Retire These Words

If ever an era and a locution were mismatched, it’s ours and “thought leader.” Thinking is in conspicuously short supply these days. Leaders are even scarcer.

But “thought leader” warrants erasure independent of the age. It’s pretentious. You show me someone who claims to be — or happily accepts designation as — a “thought leader,” and I’ll show you an insufferably smug sage. Scratch that: I’ll show you a self-enamored fool. No genuinely insightful person would deem it attractive or effective to wear such a gaudy garland of omniscience.

Not that “public intellectual,” a common “thought leader” synonym, is any better. It too is enveloped in an air of preciousness and cursed by its aura of self-congratulation. Here’s a good compass: If you cannot use a title or descriptor to introduce yourself without sounding like a pompous punchline in an old Woody Allen movie — “I’m Jonathan, and I’ve been a public intellectual for three decades now” — you need new language for your occupation.

Which isn’t really or solely about leading thought or intellectualizing publicly anyway. If you’re sharing your ideas in a classroom, you’re a teacher or instructor or professor or such. If you’re doing so on a page, you’re a writer, an author, maybe a researcher. On a stage? You’re a public speaker. On television? Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder and depends largely on the substantiveness and affect of the beheld. You’re a journalist or a news anchor or an entertainer — but please, please not a pundit. That’s another mushy, needless label rightly replaced by a more specific term or terms.

Besides, it makes no sense to speak of a “public intellectual” when there’s no “private intellectual,” just as “thought leader” lacks the antonym “thought follower,” which would refer to … what? Someone in a cult? All but a few Republican members of Congress since Trump took over their party?

Are those two categories redundant?

That’s a leading question. And just a thought.

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Also this: George F. Will bemoaned the ubiquity and vagueness of a four-letter word: “Having no fixed meaning, ‘vibe’ cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase ‘social justice,’ which includes a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun.” Will added: “Shakespeare used 28,827 different words without resorting to ‘vibe.’ He could have written that Lear gave off a bad vibe while raging on the heath, and that Falstaff’s vibe was fun. But the Bard did as well as he could with the limited resources of the Elizabethan English he had.”

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Shakespeare/Getty