An "Emotional" Subject
(But You'll Have to Guess Which One)
by Robert Winter
Lately it's become common to describe people's condition as "emotional"--without making any attempt to identify which particular emotion might be involved. The person might be ecstatic; they might be despondent. With equal plausibility, they could be enraged, terrified, jealous, grateful, amused, wistful, or horny. Further clarification is not attempted. To seek to understand anything more seems to be regarded as a quest for a Great Unknowable, like the meaning of life or the first name of Yahweh.
If all we can say is that a person is feeling something, why say anything at all? Or why not just say that he's not comatose?
In its lameness, "emotional" reminds me of downtown Los Angeles' Flower Street.
Looking past the street's somewhat namby-pamby connotations (it's probably not the kind of address you'd want for a Marine Corps recruiting station or a monster truck dealership), Flower Street is almost surreally bland and lazy. I'd have no objection to Chrysanthemum Way or Bougainvillea Drive, Rose Lane or Poppy Place. Those names are all specific enough to evoke some sort of imagery, some sense of character--or at least to indicate that somebody devoted more time to thinking them up than it took to swallow a bite of doughnut. Flower Street? They might as well have named it Tree Street.
Non-value added use of the term "emotional" is a phenomenon I first began noticing in sports broadcasting, where it may have been adopted specifically for its euphemistic value. Sensing that it might be considered unseemly on family television to describe a middle linebacker as having lathered himself into a snarling, limb-dislocating, helmet-chomping homicidal rage, the play-by-play guys seem to have opted for the term "emotional" precisely because it could as easily mean the player was overcome with warm nostalgia for his Sunday school teacher or his first puppy.
A possible dodge for canny sportscasters appears to be proving just as useful for general-news reporters--perhaps especially so if they're a tad too involved with the nuances of presenting their good side to the camera to have given much thought to the finer points of the human psyche. Thus, whether they're describing a reunion of twins cruelly separated for thirty years, people going through the ruins of their homes after a devastating earthquake, or a ceremony bestowing a Nobel Prize on a person who was born blind in a Third World country too poor afford a paved road, newsfolk today pop in the E-word with such undeviating robotic-manufacturing efficiency you'd swear it was mandated by the Official Manual of Voice-Overs. Then, having once uttered it (typically in a tone meant to convey a sense of understated but heartfelt empathy), they're done with feelings and all that mushy stuff.
Ordinary people, always quick to pick up on the mores and habits of their perceived betters on the media mountaintop, have modified their own usage accordingly. As a result, when people who have had something remarkable enough occur in their lives to place them in front of the media's microphones and they're asked how they felt during their experience, they answer straight from the perceived script: "Emotional." (Helpful, that.)
It's hard to see how people steeped in a culture that considers this an adequate way of describing the complex tapestry of human feeling might rise to the kind of subtly nuanced, frank and fearless examination of their own personal motivations and passions that has characterized great figures in the past. It could even stymie a simple attempt to get help with a personal problem. "I feel...I feel stuff. Like, you know, emotional." What in the world could a shrink make of that?
Of course, "talk therapy" appears to be on its way to extinction, and possibly the more modern approach would be for the doctor to simply prescribe a pill that makes you talk that way regardless of how you started out speaking. So perhaps the usage is appropriate, in the grand scheme of things, for an age that seems bent on morphing us into formless blobs of protoplasm and id.
But if we're going to replace descriptive terms requiring thought or other unpleasant exertion with something more effortless and universally applicable, why stop at just words for people's feelings?
Personally, I'm waiting for the day when it's common for people to describe things as "very adjective."
(c) COPYRIGHT 2010 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
