As if

Not long ago I read of a journalist who couldn’t understand the speech of his teenagers. Changelings had taken the place of children who formerly uttered quaint word selections and endearing mispronunciations. In their place, his pre-adults spoke a strange dialect. When their father at last decoded the speech patterns he learned that ‘wicked’ meant ‘good’ and ‘shut up’ meant ‘well, fancy that’. He knew for certain that he’d cracked the code once he realised that his offspring never gave him a direct Yes or No. A reply in the affirmative was ‘whatever,’ while a negative was ‘as if’. Passive-aggressive at best, but mostly just aggressive.

Where do these expressions come from? Some have been around so long that we don’t even notice. The expression ‘as if’ (meaning ‘not a chance’) received a boost in 1995, from the movie Clueless, a thinly disguised modern-dress version of Jane Austen’s Emma, and starring Alicia Silverstone. But the phrase has been around since the sixteenth century. Before that time, people said ‘as though’ exclusively. Since the late 1500s we’ve been saying ‘as if’ and until shortly before the writing of Clueless, this phrase belonged in sentences as either a coordinating conjunction or an adverb. The film merely introduced it as a stand-alone statement. And it’s an effective retort, no question. I have no problem with it. At least that phrase has a connection with reality. Even the one-word verbal shrug ‘whatever’ serves as a shortened version of ‘whatever-happens-I-will-put-up-with-it,’ or some approximation thereof. ‘As if’ has its idiomatic antecedents in phrases like ‘don’t hold your breath,’ ‘no way, José’ and Eliza Doolittle’s ‘not bloody likely’.

By contrast, for a while now I have struggled with the meaningless comparative, e.g. ‘as good as’ or ‘that’s as bad as’.

As bad as what? In vain I wait for the comparison. It reminds me of that old tease about anticip….ation. It’s as bad as a writer pausing in mid. It’s a chord that never resolves. It’s a link never made, a cadence waiting to be heard. It’s like waiting for Godot but [spoiler alert] he never arrives. What goes up must…

But perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a virtue to be found in this odd habit. The speaker is trying to describe the indescribable. A phenomenon, trait, event or emotion is so overpowering that it defies description. The speaker is at a loss for words. Sure, the speaker might be deficient in vocabulary or just mentally lazy. But it’s also possible that the speaker is trying to convey the immensity of a disaster or triumph, and is intentionally placing it beyond the power of language to describe. Thus we do enter the realm of the ineffable.

The ancients knew about beauty, terror or wonder that lay beyond humanity’s ability to describe, let alone to understand. Mortals could not look upon the gods in their eternal truth, only as they appeared in human form. Ancient writings chronicled certain concepts and phenomena that were too great and terrible, or too sacred, to be uttered.  The so-called tetragrammaton (from Greek, meaning ‘four letters’) referred to the name for God which could not be spoken. Hebrew has such a theonym, YHWH, which we can approximate in ‘Yahweh,’ a word derived from the Hebrew word ‘to be’. Orthodox Jews are forbidden to pronounce or even write this word in full, which is but a poor human rendering of the Ineffable Name.

In a secular and more playful mood, T S Eliot made reference to such veneration in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939):

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

So in that spirit I have decided to place the kindest possible interpretation on the meaningless comparative. It’s as worthy as. It’s as legitimate as. This attempt at uttering the ineffable may be misguided but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be treated as genuine. It won’t hurt me to withhold judgement about teenage inarticulacy. Like. LOL. As if.