parlipro & niceties

School clubs, I’ve realized, are breeding places for specialized lingo only accessible to those who share that manufactured social context. The strangest I’ve encountered is in Model UN, which I suppose is understandable due to its premise, but it is distinct enough to have its own name and actually set of rules—like a glossary—structured enough to even have significance in weighing a delegate’s performance. And Parliamentary Procedure is one of the most important characteristics of MUN that make it, definitionally, what it is over something else.

We have grievances over the formalities and strange unspoken rules of speech—and rightfully so. Polite speech is that—polite, but can also be annoying, inefficient, and insincere. Corporate jargon is exhausting. And the general wishy-washiness and calculated language manipulation of politics is deliberately misleading. Under Nixon, William Zinsser writes in the classic writing how-to book, On Writing Well, was when “civilian casualties” became referred to as “collateral damage.” Clearly, language can and actively becomes twisted by the context it is used in and the motives of the speaker. But I believe the argument from the model essay we read—that formalities should be done away with entirely—neglects the important role of twisting our words in designating our social contexts. When I am at a Model UN conference, the silly lingo that we use—frivolous to an outsider—is a part of the experience itself. And they are cluttered ways of saying things that could be represented in much simpler terms. (“The chair rules this dilatory” literally just means “no,” but you will never hear that at a Model UN conference.) But the human race thrives on imagined social contexts, and that legitimacy requires tailored linguistic constructs to maintain. In any context we have an inherent need for unification. If any element, from the entity to the language used in that situation disrupts that flow, our acceptance of it is also muddled. All this to say, language is the medium through which all of our information is processed; thus we can never expect a world in which there is no structure, formality, nicety to our speech. When no other crutch exists—our words are the things we cling to to assure ourselves that anything is real.