I’d like to thank Stella Tsantekidou of ‘The Human Carbohydrate’ for taking the time to respond to a piece of mine. I wrote about male horniness, and Stella replied with a beautiful piece about female neediness. You can read it below.
Now, on with today’s post.
I.
The boss didn’t say much, but now he became committed to saying even less, to reducing each utterance to its minimum spoken content. That request? ‘Yes.’ A raise? ‘No.’ That employee? ‘Gone.’ Good news and bad, delivered with an increasing terseness of vocabulary, and via a fashion of communicating inherently decisive.
But that wasn’t enough. Having arrived at a state of taciturnity, even the remaining words the boss said required a considerable expenditure of effort. All positions still needed to be put across in sound, which involved the ongoing continuation of communication. There was still a need for words.
The problem was that even if the boss moved even further from this – if they began to abandon verbal phrases entirely for say, facial expressions and gestures, that created greater room for confusion. Indeed the trial week for ‘Leading by Gurning’ was, if entertaining, notably unproductive. Was the boss’ frown one of appreciation or bemusement? Was their silence a refusal? The point had been reached where language could not be reduced further without leading to incomprehension. Likewise, the attempt to row back and use phonemes, say a ‘Y’ for ‘Yes’ and a ‘Ma’ for ‘maybe’ ran the risk of being misunderstood and was particularly badly received by those visiting the company.
It was around this time that the boss themselves became spiritually paralyzed and confronted by their own sense of the essential distraction of any form of language from the purest essence of things. Unable to decide what to do, exhausted by the thought of continuing to repeat the same old vocabulary items, but unable to reduce further before detaching from communication at all, the boss was stuck. From this point, they put out largely grunting and squeals; meanwhile in the staffrooms the younger staff members spoke in excited whispers about the boss and their linguistic travails.
I knew about all this because I worked there in the time before the boss left. I used to go and sit with the boss in their office, as they looked at their watch and fidgeted over their ‘to-read’ backlog – they maintained throughout this period a lively social media presence – and just as they seemed almost ready to say something again, the sheer weight of all that there was to express and be expressed, saw once again the tightened of the infernal knot in which they were caught, a knot which was only fully loosened some months later by the boss’ final pronunciation, by all accounts fully articulated, of the words ‘I quit.’