7
Concepts
I introduced this study with brief outlines of its guiding concepts—‘political catchphrase’ and ‘contemporary history’—before eagerly taking up the case studies to substantiate them. It seemed to me that there is enough of a received understanding of these concepts out there to set the observations and arguments rolling. A considered elaboration of the concepts as concepts, as generalized and rationally extendable ideas, was postponed in the Introduction and promised in this final chapter. The case studies, I figured, would demonstrate how those received concepts bear upon and are woven into the analysis of particular catchphrases in recent times. Concurrently, in the process of working through those, the received understanding of these concepts would gradually become sharper, perhaps even come to be articulated beyond their received understanding.
In pausing finally on ‘political catchphrases’ and ‘contemporary history’ as general concepts, I find myself caught in some uncertainty. It is now not clear to me how far the conceptual formulations later in this chapter guided this study and to what extent these are actually inferences made from the study. Perhaps, in fact, these have become somewhat more than inferences, more in the nature of general hypotheses to inform further investigations. I am inclined to think so. I did begin exploring the specific catchphrases/words discussed earlier—‘new normal’, ‘austerity’, ‘resilience’, ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’, ‘we are the 99%’—with some general precepts (rather than concepts), based roughly on considerations such as those laid out in the following. And yet, as I progressed, those precepts were stretched and gradually seemed more like general concepts. However, these elaborations are only extended to some degree by the preceding chapters. Observations about a few catchphrases/words are not a sufficient basis for the following generalizations. Further case studies are needed and further sharpening of concepts.
What follows, then, is not a conclusion in the sense of summarizing the main findings in the preceding chapters and charting some ways forward. Instead, the following offers conceptual elaborations and generalizations which have underpinned or have developed through the case studies, but are of larger import. These are presented in three sections. The first mulls the ever-slippery pursuit of ‘contemporary history’ and proposes a notion of the ‘contemporary’ which coheres with this book’s. The second considers the ‘political’ in ‘political catchphrases’, with political dictionaries in view. The third section focuses on how to describe the catchiness of catchphrases/words by considering them alongside keywords.
The ‘contemporary’ in contemporary history
Chapters 2 and 3 on the ‘new normal’ above covered a period from 2001 to 2020; Chapter 4 reached back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore concepts of the ‘normal’; and the other chapters addressed more concentrated periods within the range 2001–2020. This range is not, in itself, indicative of what makes this a study of ‘contemporary history’. 2001 should not be regarded as the boundary of contemporariness here. It was the year, I argued, when the catchphrase ‘new normal’ became a catchphrase, that is all.
My brief remarks on ‘contemporary history’ in the Introduction had referred it to a ‘recent period’, but left the period range to common-sense approximations. In his influential introduction to the study of ‘contemporary history’, Geoffrey Barraclough (1967 [1964]) observed that ‘The word “contemporary” inevitably means different things to different people’ (13); the term ‘recent’ is similarly vague. Occasionally, a dated boundary is affixed to demarcate a contemporary period, usually when historians of the contemporary find yet another institutionally expedient space: for example, for teaching programmes, professional bodies, serial publications, or repositories. Thus, at present, for the Journal of Contemporary History that boundary is after 1930, for the journal European Contemporary History it is after 1918, for British Contemporary History after 1945. Conceptually too, periodization is powerfully embedded in historiography, so it seems natural that the ‘contemporary’ refers to a period. As Barraclough had it: ‘[C]ontemporary history should be considered as a distinct period of time, with characteristics of its own which mark it off from a preceding period’ (12). Let me start this section by saying that the idea of ‘contemporary history’ relevant to this study is not based on a delimited period.
My introductory remarks also pointed to the practicalities of calling upon sources which are yet to be consolidated in existing historical narratives. With regard to contemporary history, the most productive debates have been about methods for tapping into ‘living memory’, particularly in oral history. Some of the sources called upon earlier do draw upon interviews, testimonies, reminiscences, and the like to elicit an analysable record. These sources present that unique encounter between the historian and the informing subject which underpins oral history (outlined well in Abrams 2016: Chapter 2). However, this study has not taken recourse to such methods itself. It has depended entirely on texts already in the public domain. No obvious methodological negotiation with living memory was undertaken.
