Claiming a mistake won’t get you off the hook when you’re exposed

THE redundant “so” is getting to me.

It is, in fact, driving me out of my mind.

It’s not just that I notice it when it happens. It’s that I’ve begun to wait for it, listening out for it in radio interviews and in ordinary human conversation.

There’s a pattern to its appearance.

If you question someone and it doesn’t happen early in the conversation, the chances are that it won’t appear at all. But if someone says it in answer to the first or second question, you know you’re goosed.

It’s going to sit like a fat slug on a cabbage leaf at the beginning of every subsequent answer. The question itself doesn’t matter. You might ask, for example:

“Why would any would-be Presidential candidate recycle a Hillary Clinton slogan about having a conversation with the nation that clearly didn’t work for her?”

Or your question might be:

“Are you up for a cuppa?”

Either way, the introduction to the answer is the same.

“So,” the person will begin.

So? So what? Why? What’s “so” got to do with anything?

Answer? Nothing. The “so” is irrelevant, redundant. But it’s a trend that’s becoming more and more firmly established. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know when it started. If you hadn’t noticed it up to now, I apologise for bringing it to your attention, because I promise you, the minute you become alerted to the redundant “so”, it crops up everywhere and becomes inescapable, like “fit for purpose” only more irritating, because at least “fit for purpose” thinks it means something, whereas the redundant “so” is like a verbal throat-clearing and is as irritating as when someone clears their throat every three minutes. It’s a predictably reiterated vocal event. Listen out for it.

You won’t even have to listen out for “fit for purpose”. It surfaces nearly as often as “it does what it says on the tin”.

“Fit for purpose” is usually used negatively by the compliance brigade. They’re always saying that something is not fit for purpose.

Here’s what they mean when they say it’s not fit for purpose.

They mean it’s corrupt, outdated or insecure. They mean it’s missing a wheel or a leg or a tooth.

They mean it won’t work and that someone will be left without a wheel or a leg or a tooth if they try to use it. They mean it has melted in the heat, gone brittle in the cold or developed the bends from being in water too deep. They mean it’s too tall, too small, too fat, too thin, too hairy or bald as an egg.

They mean it will give you cancer, boils, warts or an awful black eye.

They mean it could cause something to fall out of the sky or explode in a sewerage pipe. They mean nobody in their right minds would, these days, eat, purchase, listen to, suck on or sleep in it. They mean it bores you rigid before you learn the lesson it’s trying to teach you, boils over before you expect it or develops toxic fungus distributed by spores a day after you bought it. They mean it couldn’t cut butter or it would slice the hand off you.

They mean the police, the Aviation Regulator, Matthew Elderfield, your kids’ head teacher, the Revenue Commissioners, the EPA or the Archbishop of Dublin could turn up on your doorstep and reproach you for having a relationship with it. They mean nobody’s tried it out or that someone else has worn it down to a nubbin.

They mean it never was any bloody good or that it’s been sabotaged, that it was stored somewhere damp or beside something containing rat poison.

They mean employing it will get you sued, smacked or put into receivership. They mean a lot, when they use the phrase “fit for purpose”.

They mean an elegant, exotic and exciting lot. The question is why the hell they don’t say what they mean, instead of using a phrase that’s like the chewing gum in the old song, which lost its flavour on the bedpost overnight?

The answer, of course, lies partly in the fact that words and phrases come in and out of fashion all the time.

As a result, every now and again, a couple of expressions become so ubiquitous as to resemble midges on a warm summer night.

Many of the worst, at the moment, come from the regulation and compliance industries, where they’re used as a substitute for thinking and also to convey delivery of paperwork rather than reality. Another lot come from politics, and serve the same purpose. Current examples include “transparency and accountability”.

One of those constantly used by politicians, which has leaked into more general usage, is “mistake”. Now, back in the day when this word meant anything, it meant that you’d made an error, without malice aforethought. It was a slip-up, rather than an intended evil action.

Calling someone by the wrong name is a mistake, as is wearing mis-matched shoes or mis-spelling a word.

When someone who shall be nameless warbled about her mother installing particular values in her, last week on the radio, she made a verbal mistake. It was a mildly funny mistake, since it suggested that her mother had opened her up and hard wired values into her personally, the way a sparks would install a socket in a house.

What she meant, of course, was that her mother had “instilled” those values in her. It was a mistake.

Nothing more, nothing less.

BUT it wasn’t a mistake that did in US Representative Anthony Weiner. And, when he resigned from his office on Capitol Hill under pressure, it is believed, from Barack Obama, because he had sent to a number of women photographs of himself in a sexually aroused state, accompanied by text referring to bulges in his trousers, it was ludicrous for him to apologise, in his chaotic departure press conference, for “mistakes”.

It’s not a mistake when you deliberately do something which is abusive, stupid, evil or tasteless.

The apology should be for doing something wrong. I can’t figure why individuals who get caught doing something wrong think they can in some way minimise the impact of their wrongdoing by referring to it — falsely — as a mistake.

It would have been a mistake if Weiner had pushed the wrong button and sent the horrid photograph of himself to his mother.

It was not a mistake when he sent it as a form of ferocious flirtation to women he fancied.

Yet Weiner resigned, trotting out, as if he expected it to minimise negative reaction, one of the excuses regularly and fruitlessly used by loser politicians. He said he’d made personal mistakes.

He had not.

He had been exposed as a disgusting electronic flasher.

The one thing that’s clear from the Anthony Weiner episode, despite the now former representative’s misuse of language to minimise his guilt, is that, whether in public service or in marital terms, he’s sure as hell not fit for purpose.