After the Bell: The different degrees of disaster (expletive warning)

The common objection to the use of expletives is that they are very often “lazy” words indicating the swearing person has a limited vocabulary (and yet a professor emeritus of psychology, interviewed on the popular Freakonomics podcast, says: “People who have a high vocabulary also have a high swearing vocabulary.”) Alternatively, expletives are believed to be unconsidered knee-jerk responses, used habitually and without thought. It’s possible people also think they are disrespectful. 

I understand all that. I looked at the word after I’d typed it, thought it was a bit over the top, and changed it. Then for some reason, after discussing it with my editor, I changed it back. The sentence was: “It’s an amazing week in politics when not one but two European countries have elections within days that are just clusterfucks.” 

The word was in my mind because recently on holiday in Greece, we took one of those huge ferries between the Greek mainland and an island. They are incredible; a thousand people or more are chased on to them, and off them, in no time at all. There is shouting at the crowd on the pier and demonstrative instructions about staying between the yellow lines when the back of the ship drops open and forms a ramp. I now know what it feels like to be herded. Like sheep, you drag your inevitably overweight suitcase up the ramp, deposit it, and get directed into huge cabins with rows and rows of seats only slightly more comfortable than those on an aeroplane.

The seats were weirdly numbered (M was not next to L or N), and people sat everywhere and anywhere until one of the hard-pressed ferry officials came around to sort it out as much as possible. One of our Greek fellow travellers helpfully told us: “Eeet ees clusterfuck. Sorry,” she continued with a shrug, “there is no equivalent word in Greek.”

Honestly, it was hilarious. Since Greek is the foundation of the English language, if there is no such word in Greek, then clearly we have advanced the language immeasurably or are dealing with an aberration. Yet, it’s an oddly useful one.  

Thinking about how to respond to my critic, I came across this article a while ago about the difference between a snafu, a shitshow and a clusterfuck.  

It quotes Stanford business professor Bob Sutton describing clusterfucks as: “Those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, impatience and incompetence that afflicts too many decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident and prestigious groups.”

I was delighted to see I had inadvertently used a word which may be an expletive but was at least aptly descriptive and, as it happens, one that vaguely fit the circumstances. Sutton says we are often victims of a “fuck-up” (an immediate disaster) but while fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition, clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, he says. 

The word dates back to the Vietnam War and was military slang for “doomed decisions resulting from the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little on-the-ground information”. The “cluster” part refers to the officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia.

Consequently, it’s different from a “snafu” (situation normal, all fucked up), which suggests minor malfunctions and hiccups — also military slang, from WW2. And dissimilar from a “shitshow”, which is a situation or state of affairs characterised by “chaos, confusion, or incompetence”. That’s the dictionary definition, would you believe? 

Often, clusterfucks are rooted in illusion and they imply that the originator assumed that an objective was much easier to attain than it is. Or, at the very least, they fail to acknowledge the realities of their environment and don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know. 

In the case of the UK and French elections, they were “clusterfucks” in the sense that the people who called the elections somehow managed to convince themselves that the result would be better than the disasters they turned out to be. Ensemble, the party of French President Emmanuel Macron, went from 245 seats in a 577-seat parliament to 168 seats. Former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party went from 372 seats to 121 in a 650-seat parliament. Not the anticipated outcome for either.

They both had their reasons for calling the elections, but while sometimes an expletive may be thoughtless, ill-considered shorthand, sometimes it is exactly the right description!

What about the disrespect issue? Here I think my critic is probably right. In a casual, commentary column like this one, I suppose you could argue that it’s no great shakes. After all, I use all kinds of modern shorthand, like “obvs” and “natch”. It’s meant to be an injection of lightheartedness to serve as a relief both to the often weighty subject matter and in contrast to the overstated, somewhat obvious and overwritten op-eds we see in publications all the time. But expletives are noxious, so in general I think we journalists should try to avoid them.

In the modern era, that’s what social media is for, it appears. DM