In planning this study, I was attentive to the challenges of negotiating between past and present with consistent historiographical principles, a subject of much philosophical reflection. Let’s leave aside Benedetto Croce’s (1921: 12) argument, quoted in the Introduction, that ‘every true history is contemporary history’. That deliberately conjoined past and present such that little scope was left for conceptualizing a distinctive space for contemporary history. Insofar as a meaningful practice of contemporary history has been considered, there are two influential ways of relating the past to the present. On the one hand, contemporary history involves establishing the presentness of the present in relation to some idea of where the past became firmly such. This approach could be considered via the metaphor of strata (like geological strata). If a historical period is considered as a stratum where previous and subsequent periods are strata formed beneath or on top, then the present is the surface the historian is on, founded upon the latest acknowledged stratum. This is roughly the view that, for instance, Frederick W. Pick (1946) took in observing, ‘The writer of Contemporary History […] having analysed the society of the present, can subtract from his vision of the past just those features which he found to be peculiar to the world in which he lives’ (27). That is, the past is found by scraping away the surface of the present. And, similarly, the metaphor of strata is implicit in Barraclough’s (1967 [1964]) declaration: ‘Contemporary history begins when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape’ (20, italicized in the original). The present appears like structures built upon the surface of the past. On the other hand, in contemporary history the relationship of present and past could be considered a continuous process. Instead of strata, metaphors of ongoing movement may be foregrounded: the present is the moving tip, the vanguard, of a process that extends backwards as the past. Some of the discussions of Michel Foucault’s various statements on his method after The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 [1969]), especially of his phrase ‘history of the present’ (Roth 1981; Auxier 2002; Garland 2014; Revel 2015; Poster 2019: Chapter 4), delve into such metaphors. His use of the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ for subsequent phases of his approach are suggestive in this regard (see Garland 2014). ‘Archaeology’ metaphorically digs into geological strata as historical periods; and ‘genealogy’ is a process metaphor in Foucault’s later and more politically charged work, where the traces of the past are always in the present.
Such historiographical metaphors to sharpen the ‘contemporary’ have had a bearing on this study, but unevenly. To some extent, for instance, the surface of the present appears in the case studies that have been presented, where a phrase or word catches on—usually at some transitional juncture of usage. The ‘new normal’ could thus be thought of as taking off from the surface of the stratum where concepts of normality have become, in some sense, static and seem insufficient. Similarly, ‘austerity’ acquires its current resonance at the end of a chain of adjustments and modifications in usage, following a kind of genealogy or, rather, its linguistic equivalent, etymology. On the whole, however, neither of those metaphors for conceiving the ‘contemporary’ works satisfactorily for this study. The case studies suggest that the particular connotations and resonances of a catchphrase at a given juncture work in relation to a great many other catchphrases, slogans, references, associations, and so on. They catch on in different ways as catchphrases, and take off or rise and fall and sometimes disappear irrespective of anything as cohesive as a surface or boundary from where the present is gauged, or as coherent as a continuous process. The sense of contemporaneity in this study has a different basis.
With regard to the historiographical implications of the ‘present’, this study’s methods benefitted from Henry Rousso’s The Latest Catastrophe (2016 [2012]). Rousso’s was a careful investigation into the impulse to engage with the ‘present’ in the practice of history as that developed through history; therefore, a history of that impulse itself, mediated by accounts of various received periods. It effectively tracked the reckonings of scholars and learned bodies at subsequent junctures, which often involved denying the possibility of contemporary history and yet always returned to the need for and undertaking of it. Rousso presented, thus, a process whereby historiographical preconceptions were sharpened, so that by the later twentieth century contemporary history occupied a dominant place in the discipline. With such hindsight, Rousso found a periodic push for the reiteration of contemporary history, which he called ‘the latest catastrophe’. This push also posts the boundary at any given time from where the contemporary, the character of the present, is derived. In his introductory summary:
Interest in the near past thus seems ineluctably connected to a sudden eruption of violence and even more to its aftereffects, to a time following the explosive event, a time necessary for understanding it, becoming cognizant of it, but a time marked as well by trauma and by strong tensions between the need to remember and the temptation to forget. That, in any case, is the hypothesis I develop here, relying on the lapidary and compelling definition that all contemporary history begins with ‘the latest catastrophe’, or in any case with the latest that seems most telling, if not the closest in time. (9)
Rousso mainly had in mind such ‘explosive events’ as world wars, revolutions and genocides; ‘eruptions of violence’ that call urgently for explanations and coming to terms. To some degree, the ‘latest catastrophe’ therefore puts pressure on the pursuit and principles of doing history itself. Historiography needs to be reconsidered in a fundamental way, so that the present can both be understood in terms of, and calls for, a renewed understanding of the past. The historian assumes a position somewhat greater than that of a specialist or academic in the narrow sense, and becomes a kind of arbitrator for the settlement of trauma and tensions:
[H]istorians of the contemporary, in the face of the short- or medium-term legacy of a great catastrophe or major upheaval, must confront issues that go far beyond a mere intellectual and academic exercise. At stake is the quest for truth, the taking into account of all the suffering endured, the avid need to distinguish between good and evil, the often urgent and anguished necessity of a narration, even imperfect, that will make sense in the event’s aftermath. (41)
Naturally, the practice of contemporary history constantly constitutes itself along the moving boundaries set by periodic outbreaks of ‘catastrophe’.
