How Politicians Say Nothing in Many Words

There's a game I play when I watch a politician being interviewed. I count how long they can speak before saying something that could actually be proven false. A real claim, with edges, that a fact-checker could grab hold of. The record, in my own private league table, is close to four minutes. Four minutes of fluent, confident, grammatical English containing nothing at all.

It's a genuine skill. Saying nothing badly is easy - you just stammer. Saying nothing well, at length, under pressure, while sounding thoughtful, takes craft. And the craft is almost entirely a matter of word choice. Here are the moves.

The passive that loses the culprit

Mistakes were made. The most famous evasion in the language, and still the most efficient. Notice what the passive voice does: it keeps the mistake but deletes the maker. Things went wrong, yes - but by whom? The sentence declines to say. The grammar has quietly carried the guilty party out the back door.

You can spot the move anywhere the actor goes missing. Errors occurred. Funds were misallocated. The commitment was not honored. Each one describes a wrong without a wrongdoer. When you hear a sentence about something bad that has no visible subject, someone is usually standing just out of frame, hoping you won't look.

The verb that never lands

We are committed to exploring options for addressing these challenges. Read it again. Every noun is abstract and every verb is suspended. Committed to exploring - not doing, exploring. And not even exploring solutions, but options for addressing them. Three layers of hedging stacked between the speaker and any actual act. By the time you unwrap it, there is nothing inside.

This is the vocabulary of perpetual intention. Looking at. Working toward. Aiming to. Seeking to. In the process of. Verbs that describe the posture of doing something without ever arriving at the thing done. You can string them together for a whole press conference and never once be pinned to a deadline or a deed.

The words that sound like feeling but aren't

We take these concerns very seriously. It sounds like empathy. It commits to nothing. To take something seriously is not to do anything about it - it's to adopt an attitude toward it, and attitudes can't be audited. The same goes for our thoughts are with those affected, and we understand people's frustration. Each performs concern while promising no action that concern might require.

My favorite of these is lessons will be learned. Again the passive - learned by whom? - but also the sheer emptiness of the claim. No lesson is named. No learner is identified. No change is described. It's the verbal equivalent of nodding slowly with a grave expression, and it means precisely as much.

The qualifier that eats the sentence

Watch how much work the small hedging words do. We believe that, broadly speaking, in most cases, the policy should, where appropriate, deliver benefits over time. Strip the qualifiers and you're left with "the policy should deliver benefits" - already weak. But broadly, in most cases, where appropriate, and over time have dismantled even that. Every one of them is an escape hatch. If the policy fails, none of it was ever promised.

Over time is especially clever, because it can never come due. However long you wait, more time remains. The results are always still arriving.

Why the machine runs on abstraction

The thread running through all of it is abstraction. Concrete words have edges, and edges can cut back. If I say "I will cut the waiting list to ten weeks by June," you can check in June. If I say "we remain focused on improving patient outcomes," there is nothing to check, ever. The abstract noun floats free of measurement, and things that can't be measured can't be failed.

This is the opposite of everything good writing tries to do. A novelist reaches for the concrete word because it makes the reader see. The evasive speaker reaches for the abstract word for exactly the same reason, in reverse: so the listener sees nothing, and has nothing to hold. Same tool, opposite purpose.

Learning to hear the hollow

I don't think politicians are uniquely dishonest, for what it's worth. We all reach for the soft, actorless, abstract phrasing when we don't want to be pinned down - in performance reviews, in breakups, in the emails we send when we're quietly missing a deadline. The politician is just fluent in a dialect we all speak a little.

But you can train your ear. The next time a sentence washes over you sounding reasonable and warm, stop and ask three questions. Who is the actor - is there one? What, concretely, is being promised - and by when? And what would it look like if this turned out to be false? If you can't answer, you've just heard a great deal of fluent, confident English that said, on inspection, nothing at all.