George Carlin's Comment on "Offensive Language," and the Train Wreck of the English Language Today

I have in the past had occasion to remark George Carlin's remarks about the word "lifestyle"--which seem to me to absolutely hit the mark.

This is even more obviously the case when we look more broadly at the "language policy" he spelled out for the same performance, satirically rejecting a vast number of other usages.

Notably these usages he rejected were, some inane slang aside, just about all corporate buzzwords, especially as they relate to marketing and management ("I will not say concept when I mean idea. I will not say impacted when I mean affected. There will be no hands-on state-of-the-art networking . . ."); and "New-Age lingo . . . support-group jargon from the human potential movement" ("I will not relate to you and you will not identify with me . . . There'll be no sharing, no caring, no birthing, no bonding, no parenting, no nurturing . . . and we definitely will not spend any quality time . . .")

These may seem two different sources of befoulment of the English language, but one can argue that they are actually just one common source. The corporate idiocies and the New Age idiocies of that generation are virtually inextricable. This is not simply because of the innumerable influences they exercised on each other (with corporate gurus displaying their superficial "out-of-the-boxness" by flogging New Age concepts to business-suited executives, with New Agers displaying their utter conventionality by taking lessons from the corporate folk they implicitly put on a pedestal--profits, profits, profits, that is the kind of hippies they are), but because they were both dimensions of one phenomenon pushing the culture in a single direction, and all of this summed up in the inanity of today's cynically promoted vulgarized pop version of "mindfulness," which I think can be usefully compared with what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination." That sociological imagination connected the individual life with the broader life of society and humanity--sees in the "private trouble" the "public issue." The so-called "mindfulness" I am talking about, and the whole mentality it reflects, does the opposite. It endlessly induces the public to understand public issues as only private troubles, to be dealt with privately--the New Age-ism just another "management technique" applied to the public for the sake of the crassest profiteering in the large and the small.

The result is a grotesque mockery of all that ever meant anything in genuine mindfulness.