Drop This Popular Conversational Tic: It Says You’re A Bullshitter
Let’s get real: This common phrase that’s meant to convey authority actually trivializes your message.
I love the puzzle nature of language, since I was old enough to read. As a journalist, business writer, editor, and ghostwriter I have noticed a phrase that has become an accepted form of needless punctuation in conversational language—a phrase that subtly irritates the ear because it doesn’t fit the puzzle.
It’s like an annoying hum in your refrigerator. You hear it all the time but put up with it. It’s a phrase that has become so worn out that no one, especially in business and politics, should be allowed to utter it again, anywhere, for any reason.
How many hundreds of times a day can you hear on television and radio—and in business conversations—the utterly pointless, empty, self-important expression, “the reality is.” How did this bug infect all our public discourse? Talking heads use it to liberally season their pale punditry. Whose reality? Who appointed you wizard of real? Bullshit, right?
Who did this? Who gets the blame for this blizzard of of blather? As a wordsmith with limited time and attention span, I did Google the phrase once, in quotes, filtered for the 1980s only. Just guessing. Here’s what I found:
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered to a convention of evangelicals a talk that went internationally viral, pre-digitally speaking, and came to be known as the “Evil Empire Speech.” The speechwriter, Anthony R. Dolan, had cranked out an electrifying text and Reagan crushed the delivery like he was Moses on the Mount. In it the president scorched the Soviet Union for proposing a freeze on all future nuclear weapons, calling the offer a ruse to hide something more nefarious.
Soviet leadership, the president said, has “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” To a crescendo of applause, Reagan declared, “The reality is that we must find peace through strength.”
Gung ho! Great line. Perfect usage for the subject and occasion. Fits the puzzle of language at the time and place. Wish I had written it myself.
But since then, somewhere along the way, everybody started getting their Moses on. The phrase now sounds pretentious, presumptuous, and provocative, especially coming out of the mouths of talking heads, some of whom appear to have, at best, a passing relationship with reality.
The reality is… I don’t want anyone to think so highly of themselves, or so poorly of me, that they feel the need to point out some perceived ignorance and correct it. It’s preachy and subversively confrontational. Whatever the intent, I lose respect for any pundit or business person who starts a sentence with it. I hear the phrase and in my head a voice says, “Bullshit!”
Am I just splitting infinitives? Maybe, but language is subtle. Do yourself a subtle favor and never say it again.
