Not even Liz Truss’s greatest admirers- and she must have some, despite becoming Prime Minister without the support of the electorate, or even of our own parliamentary party- would claim that she is a gifted orator. Indeed, for most people she is synonymous with a certain kind of blank eyed, dead toned verbal style, modulating into an oddly hysterical exclamatory mode, as in her hilarious claims about cheese imports and pork markets, which have earned her the kind of YouTube hits more commonly associate with minor pop stars.
And so it was perhaps no great surprise today to find that, at today’s great moment, when the doors to the throne room finally swung open, her words, rather than soaring to lofty oratorical heights, dropped dully to the floor like so many unleavened Yorkshire puddings, destined to be forgotten as soon as uttered. Yet words, even when uninspiring, are, paradoxically, always interesting. Truss began by praising her inglorious predecessor, in a series of eulogistic claims: “You”, she apostrophised the Great Man, “got Brexit done…crushed Jeremy Corbyn…rolled out the vaccine…stood up to Putin”. The verbs as so often, are the most revealing here, presenting Johnson as incisive, domineering, heroic, pluckily pugnacious, none of which are accurate, but it was what happened afterwards that was more interesting. “From Kiev to Carlisle you are universally admired”, she perorated, becoming almost certainly the first person to exploit the near euphony of those two not enormously similar cities, and allowing herself a hyperbole (really? universally admired?) whose hollowness was exposed by the crushing silence that followed. The briefly perfunctory round of applause that followed, as the massed ranks of the Tory Party remembered whom she was talking about, suggested the bored and dutiful clapping at the departure of an unpopular supply teacher at the end of term school assembly.
The remainder of this brief, four-minute call to arms, showed Liz on safer territory- herself. More hyperbole followed, with no sense of irony, the Conservative Party described as “the greatest political party on earth”, the superlative at best questionable for a party which has had four prime ministers in six years and presided over the UK’s economic and social decline for twelve. And then Liz swooshed through the gears, crucially remembering that you only really need one word, one verb, to sound impressive in these linguistically challenged times. See if you can spot it in this mercifully edited transcript: “Deliver what we promised…We will deliver…I will deliver…taxes… I will deliver on the energy crisis…I will deliver …And I will deliver on the national health service…But we all will deliver on…We will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver…And we will deliver a great victory…”
I make that eleven “delivers” in three and a half minutes. Three of them come in a triad, an oratorical device beloved since Julius Caesar rhetorically boasted “veni, vidi, vici” two millennia ago, though there’s something dispiriting about Truss’s lack of imagination and verbal flair- where most speakers manage to use the triad to link three ideas neatly and coherently, Truss’s repetitively staccato bleat “I will deliver/I will deliver/I will deliver” is suggestive of something more automaton than human. As for “deliver”, it’s the 21st century’s go-to verb of choice for management- and what is politics these days except another form of management? And you can see why politicians love it- historically it was a transitive verb, in other words you had to deliver something, typically a baby, a wardrobe, or the groceries. But now it’s hopped over the boundary and become intransitive, which means you no longer have to deliver anything in particular- so Truss can say “I’m going to deliver on the NHS”, conscious that she’s promising precisely nothing, whilst sounding as though she is. Mind you, it’s no surprise that she sounds as though she wants to do something, following Johnson, who’s been on holiday for months.
“Deliver” does indeed have an intriguing, riches to rags history, a noble pedigree. Essentially linked to the spirit, it was familiar in the Lord’s Prayer, whose seventeenth century English we dutifully mumbled every morning of our school lives. The opening invocation “Our Father, which art in heaven” used to perplex and fascinate me; my infant ears heard “we chart in heaven”, irresistibly conjuring in my imagination an image of celestial geographers with astrolabes, mapping the heavens. Addressing God using the Early Modern English second person in “hallowed be thy name…thy kingdom come…” was pleasant, because in Derbyshire it was the everyday language of the playground, and this made God sound reassuringly human and familiar, a mate. And then the end, with its majestic “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”, recalls the French etymology of the word, de liberare, literally to set free (speakers of Spanish still confuse bs and vs)- in other words, free us from evil. Semantics are ever fluid, and whilst “deliver’s” morphing might not be particularly weird, it is surely a bit disappointing for a word to shift from the numinous to the merely humdrum sense of doing your job; it’s what linguists refer to as pejoration, or weakening, and it’s what has happened to words like “awesome”, and “sublime”, which mean a fraction of what they once did. Yet now perhaps our best hope is that we are ourselves delivered from Truss, the would-be deliverer…
Comentarios