I See Through Your Calls for ‘Transparency’
Like all other vogue words, it will gradually lose its appeal and fall out of common use.
ET
Words, like clothes, can lose their elegance, come to seem inappropriate, sometimes even no longer quite fit. They can also wear out from overuse. Think “consumer society,” think “lifestyle”—vogue words of yesteryear. Think “tipping point,” think “outlier”—more recent vogue words now no longer altogether in vogue.
“Every now and then a word emerges from obscurity, or even from nothingness or a merely potential and not actual existence, into sudden popularity,” wrote H.W. Fowler, one of the small number of gods in my cultural pantheon. “Ready acceptance of vogue-words seems to some people the sign of an alert mind; to others it stands for the herd instinct and lack of individuality.” Then there are “cant” words deployed in “parrot-like appeal to principles, religious, moral, or scientific, that the speaker does not believe in or act upon or does not understand.”
A word now very much in vogue that is also a cant word is “transparent,” or, in its noun form, “transparency.” In congressional hearings, in city councils, no doubt in psychotherapy sessions, transparency nowadays is regularly requested, even though many of the various people requesting surely must know that it isn’t really available.
At the moment, with hundreds of drones flying over New Jersey and New York, and with no one knowing quite what they are doing there or whose they are, one hears from every quarter—senators, representatives, city officials, local citizens—the call for transparency about these flying objects. None has been forthcoming, and so the calls continue, with transparent and transparency, at least for now, lodging themselves more firmly in the language.
Transparent, it turns out, has several shades of meaning, and various synonyms, among them pellucid, diaphanous and translucent. Transparent has itself become a baggy-pantsed synonym of sorts for “the truth.” Politicians nowadays regularly call for transparency, though the majority of them are barred from delivering or even receiving it by their ideological blinders.
“I’ve been very transparent about my position on capital punishment as a form of justice,” said Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb recently about his choosing not to commute the death sentence of a man who has been on death row since 1999. The governor should be sent to linguistic jail (with time off, of course, for good grammar) for qualifying the word transparent, which, like unique and some other positive words, allows of no qualification.
As Paul Valéry has his character Monsieur Teste say, in connection with Teste’s distrust of words: “The swift-moving person uses them and is safe; but let him pause the tiniest bit and that little bit of time breaks them, and everything falls into the abyss. The one hurrying has understood; one must not slow down; one would soon find that the clearest statements are woven from obscure words.” Not that transparent is an obscure word. Instead it is an inexact one.
Words can glimmer, glow, dance and sing, but they don’t always obey their users. Transparent is such a word. By now discerning people should be avoiding the word not like the plague (a cliché this discerning writer can’t allow himself) but sedulously.
Yet we may confidently look for the words transparent and transparency to get an impressive workout during the various hearings on President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominations. Like as not, senators will call for transparency. Just as likely, nominees will fail to deliver it. But then, hypocrisy and not transparency is the chief mode of discourse for all but a minority of politicians.
One might expect both transparent and transparency, like many a vogue word before them, gradually to go out of style and hence out of use and thereby all but disappear. Yet the words may well turn up in a radically different context. Given the slow but steady rise of young people claiming to be transgender, words will be needed to describe their parents and their role in bringing them up.
Lo, we already have such a word: transparent. Ah, the genius of language—never at a total loss.
Mr. Epstein is author, most recently, of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.”
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