Obviously, such a sense of contemporary history in relation to the ‘latest catastrophe’ is relevant to the tracking of catchphrases/words like the ‘new normal’, or ‘austerity’, or ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’. Rousso’s use of ‘catastrophe’ is similar to what are dubbed as ‘crises’ in the junctures covered here: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, financial crisis of 2007–2008, the Covid-19 outbreak, climate change. However, ‘crisis’ has a somewhat different emphasis than ‘catastrophe’, more of a sense of being on a precipitous edge than being in the aftermath of disaster, more intricately woven into the ongoing process of under-pressure exchanges and social life than leading into consequent trauma and tensions. As Janet Roitman (2014: 39) put it, ‘[C]risis is not a condition to be observed (loss of meaning, alienation, faulty knowledge); it is an observation that produces meaning’. A ‘crisis’ could be an ‘eruption of violence’ (like 9/11), or a realization of being at an edge of an abyss (like climate change), that variously appears and peaks and recedes and remains latent, or slides seamlessly into another crisis. A crisis, we may say, portends an imminent catastrophe or seems like a slide towards catastrophe without quite being a catastrophe itself. A catastrophe is an explosive event that ends but has an aftermath, which contemporary history then engages in a cathartic spirit. Crises unfold, recede, and shift without clear culminations. Tracking the usage of catchphrases like the ‘new normal’, therefore, seems to follow the passages, the expansions and contractions of crises, rather than focalize the catastrophic event. Insofar as such tracking materializes an account of contemporary history, that bears some resemblance to Rousso’s conception of contemporary history, but with a significant difference. Rousso’s ‘latest catastrophe’ puts a putative boundary for doing history, from where the ‘contemporary’ is articulated. The tracking of catchphrases amidst and through the passage of crises does not do that. The contemporary here, for this study, seems more indefinitely or intractably initiated; the drive of doing contemporary history appears more enmeshed in an unfolding process of crises upon crises than a reckoning with the latest catastrophe behind us. Rousso’s understanding of contemporary history is relevant to what this study does, but offers no handle for grasping its focus on political catchphrases.
A somewhat different formulation of the ‘contemporary’ in contemporary history is called for, consistent with the historiography of this study. I propose this: the contemporary is understood in terms of the prevalence of a structure of idiomatic usage across multiple or extensive domains of communication; the practice of contemporary history involves working within and with attention to the prevailing structure of idiomatic usage. I am aware that this is an unusual approach to engaging with contemporary history; clarifications are in order. A ‘structure of idiomatic usage’ refers to a network of idioms which is current at a given time or over a stretch of time. The relevant sense (3) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines an ‘idiom’ as:
A form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety; spec. a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.
