Opinion: Semantics: “We’re broke” -- truth or scare tactic?
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
On Thursday’s episode of Terry Gross’ radio program ‘Fresh Air,”’ she welcomed linguist Geoff Nunberg, who delved into the meaning of ‘economics’ and whether ‘we’re broke,’ or, as he said, ‘Republicans have made [these words] their mantra to justify cuts in government programs and services.’
That claim that we’re broke drives some people into a lather. A recent New York Times editorial called it obfuscating nonsense. No states are going to go bankrupt, it said, and a country with a big deficit is no more broke than a family with a college loan. E.J. Dionne called it a phony metaphor. And a recent Bloomberg article observed that you can’t call a country broke when investors all over the world are lining up to lend it money for less than a one percent return.
To the New York Times editorial board, the catchphrase ‘we’re broke’ has become an easily digestible scare tactic; an easy way to persuade voters to believe in one budget plan over another. Nunberg continues:
[It] can convey things other than fear. It comes from an old use of break to mean impoverish, and suggests an abiding association between destitution and destruction, the same connection that gives us wiped out and busted, not to mention the -rupt of bankrupt, which came from the Italian for broken bank. The Victorians said all to smash, or more politely, ruined, which could suggest financial, moral or social degradation, or sometimes all three together -- as when a character in Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ says: A countess living at an inn is a ruined woman. In fact, broke and its synonyms can convey those same overtones of shame and disgrace, which is why we say somebody who’s gone broke is financially embarrassed.
But certainly in California, the topic of ‘economics’ is rooted in reality, not political semantics. Even the news side of the New York Times agrees with that. Otherwise, why would Gov. Jerry Brown spend his time looking under all the couch cushions for spare change as he tries to devise a workable budget plan to save the state.
Here’s where Nunberg splits linguistic hairs:
Well, okay, since I asked, it’s the first part, actually. I get where broke is going, but I have some trouble with that we. In my experience, people work more sleight of hand with that little pronoun than with any other word in the American political lexicon. Who exactly is the we on whom all that helplessness and humiliation have been visited? Well, who could it be but the American people, or the people of New Jersey, Wisconsin or wherever? But if that’s right, the statement’s puzzling. It isn’t as if the whole country is beggared or the American economy has collapsed. There’s still a lot of money around in the aggregate, even if it’s not spread around evenly and there are places where the floorboards show through. That’s where the pronoun gets tricky. We doesn’t always mean you and I and the others. Thanks to the semantic operation called metonymy, the word can jump from one thing to something else that’s connected with it. When I say we’re parked out back, I don’t mean me and my wife. I mean our car. And when the president of the pep club shakes the tin where the cookie money’s kept and says we’re almost broke, she doesn’t mean the members are all out of money, just the club’s coffers.
If the royal ‘we’ are left out of the conversation, Nunberg concludes, the real ‘we’ would have a much easier time understanding the true financial landscape and could genuinely move the conversation forward.
RELATED:
Michael Kinsley: You can’t cut that
--Alexandra Le Tellier
