threatened by having the cogs and levers of your craft exposed? Give me something concrete to worry about!) Nor does a glance at Lawrence’s Twitter feed – a litany of sham provocateur brave-enough-to-say-what-you-won’t schtick – suggest that he passes the arbitrary probity threshold I use to decide whether I should care about other people’s opinions. No, what was most disappointing was that Lawrence resorted to an extremely cheap trick from the rhetorical playbook: the superlative.
The objective of most proffered opinion ‒ whether in op-ed thinkpieces, blogs or social media status updates ‒ is for the author to bring the reader round to their point of view. In person, charisma, eloquence and forcefulness may provide able surrogates for a truly persuasive argument; politicians supply evidence of this almost every day. But written arguments require true rhetorical skill. You need to give the sense that you’ve given due consideration to the competing cases. You need to appear sober and detached enough to provide independent analysis. And you need to demonstrate that you have the experience, decency and sagacity for your reader to trust your verdict. Only then can you build up the authority to deliver your discerning judgment.
Using the blunt trauma of a superlative as part of an argument is a rhetorical own goal. It’s cheap (consider a kebab shop that describes itself as BEST KEBAB SHOP), it makes you look solipsistic and dogmatic, and ultimately it crushes your credibility as a trustworthy arbiter (Kanye West: “I’m the greatest rock star in the world!”).
In 1950, the then editor of the Manchester Guardian, AP Wadsworth, added a decree to the paper’s stylebook that recognised this: “Superlatives must be used very sparingly, in every sense. We do not wish to give the impression that we live in a constant state of excitement.” But the pressure to generate clicks through headline exaggeration has nevertheless led to the proliferation of superlatives across the media. X is bad therefore it is labelled the worst. Y is good therefore it is branded the best. Examples I’ve culled from the thousands of internet comment pieces churned out every week include: “Are millennials the worst generation ever?” “Is this the best vacuum cleaner ever?” “This is the worst government ever.” This last example is a particularly persistent trope whose historical illiteracy has been lampooned by an excellent Al Murray routine.
Donald Trump is very fond of superlatives, living as he does in a constant state of excitement. During his vituperative campaign, he has described Hillary Clinton as “the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States”, exalted himself as “the most militaristic person ever”, and claimed that he would become “the greatest jobs president that God ever created”.
It’s because of Trump’s rise that I felt compelled to respond to Lawrence’s comment. Because it’s hyperbolic observations like his that have helped create the hysterical environment for the likes of the Republican rabble-rouser to flourish. All of Trump’s outlandish claims in the above paragraph are nauseating tosh: CNN discovered that his commitment to the military was so strong that he deferred from the Vietnam war five times. But somehow, the grandstanding language he uses has not actually proved all that emetic. Rather, because he’s using the titillating vernacular of the internet, his oration is at once recognisable and reassuringly familiar. Trump is therefore able to brush off scrutiny, simplify debates and seed the internet with vine-able one-liner put-downs and unverifiable claims because the digital soil has been tilled for him.
There’s something unpleasant about the modern human condition, that we love to ridicule the worst and idolise the best. We are rarely engaged enough to describe things as they really are, which is somewhere in the middle. But it is the duty of commentators and public figures to resist these urges. It’s their responsibility to peer into the messy and complex world of art and life and sport and politics – things that are normally quite good or quite bad, rarely the very best or the very worst – and use the finepoint vocabulary at their disposal to fairly describe the object at hand, before passing judgment. Not to resort to lurid superlatives. To do so is an invitation to idiocrats.
Twitter: @jamesgingell1