The specification points to the non-logical construction of idioms, and is taken as definitive of idioms in scholarly accounts. Sam Glucksberg’s (2001) helpful overview of idioms, among other kinds of figurative expressions, gave the standard definition as: ‘a construction [of words, a phrase] whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of its constituents’ (67). Much of Glucksberg’s account charted the enormous variety and fluidity of idioms, and of scholarly approaches to studying them. For the latter, he summarized the main issues thus:
The first issue concerns compositionality. To what extent are idioms compositional, that is, to what extent can the meaning of an idiom be derived from the meanings of its constituents? As we shall see, degree of compositionality varies greatly among idioms, with some idioms being fully compositional and others not at all. The second issue concerns the syntactic properties of idioms. To what extent does an idiom’s meaning depend on its syntactic form, and to what extent can an idiom be open to syntactic analysis and transformation? This issue of syntactic flexibility [where the components of an idiom can be moved around while continuing to carry its meaning], like that of compositionality, relates directly to the standard definition of idioms as non logical. If an idiom’s constituents have no meaning at all, then the idiom should be incapable of syntactic flexibility. However, idioms can vary from being fully syntactically flexible to not at all. (68)
Linguists studying idioms have tended to focus on describing categories of idioms and analysing specific idioms in context, and at times describing ‘idiomaticity’ as a set of practices inferred from large collections of idioms (using a corpus, e.g., in Wulff 2008). The kind of idioms that are foregrounded in analysis are usually received idioms, that is, identified as such through sustained and varied histories of usage. Catchphrases, I suggest, are not quite received idioms. Rather, catchphrases are constructions which, in bursts of intensive and extensive usage, by catching on, become idiomatic—perhaps temporarily or for a short time and sometimes gradually becoming received idioms. Through their constant usage in different contexts, through continuous adaptation and accruing associations, they become non logical and are used in non-logical ways at least for a while, that is, they come to mean more than their constituents. Some catchphrases may persist in being used thus to gradually become received idioms, others may fall out of the catchphrase circuit and melt into ordinary logical usage. Catchphrases like the ‘new normal’ or ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’, within their circuits of extensive and intensive usage, acquire meanings which cannot be inferred from their constituents. A catchword, in a similar way, confers more meaning to a phrase in which it features than its dictionary definition or logical implication would suggest—within its catchword circuit and whilst a catchword. Catchwords like ‘austerity’ or ‘resilience’ mean more than they are defined to whilst used as catchwords. Catchphrases/words could thus be thought of as idioms-in-the-making or short-term idioms, relatively unstable compared to received idioms. But within their catchphrase/word circuits they behave idiomatically, and just as variably, with a similar range of compositionality and syntactical flexibility, as received idioms do. The case studies in this study could be regarded as demonstrations of how and in what ways catchphrases/words acquire their idiomatic character. Their catchiness makes them idiomatic, their idiomaticity escalates their catchiness.
The linguistic approach to idioms, largely focused on categories of idioms and specific idioms in context, has been less attentive to their bearing upon each other at a given juncture, or to their networked or interconnected prevalence in communication systems. Idioms of a given language formation have a collective effect on how that language is used to constitute the world. That is in much the same way as in the junctures examined in preceding chapters, where the catchphrase-connotations of ‘new normal’, ‘austerity’, ‘resilience’, ‘We are the 99%’, etc. were intricately connected. Such catchphrases/words are used in relation to each other and with reference to prevailing social circumstances; at the same time, together they render those social circumstances coherent. Unsurprisingly then, idiomaticity has usually been taken as conferring a character on everyday language, giving language the life of its time. Such is, in fact, the leading sense (1) of the word ‘idiom’ given in the OED, albeit marked as anachronistic or rare: ‘The specific character or individuality of a language; the manner of expression considered natural to or distinctive of a language; a language’s distinctive phraseology’. Glucksberg’s study considers the significant part idioms play in language acquisition, to conclude:
People talk not only to communicate propositional content but also to reflect upon and express attitudes and emotions. Idioms, metaphors, and many fixed expressions reflect social norms and beliefs. To learn a culture’s idioms and other fixed expressions is to immerse oneself in that culture. (89).
Since catchphrases/words are idioms which are intensively and extensively used over specific periods, their usage signifies not only what Glucksberg calls ‘immersion in that culture’ but also having the pulse of that culture or being attune to that zeitgeist. For this study, the catchphrases/words refer predominantly to the cultures of British and American communication circuits (somewhat more widely, Anglophone circuits), but also carry the reverberations of the global or global cultural circuits of our world, in our time (to echo Hegel).
