How is it that certain words prevail to the point of being immediately taken up, repeated, used in all sauces and all menus? How is it that “benevolence”, “resilience”, “inspiring” and a few other “elements of language”, as they say again, overcome others to the point of annexing all the mouths? These few examples of mechanically pronounced terms are only the symptoms of a moral and intellectual conformism which ossifies minds, formats language and numbs businesses. Where does it come from that some people so easily cling to branches of the same words? How can we explain this linguistic contagion, this lexical virality?
Firstly, we are paying for the fashion of past years which valued images over words. A picture equals 1,000 words, they said mischievously. The presentation texts were then replaced by lipdubscompany brochures, depressing amateur films, conferences, screenings of slides in series, interviews, by multiple choice questions, personality tests, by color graphs, etc. As a result, people have fewer and fewer words in their minds.
Secondly, this reduction in vocabulary is accompanied by self-righteous inflation. Notice that these words repeated over and over are generally gentle, pleasant, kind. Being for the most part positively connoted, they therefore become irrefutable. Would you have to be crazy enough to challenge benevolence, resilience, inspiration and all these untouchable words?
“Words serve reality less than they serve the ego of their followers”
A form of moral harmlessness and invulnerability surrounds these terms. So that those who express them feel like they belong to the camp of good. It is not so much the truth, the concern to decipher reality, the adequacy between words and things that lead to these positive stereotypes as the need to be recognized as a positive, constructive, optimistic person by those who use them. resume in chorus. Words serve reality less than they serve the ego of their followers. As if using a positive term made the person feel positive. This comes down to wanting to take advantage of language to better gratify one’s being.
A weakness that gives itself the appearance of goodness
Thirdly, behind the use of these positive and therefore unchallengeable words, we can sense a lack of courage, a fear of being fought, contradicted, offended. Louis The slightest questioning offends her, the slightest criticism hurts her. However, in this unassailable candy pink climate, irony, equivocation, doubt, criticism, interrogation, in short, thought, become more impractical than ever. These positive words act like ramparts, like screens behind which the fear of being challenged is sheltered.
To summarize, the use of these words does not seek so much to signify a situation as to enhance their users. By using these terms, they mask their linguistic poverty, their lack of identity and their vulnerability, which they camouflage behind the irrefutability of a right-thinking positivism. Behind the altitude that they give themselves, it is the admission of a baseness that is revealed. That of a weakness which gives itself the appearance of goodness, that of a lack of identity which gives itself the appearance of being a good person, that of a submission which takes itself for progressivism, that of ‘a cowardice that believes itself to be strong. It is the revenge of the herd, says Nietzsche, on the strong, the free and the independent.
But the quality of companies and the intelligence of employees deserve better than this space of conventional expressions and automatic words. Giving them the opportunity to express themselves and exist requires cultivating the question mark, maintaining reflection, enriching vocabularies, questioning self-righteous ready-to-think, without ever giving in. to loose moralistic leagues and their lexical conveniences. It is at this price that freedom of tone and spirit will be preserved. As Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America : “I would, I think, have loved liberty in all times; but I feel inclined to adore it in the times in which we live.”
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