My current project in this Substack is to cultivate the garden of language by examining those qualities that help our language come alive, and that help us resist the infestation of empty words. Today, I consider the frantic energy imposed upon language by modern media, and the value of striving instead to adopt language that is more serene.

Calm

One of our best living essayists is the writer Brian Phillips, and it’s an indication of where writing and the essay stand in our times that Phillips has spent most of his career writing for an array of cult sports websites—he’s now a staff writer at The Ringer. His essay collection, Impossible Owls, is very well worth reading.
When I think about the changes imposed upon language by the internet, a relatively minor piece by Phillips from 2012 regularly comes to mind. In that essay, Phillips examines how the archetype of the “crazy athlete” thrives on the internet due to that platform’s tendency to both exoticize everything and to dull its novelty:

12. The Internet has given us access to every weird thing in the world while simultaneously taking away the last vestiges of the “exotic.” You can see pictures of a manatee smoking a cigarette, but you can’t say “far Timbuktu” when you have a Flickr photoset about Timbuktu saved on Pinterest.

Accordingly, Phillips notes, the internet nudges its users toward a certain form of language:

14. One consequence of this is the tone of burned-out overstimulation that, for no particular reason, I’ve taken to calling “whaff.” Whaff, in its simplest form, is semi-sarcastic exaggerated praise for the bizarre, the cute, or the stupid. If you’re on Twitter, chances are you’ve encountered whaff within the last 10 seconds. “OMG THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVAR,” followed by a link to an animated GIF of a baby owl falling into a hot tub, is the elemental template of whaff.

15. Whaff is never, however, entirely sarcastic. The attitude it projects is somehow both despairing and celebratory, without really occupying any of the middle ground between those two extremes. Whaff is nihilistic (because the world is so arbitrary and nonsensical) but also full of wonder (because the world is so huge and surprising and strange). At the same time, whaff is always both self-mocking (since you’re admitting that you actually like reading fanfic about Stan Van Gundy’s sweater collection) and self-congratulatory (since you’re smart and interesting enough to have undertaken the online odyssey that led you through the emotional arctic of the various fuckyeah Tumblrs to Stan Van Gundy fanfic in the first place).

16. Whaff is the tone of explorers who have been given more maps than they could ever use and who never have to leave their own rooms.

If the “OMG CAT GIF” form of post is perhaps less standard today than it was in the comparatively innocent days of 2012, still, I think “burned-out overstimulation” and “nihilistic but also full of wonder” capture pretty well the forms of language that persist online. Whaff has merely migrated from text to audio and video, producing a media ever more characterized by absurdist videos mocking other absurdist videos. In such a context, language becomes ever more frantic as it competes for attention with the churn of bizarro images and actions produced by social media. An age of permanent crisis in politics and media similarly exaggerates the manic quality of language online, pushing every speech and every headline to further urgency, greater hyperbole, more exaggerated and absurd diction.

Whaff and other forms of frenzy promote empty words because they place a pressure upon language to do more than just speak the truth. It must capture—or, indeed, produce—the extreme feeling associated with the whaff explorer’s latest discovery or the political addict’s most recent crisis. Moreover, the joint “despairing and celebratory” impulses of whaff produce obvious insincerity. The person describing a baby owl GIF as “THE GREATEST THING EVAR” or describing the latest actions of his or her political opponents as the end of democracy doesn’t really believe the claim, as evidenced by the speed with which he or she will inevitably move on to the next big thing. Whaff and online outrage are pure stimulus and response, unimpeded by thought.

To escape such habits of empty verbiage and cultivate lively words, we must seek a language of calm.

To use words with calm is to give them their due weight. It is a form of precision, but it is a precision that encompasses not just using the semantically or grammatically correct word, but the emotionally correct one as well. “Emotionally correct” may seem a strange concept in a culture that baptizes every emotion, but what I mean by it is simply emotions that are commensurate to the situation. To proclaim a GIF “THE GREATEST THING EVAR” is hyperbolic, emotionally out of key. Equally, the language of panic or crisis may or may not be warranted depending upon the situation. While you have every right to feel these emotions over the latest disturbing news story, if you would express them publicly you must first subject them to scrutiny, to consider whether such expression is warranted and helpful.

To use words calmly is not to foreswear any emotion. It is rather to avoid the temptation to generate feelings for their own sake, because the cry “I just want to feel something” is the motto of despair.

Look, friends. I am well aware that to admonish my readers to speak calmly may seem absurd amidst the—truly—historic events that have occurred in America in July, 2024. Yet even in a true crisis, those who manage to intervene productively are generally those who manage to remain calm. Those of us who are bystanders to historic events have all the more reason not to contribute to panic through our words.

One might also note that calm words could readily slide into boring ones. And while I could argue here that nothing is truly boring, regarded properly, I’m not going to take that line at this time. The writer does bear the responsibility to attract and to keep the attention of the audience, and to fail to do so is to fail in one of the most basic tasks of generous communication. It can’t always be the reader’s fault if they don’t find your work engaging. In an essay on King Lear, Norman Maclean comments:

At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting.

Maclean defines intelligibility as dependent on “order and completeness,” the calm and methodical presentation of one’s material in a whole that the reader can grasp—even if the topic, as with Lear, is something so unintelligible and frenzied as madness. However, intelligibility must be complemented by being interesting, including the qualities of “unexpectedness and suspense,” “for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be—or why should it be written or read?”

Maclean continues, “the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape—he gives it proper size.” To meet reader’s needs adequately, Lear’s madness can neither pass perfunctorily by as a single scene, nor can it be drawn out “until the spectator began to suspect an author was manipulating suffering for suspense.” Accomplished writing must therefore strike a proper emotional balance, must be calm.

If you have read Maclean’s fiction—and if you haven’t, you must—you know that such a tenor of emotional balance is characteristic of his work. His best-known work, the novella “A River Runs Through It,” is fundamentally a cry of grief for Maclean’s brother, who died young. And yet despite the book’s agonizing subject matter, Maclean’s diction never strives to mimic or, still less, create that agony. Rather, his language is calm and poignant, even liquid. Consider the conclusion of the book, at which point the brother character has died, and Maclean’s fictional alter ego is left grappling with the realization that he never truly knew his brother. Maclean does not shout his sense of loss or plumb the depths of despair. Rather, ruminating over the Montana rivers that his brother lives, he simply concludes: “I am haunted by waters.”

Such words illustrate what Maclean means by giving material proper size. The reader can never really feel the agony Maclean felt in his brother’s death, and it would be a mistake for Maclean to try to immerse us in that experience, to try to produce with words the profound suffering that comes only from experience. What he can do, and does, is to invite us to contemplate that experience in a shape and size we can bear, and thus to make his words all the more meaningful for their restraint.

What is true of a fictional story, like Lear or “A River Runs Through It,” is true as well of our arguments and even our daily speech. Material that lacks the proper size screams “GREATEST THING EVAR” or “THIS IS THE END,” and so it loses its intelligibility and its interest. We grow numb and cynical as we adjust to hearing everything in a scream, and so the despairing impulse of “I just want to feel something” feeds upon itself.

To speak calmly in such a climate is to give our audience rest. If you’ve ever worked around heavy equipment or otherwise in a loud environment, you know the relief that comes when the machine shuts down, or you step outside—blessed quiet.

Calm, measured words give our readers such relief. But they do more than that. Whaff and anger provoke despair because their emotional tenor never modulates; they give us no sense that things will ever settle down. Calm speech in its very form suggests the possibility that things can get better, that we will once again be able to speak as if we’re not in the midst of crisis. Accordingly, to speak calmly is an act of hope.

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