This temporality of catchphrases as idioms makes them particularly serviceable for doing contemporary history. Whilst a catchphrase is idiomatic, it is of the present. The present is, to some significant degree, held together by a network of catchphrases in use. Tracking the passages of catchphrases in use is therefore, in a material sense, tracking the passage of presentness as it unfolds, from within, in at least some of its dimensions. As a method, this approach is necessarily different from that which begins from some putative boundary of the present, such as Rousso’s ‘the latest catastrophe’ or Barraclough’s period-line where ‘the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape’. Catchphrases that are currently in circulation, all bearing variously upon each other, obviously do not all become catchphrases at any one juncture or even within any compressed phase. Each enters into and falls out of catchy eminence at different times, but while it is used concurrently with other catchphrases/words, they all bear upon each other and link up different dimensions of the social world. This sense of the ‘contemporary’, which can be obtained by tracking catchphrases, then, does not fall in readily with the convention of historical periodization. In this context, the idea of a historical period seems too neat and categorical. The ‘contemporary’ that is apprehended via catchphrases—for that matter, any juncture in history that could be apprehended via the catchphrases of the time—appears without the convenience of periodization. This does not, or should not, trouble the practice of history particularly. Historians have generally been cognisant of the artifice and problems of periodization for a while now (see Blackbourn 2012; Le Goff 2015[2014]), and the concept of historical time, especially ‘modern time’, has been helpfully complicated (especially in Kosellek 2004 [1979]; Kosellek 2002: Chapters 6 and 7). Nevertheless, if the contemporary is not approached as a period, or at least some kind of time-formation, it is perhaps difficult to grasp its place in history. We may ask: in what sense is the contemporary, tracked thus though catchphrases, then historicized? Where is the history in this mode of analysing the contemporary?
Arguably, an historicizing ‘distance’ appears in critically analysing catchphrases while those catchphrases are widely in use. There is, for instance, an obvious slippage in my reading of sources featuring the catchphrase ‘new normal’ in Chapters 2 and 3. I refer to publications which used ‘new normal’ to refer to, for example, conditions arising from the Covid-19 outbreak. In these publications, the catchphrase was used because it was already considered meaningful and did not need elucidation; using it established immediate relevance between authors and readers, simply by being used. However, my discussion of the catchphrase in these publications goes against the spirit in which it was used. I deliberately try to elucidate the particular instance of usage in a given publication in relation to previous and forthcoming instances of usage. In doing this, I dislocate the presumption of immediate relevance and expect to throw some light on the publication itself. Instead of, so to speak, going along with the usage of ‘new normal’ as a catchphrase of our time, as a transparent expressive device, I disjunctively draw attention to it as a catchphrase, and look at the catchphrase as if it were opaque. And I do this repeatedly for sources where ‘new normal’ was transparently used, in texts along a timeline, presenting the catchphrase’s shifting opacity as an expression of passing time.
Because the catchphrase is pervasively in use, pausing on it as if it were a historical construct and, then, demonstrating its historical constructedness becomes a constant—constantly performed—negotiation between past and present. Brashly, I am inclined to suggest that historically tracking current catchphrases is par excellence a method for contemporary history. At any rate, it is a methodological ploy which concretizes an abstract aspect of contemporary history that has occasionally been noted. It is akin, for instance, to Michael Roth’s (1981) understanding of what Foucault’s ‘history of the present’ entailed:
Writing a history of the present means writing a history in the present; self-consciously writing in a field of power relations and political struggle. […] Foucault, in all the [later] works discussed in this paper, is writing a history of the present in order to make the present into a past. Writing from the brink of a dramatic shift in the structures of our experience is essential to Foucault’s task because this enables him to conceive of the present as that which is almost history. (43)
Where Roth saw Foucault’s project as disrupting the political present, Rousso focused on the historian’s effort. Historicizing the contemporary is, in Rousso’s view, a disruption of the historian’s present:
Historians of the present time, like all historians, thus experience a structural tension between proximity, distance, and alterity, but they do so with a different polarity: it is more difficult for them to be far away. Their practice consists not of moving closer to what is a priori remote, like an anthropologist considering a Caduveo Indian or a historian a medieval peasant woman. On the contrary, it consists of moving away from what appears close by, such as a resistance fighter or a survivor who is the same age as the historian’s father or grandfather, who speaks the same language, who may live in the same neighbourhood, and, often, who regularly attends or attended the seminars at which the historian speaks.
(Rousso 2016: 158)
To restate that nice stew of metaphors: the contemporary historian is not like one who speaks about a remote idiom, but like one who speaks about the idiom within which they live as if it were remote and can be spoken about. Narrating contemporary history via current catchphrases is a direct way of doing that.
