Writing in Slate, Ben Yagoda muses on the displacement of the imperative by the construction “need to.” It’s become increasing rare to tell or be told, directly, to do something. Instead, we tell people they “need to” do this or that, or we’re told something “needs to be done.”
The ascendance of need to dovetails perfectly with the long and sad decline of the traditional imperative mood. Sad, because it’s a great mood. Without it, the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions. In our society, where giving offense is always feared, the imperative is rarely heard. So, instead of the pleasingly direct “No Smoking,” we have the presumptuous “Thank You for Not Smoking” or the loopily existential “There Is No Smoking.” The last remaining preserves of the imperative are the military, traffic signs (“Stop” has an estimable eloquence), innocuous adieus like, “Have a good one,” “Take care now,” and “You be good,” and, intriguingly, the titles of works of art. The biggest trove is pop songs, from “Come On Do the Jerk” through “Love the One You’re With,” all the way up to “Say My Name.” Command titles form a large subcategory of Beatles songs, including “Come Together,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” “Help,” “Let It Be,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “Think for Yourself.”
Yagoda traces this to the Abraham Maslow paper “Hierarchy of Human Needs,” and from there to “a Maslow epigone named Thomas Gordon, founder of “P.E.T.” (Parent Effectiveness Training)” — the fellow who told us that rather than order people around, we should express our needs using “I” constructions:
His copyrighted “Credo for My Relationship With Others” includes the classic sentence: “At those times when your behavior interferes with what I must do to get my own needs met, I will tell you openly and honestly how your behavior affects me, trusting that you respect my needs and feelings enough to try to change the behavior that is unacceptable to me.”
But here’s my question. If your spouse, for instance, says to you, “I feel neglected when you go out with your friends, and now that you know, I trust you’ll stay home every night,” does that really make the exchange more tolerable than, “please don’t spend so much time with your friends”?
Either way, the emotional subtext is loaded; either way, both the neglected and the neglectee are bound to feel uncomfortable, hurt, undervalued, alternately controlled and controlling.
All we’ve done is to render our language more baroque and less direct; we’re imposing an elaborate code of manners that while fascinating is, ultimately, only so much clutter.
What do you think? Is our language becoming more baroque?
Related: A speechwriter notes that our spoken language is also becoming increasingly vague.
