All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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Lost in the Weeds

Problem Practices, , , ,

 The phrase is a good way to admit straying off course.

As a language, English is enriched with a lot of multi-faceted expressions that explain its pervasiveness around the world. In it, verbal constructions describing things and feelings are ‘slippery.’ English expressions can be applied across a range of applications that can be a considerable distance from their original meanings. This is an advantage English shares with only some other languages, where anyone can reuse words and phrases and make them their own. In musical terms, English is like jazz.  Both become more interesting when a user learns to “bend the notes.”

So it is with the useful and common expression, “lost in the weeds,” usually meaning that a discussion has strayed way off course.  Surprisingly, students of colloquial expressions don’t agree on its origins. But I suspect it relates to the sinking feeling of hitting a golf ball that has ended up somewhere in the tall grass beyond the fairway. There isn’t much that is more annoying than trying to find and then hit a tiny object embedded at the base of tall weeds that have learned to stand their ground. A shot from that location is not so much a part of the game as a separate bit of excavation attempted with all the wrong tools.

But then, “lost in the weeds” could also be a farmer’s phrase, referring to huge fields of tall grain hiding an implement. And someone online is sure it’s a pilot’s expression for overshooting a runway: as good a demonstration as any of the plasticity of English expressions.

Whatever its origins, it has always been useful because my undisciplined mind tends to meander a considerable distance away from the original point I wanted to make. The phrase is a good way to admit straying off course. Or I would hear students take flight into the same kind of verbal free-lancing, pointing listeners toward oblivion. The phrase seems like a nicer way to remind them to get back to their point.

All of this came to mind last week reading a book review in the New York Times, where the reviewer chided an author for wandering ‘into the weeds.’ The book on the great transcendentalists apparently didn’t get around to the key figures of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau until the second half.  Instead, it seems that many early pages focused on the town of Concord Massachusetts, while other pages featured an extended discussion of the origins of the ordinary pencil. Then, this reviewer’s peculiar observation follows after he uses the phrase:

“The phrase ‘lost in the weeds’ is only an insult when it assumes one doesn’t want to be there.” He then goes on to note that these long diversions seemed to be intentional. He wants to believe that the writer had reasons to seemingly wander off topic.

I don’t want to split hairs too finely here, but it is what rhetoricians do. The point is clear: the book’s author was not “lost” at all. One shouldn’t presume a book has gone off course and then assert that the author probably had his reasons.

The lesson here is to muster the small amount of reasoned consistency required to carry through with the spirit of a popular turn of phrase. Even this wonderful little analogy about wandering off course requires a nimble and, yes, disciplined mind. This requirement means that there is usually some mental fog present in asserting that one is ready to “bite the bullet and delay a decision,” or “expect to always hit home runs every time the ball is snapped.”

 

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The Missing Elasticity of Social Relations

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

In lockdown we have become less able to practice the conversational arts that typically include building common ground. 

The pandemic has shortened our direct contact with others and, as a likely consequence, some of the empathic qualities of everyday discourse as well.  It isn’t that we have stopped meeting strangers in face to face encounters.  It is that the remaining and limited moments of contact can more easily devolve into apathy, rudeness and even verbal hostility.

If we are to believe news reports and videos of people behaving badly in airports, planes, grocery stores, and take-out restaurants, we may be right to conclude that a larger minority are burning short fuses. The sensible precaution of mask-wearing in a public place has sparked any number of confrontations, often leaving overworked clerks to try to calm tantrums of defiance. On a friendliness scale from 0 to 10, a reasonable guess is that many Americans struggle to interact with strangers and stay above six. And especially for  service and mental health providers, the number seems to be heading lower. Short tempers, indifference and impatience rule.

All of this is by way of suggesting that this uneasiness that defines personal relations has been aggravated by our isolation. This is most dramatic in the retail politics that rules the airwaves. What was once more likely to be civil discourse more often devolves into the kinds of rhetorical horror shows, especially at the political margins. The pandemic has meant that there are even fewer contacts happening that might help bridge the gap between disrupters like Donald Trump and more traditional institutionalists.

Of course it is not just the pandemic that feeds this split. Social media have aggravated the problem by enabling political victimization without equally facilitating engagement. To cite one small sign of our isolation, the dining rooms in the Capitol complex where members and staffers used to mix informally are mostly closed; take-out is the order of the day. It’s a reminder that in lockdown we have become less able to practice the conversational and transactional arts that typically help us find common ground.

 

Have we forgotten how to be kind?

And because listening in our “me” age has never been very good, it follows that our impatience to consider different views has grown. An office or public space is shared with others.  But when the space we occupy is exclusively our own, there may be a natural diminution in the ability to see things from another’s standpoint. In a word, the pandemic has made us less empathetic.

Many of us feel like our worlds have grown small and isolating. That perception is reinforced by overreliance on sadly inadequate media that substitute for direct contact. Kids are rightly tired of remote learning. And their media malaise seems matched by workers still at home. Research suggests that workers generally like the convenience of living over the office, but many have also slipped into a stilted formality with co-workers that can be seen on any number of video platforms. A camera that is on and recording us is a natural intimidation. I doubt that Zoom and its counterparts ever deliver the best versions of ourselves.

We can see our struggle in terms of our increased time in the virtual world. But, interestingly, in 1979 President Jimmy Carter identified the same dynamics of a nation coming apart.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

It may be a coincidence that this unusual “malaise” speech happened in the formative decade for the home computer and the internet. Both would become key escape routes that would allow more remote messaging. Carter thought we had succumbed to the empty desire of “owning things and consuming things” in our search for meaning. But the national “emptiness” he described fits the digital age as well.

Of course, the sources of human behavior are partly unknowable, multi-dimensional and triggered by countless biographical and social origins. But I suspect that many of our political and social standoffs are enabled by technologies and the physical vulnerabilities that have forced us into mediated contact.