"Everybody," "Nobody," and Other Absolutes in The Age of Ads and Trump (repeat post)

CAUTION: Repeat rant from recovering English Teacher trying to get people to cut back the BS of everyday semi-communication.

What's on my mind is the click-invitation Link title (different from the article title) in the e-mail to me from THE NATION for current stories: "All Eyes Are Now on Robert Mueller [...]" / [by] GEORGE ZORNICK

Uh, no; "All Eyes" are not. Not even all human eyes among American adults. This is part of the "EVERYBODY/NOBODY" problem where we habitually forget to mention the population of which EVERYBODY is or is not doing something (etc.) and how the hell we might be able to know.

This is not a good thing, and how not-good has become especially clear the last couple of years.

* Politically-involved people tend to think *everybody* is politically involved. That's patently untrue: check out the large number of Americans who don't even bother to vote.

* Politically-involved people of Leftish persuasion can come to think that *everybody* is ready to impeach Donald Trump or struggle to retain the Affordable Care Act, or whatever. Unfortunately, "whatever" can include such delusions as some activists in the late 1960s thinking the USA in a pre-revolutionary state. We were not, as the 1972 Presidential election convincingly demonstrated.

*Everybody* they knew was ready to "take it to the streets": (1) probably not, even among those they knew; (2) they didn't know enough people, or a statistically useful sample.

* Donald J. Trump is on an extreme of the continuum, but there is a continuum of everyday, hyperbolic bullshit that American speakers of English (and probably others) clearly tolerate way too much. Your kids tell you "But *everybody* in my class is getting tattooed," and you know to tell them, "Name two." Try similar challenges when adults (with less excuse than kids) hit you with AdSpeak, CoachSpeak, CampaignSpeak, AcademicSpeak — all those "disruptive interventions" by just a journal article — CorpSpeak, and similar fonts of hyperbole and other usually misused figures of speech. The road to Trump was paved with sloppy use of language (superlatives anyone?) and bullshit clichés like, "Since the beginning of time" — Really? Is that since the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness (for highly local, subjective time), or even the last odd 6K years for a popular Mythic Time? "We want 110%?" — Uh, huh: You're saying you want a blank check on my time, right? "The worst/best _______ ever." (1) Again, probably not. (2) Something doesn't have to be THE WORST EVER!!! to be very, very bad. The pizza you're selling doesn't have to be the best in this arm of the galaxy to be a good buy: In a big city, as MAD Magazine pointed out long ago, best on the block is probably good enough.

People who (figuratively) bend over backwards not to offend their auditors on identity grounds should take at least a bit of care not to offend their auditors' intelligence.

"Everybody/Nobody Is Talking About ..." — A Note on Usage

      This is from an e-blast from the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I've encountered the line a number of places: "Here's something nobody in the media is talking about: ..." Or it's a rhetorical question, "Why is nobody talking about ...?" Or, for the flip side, the assertion, "Everybody is talking about ...."
      Uh-huh.
      First off, as the wise-ass saying reminds us, "'media' are a plural noun," less plural than it should be in terms of serious journalism, but plural up the whazoo on the web. Whatever it is, there's a good chance somebody on the web is talking about it, and fairly often on a site that most of us would accept as a politically relevant medium. So before people hit Send for posts with assertions like "Nobody/Everybody is talking about," they should do a quick Google search and test the assertion. "The exception proves" — i.e., tests — "the rule," and if even one person out there is talking about it, it ain't nobody. "Everybody" is more difficult to test empirically, but common sense can be useful: just limiting ourselves to human beings on our planet gives over seven billion "somebodies," and short of basics like breathing, it's unlikely that everybody is doing it or saying it or believing it or whatever.
      A couple or three decades back, one of my students in a College Composition class ("Freshman English") started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ...." I asked him if he dated "the beginning of time" with the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness or the first day of creation in Genesis — and whether "Man" included women and children. A few question got to the, uh, "data set" for his exposition: "Me and my buddies back in high school"; so I asked him why he didn't just write about his group in high school. He noted that I'd taught that a useful strategy for an opening paragraph was to start broad and then narrow down to a thesis statement. I said that the advice held but by "broad" I didn't mean cosmic. I also taught "Write about what you know about" — adding that sometimes that required research.)
      Similarly, there are all sorts of useful things one can say about the major media or the media one reads or some set of mediums where one could legitimately talk about "no one" or "every one" — or one can cut the absolutes like "everyone" and "no one"  (and a bit of the crap) and just announce "Here's a topic I wish more people would talk about, and here's a thing or two I wish you-all would get off your sorry asses and work on."
      We live in an era of hype, and pretentious bullshit like "From the beginning of time, Man" will get attention — it worked in a deodorant commercial — and sound impressive to people with a fair amount of schooling and insufficient education. Similarly for lines insisting that "Just everybody" is doing thus-and-so or plaintively asking "Why is nobody talking about ...."
      Such talk is excusable in a college freshperson or from your kids when they tell you how just everybody is getting tongue studs, facial brands, tattoos, and/or scarification. I pressed my student on just what the hell he was actually talking about, and if you've had any success at all raising kids you know to demand that they "Name two" with anything "just everybody" is doing.

Addendum: Journalistic "C's" — Historical Context (6 March 2015)

In an article published in my local newspaper on 6 March 2015, the columnist Martin Schram quotes US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Republican of California chiding his colleagues for holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security when "We face more global and domestic threats today than ever before […]." 

Mr. Schram says the Congressman "blasted" his fellow conservatives, and certainly the blast was well deserved — but Mr. Schram should have provided an introductory warning such as, "Using the rhetorical device of hyperbole, Nunes blasted his fellow conservatives …." 

'Cause come on! British forces burned public building in Washington, DC, in 1814 — including "the presidential mansion" — and the War of 1812 was a fairly close thing. The US Civil War was by definition a deadly threat to the American Union, and the United States was in great danger during World War II and the Cold War. The Great Depression and the protests and the riots of the long 1960s weren't on the threat level of Fascism or Stalinist Russia, but they were very serious, as was the crime wave of the 1980s.

The threat of thermonuclear annihilation is still with us, but that's a matter for nuclear build-down, which Mr. Nunes probably doesn't have in mind — and probably ditto for resource depletion and climate change.

So, again: Context, journalists, context, in this case historical, and a sense of proportion. It's a good idea to fund the Department of Homeland Security, period. There are threats out there; they don't have to be the worst in history.