When I was in college I fell in love with a man who loved to smoke. He consumed both pot and tobacco with a craftsman’s attention to detail. I never much cared for pot, alcohol was my preference, but I did smoke cigarettes. I bought mine in packs from the gas station. At the time, I smoked Camel nons, what we used to call filterless cigarettes, the kind where you inevitably pick a fleck of tobacco off the tip of your tongue. This was before the trendy American Spirits, which I smoked later, but well after everyone knew smoking was bad for us. This man rolled his own cigarettes. He was so skilled at it he could roll one handed, while driving, and come up with a perfect cylinder of tobacco wrapped in thin paper. I thought we were so cool, driving to his house by the beach, suntanned, young, windows open, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and drinking a cold Heineken. Yes, while driving – I was an alcoholic even then. It’s summer now, warm, and I’m thinking about things I love that are inherently fraught. I love catch phrases, labels, easy tags. At work, I call them terms of art. A term of art is a phrase a group uses to describe a pattern or behavior. It can be as simple as a father whispering to his teen-aged kids “FHB” when Uncle Jim and his family arrive unexpectedly for dinner, meaning “Family Hold Back” as in, don’t take your customary second helping until everyone has eaten. It’s shorthand, but it often conveys cultural information. The FHB family – (this is a real example) values hospitality, and wants everyone to feel welcome. Nobody’s going hungry, there’s plenty of snacks for later, but with FHB Jim and family each get a plateful. In-jokes and neologisms can be terms of art, shorthand that conveys cultural information about what is in or out, a kind of linguistic side-eye, side-eye being a term of art. When I coach work teams I invite them to come up with their own terms of art. What are phrases that can serve as shortcuts and emphasize cultural values or aspirations? A lot of my clients are in advertising, so they come up with some very creative ways of expressing things like a commitment to being direct or tolerating conflict or setting good boundaries with clients. Confidentiality precludes my sharing these phrases with you but they are usually memorable, sometimes involve profanity, and they really work. But there’s a dark side to the labels, catchphrases and terms of art when we use them as shorthand at work or in our personal relationships. What could, in theory, be useful becomes, in practice, toxic and disruptive. Catchphrases, when widely adopted, get encrusted with political, social and cultural baggage that makes them more damaging. They move from tool to weapon. It’s like pouring molten lead into a piece of wood to make a cosh, heavy and lethal. I wrote a few weeks ago about therapy speak and recovery speak being co-opted by people who are not therapists and not in recovery to attack others. The backlash to those kinds of facile overused terms has been written and spoken about widely. And yes, it is bad for us. Bad for relationships, bad for communication, reductive and limiting. Here's an example. The New York Times ran an article about the term “mankeeping” this week. Mankeeping is the emotional labor many women experience in opposite sex relationships when their male partner has no friends or social network and turns to his wife or partner to fulfill all his social and emotional needs. Last week the Times ran a long article called The Trouble With Wanting Men about “heterofatalism” the sense of frustration, dread or doom women seeking men feel about the men they date. These men are described as commitment phobic, unreliable, immature, passive, helpless. I read both these articles, and I will admit some of the points landed. I felt like the labels had some resonance. Women often talk with other women about their frustrations with their male partners, and I am susceptible to all the catchphrases we use to describe unskillful patterns of behavior that feel gendered. Often because they are gendered. This is what made me think about the cigarettes. I loved smoking, and did it for a long time. There was a delicious subversive delight in the snick of the lighter, that first inhale, the kick when the nicotine hit my bloodstream. It was an excuse to step out of a party and a reason to gather with friends, huddled in a doorway outside of a club. Labels that sum up behavior which irks or challenges, phrases that expertly sketch power dynamics run amok, give me that same hit. There’s a reason these terms take off on social media, because they are reductive and delicious, especially if you are the one who can wield them. Even though I really try to be less judgmental, more compassionate, to move with curiosity and openness rather than condemnation and censure, I can feel all the slights and damage of years as a woman in the world reach out for the tasty psychic snack of the snappy label drenched with derogatory implications. Listen for more Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe
