The verbiage of President Biden’s inauguration was self-consciously Lincolnesque. Emphasis on the self-conscious. He used the phrase “uncivil war,” a bit of wordplay that didn’t land as it unintentionally implies its negation: A civil war is good. That said, pretty strong overall. I was relieved to watch it end Donald Trump’s sham challenge to the legitimate election result. And I was also relieved not to hear Biden’s winceworthy “Build Back Better” slogan come up.
In 2019, Biden rolled out the slogan of “no malarkey.” I reviewed it positively, making “malarkey” the Word of the Week and tracing the charmingly out-of-time word back to its slightly uncertain origins. The reason I liked it then was that it was direct. It’s something that you could actually imagine somebody saying out loud outside of the context of a political speech, even if you might have to imagine that the person actually saying it is an eccentric born before World War II who talks a little funny and flies off the handle angry sometimes.
More recently, though, in the pandemic era, the Biden campaign has been going with the much more bloodless “BBB” slogan. What verbal slop.
My modest hopes for political and public life in America aren’t for “unity,” whatever that might mean. I just hope that the end of the Trump years will mean the end of the cultural assault on the careful use of language. And so, my optimism droops every time I hear “Build Back Better.”
This slogan is, first of all, clearly not written by somebody who is fully fluent in English. “Build Back Better” is originally a coinage of the United Nations, where it was used in the language set at a conference on environmental disasters in 2015 in Sendai, Japan. Sendai had been the scene of a terrible earthquake several years prior, and the U.N. crowd descended.
U.N. people are mostly from non-English speaking countries. For them, it’s, of course, totally forgivable when they don’t have an ear for the ring of decent English prose. What is not forgivable is the U.N. people who are simply bureaucrats — and who have a bureaucrat’s ear for prefab slogans and the proliferation of buzzwords and pointless acronyms and the word “synergy.” In short, they love malarkey.
This is how nobody seems to have pointed out between 2015 and the coronavirus outbreak that the word “rebuild” exists in English (while “build back” is barely a native English phrase) and that you don’t “build better” so much as “stronger.” The whole thing just doesn’t scan. Yet, by 2020, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had adopted “build back better.” Then, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who should really know better, did too. And then, it became the Biden slogan.
The 45th president was awful to words. He was promiscuous with superlatives. Perfect. The best. He was never content to describe himself as having placed a merely “satisfactory” phone call or hiring “some very talented” people. Meanwhile, his enemies became self-satisfied for not talking like him. Just as I think people speaking English as a second language are more forgivable for abusing it, I always thought Trump’s wife should get a break for her own slogan that messed up with the word “good”: the “Be Best” campaign. Liberals mocked the Slovenian first lady mercilessly for what is really no more inelegant a formulation than “build back better.” What’s next, “Grow Growth Greater” as our national economic policy? In a supposedly new era, take every excuse to be kind to the language. Rebuild.