The ‘political’ in political catchphrases
In the Introduction I distinguished the sort of catchphrases of interest here, political catchphrases, from commercial catchphrases. This way of distinguishing catchphrases is, in fact, based on contemporary circumstances. It is taken as understood now that the term ‘catchphrase’ is predominantly associated with advertisements and showmanship. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition (updated in 2018) confirms this:
A frequently used or well-known phrase or slogan, typically associated with a particular group or person and serving to attract public attention or interest; esp. (a) a signature or stock phrase of an entertainer or character in a play, film, etc.; (b) a memorable or striking phrase used in an advertisement; an advertising slogan.
However, of the seven examples of usage given in the OED, two—including the earliest from 1834—are from political rather than advertisement or entertainment contexts. Despite the precedence given to commercial usage now, catchphrases continue to be associated with political communication. So, it seems natural to embark on any investigation of catchphrases by distinguishing between the commercial and the political.
The first dictionary devoted exclusively to catchphrases was Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1977 [1985]), covering a long period from the sixteenth century to the present. This had ‘catch phrases’ as overlapping with proverbial sayings, clichés, and famous quotations; according to Partridge, ‘catch phrases’ are distinguishable from those not by definition but by ‘the context, the nuance, the tone’ (viii). Dictionaries of catchphrases since, (such as Craig 1990; Rees 1997; Farkas 2002), mainly dwelling upon current usage, have tended to play up commercial contexts. Like Partridge, later lexicographers have found it easier to recognize catchphrases than to define the term ‘catchphrase’. Also like Partridge, in their selections, these dictionaries have included almost any construction which could be considered idiomatic at a given juncture, taking in what would have been called ‘war-cries’, ‘slogans’, ‘sayings’, ‘idioms’, ‘quotations’, ‘clichés’, and so on earlier.
The rationale for focusing particularly on contemporary political catchphrases in this study can be sharpened by considering general idiomatic usage which has been tagged ‘political’ in various historical contexts. Dictionaries of political terms and usage from different historical junctures offer a useful resource in this regard. Their selections, definitions, and exemplifications of words and phrases, and the cross-connections made between them, reveal much about political discourses in historical contexts.
All dictionaries are necessarily of their time, of course. Amidst constantly evolving contexts and verbiage, dictionaries draw the line where and when they appear, while political usage moves on. Certain terms inevitably become archaic thereafter while others become current—and updated editions follow. Some dictionaries construct their presentness with careful cognizance of the past record, by following historical linguistic principles. Hans Sperber and Travis Trittschuh’s American Political Terms (1962) presented a model for this approach, trying to find the common ground between philological and historical scholarship (v). Dictionaries are sometimes designed especially for scholarly usage: thus, Iain McLean’s Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (1996) covers ‘the concepts, people and institutions most commonly referred in academic and scholarly writing about politics’ (x). More common, though, have been dictionaries of political terms meant for consultation by anyone interested in the politics of their time—for general readers. These offer snapshots of political idiomaticity in specific historical junctures, a vivid sense of both politics and political communication current then. In approaching contemporary history via political catchphrases, I had in mind the awareness of politics in the present that such dictionaries reflect.
A few well-spaced examples may serve to illustrate the differences in subsequent phases of political awareness found in these dictionaries. The earliest political dictionaries of the late eighteenth century in Britain bear little resemblance to their later counterparts. Despite ideological differences, dictionaries such as Joseph Pearson’s (1792) and Charles Pigott’s (1795) shared some common ground (for the background to these, see Jang 2016; Mee 2016: Chapter 4). They were obviously addressed to (and were about) an inner circle of the political elite, largely distant from what they called ‘the people’. Readers with an interest in political terms and communication at the time were mostly men of the literate gentry. Their choice of words and phrases represented a jargon shared by this elite circle, and the explanations alongside usually came with coterie snipes and diatribes. Insofar as communication with a larger public was concerned, the only relevant entry in both was, fittingly, ‘proclamation’; and their elaborations spoke clearly of the spirit in which, and audience for which, they were written:
PROCLAMATION.—A piece of paper pafted on walls, to frighten the people out of their rights; the fame as idle cautions againft p—-g pofts, and of juft the fame ufe. People will always know where they have the right to p-fs, and will p-fs when they pleafe.
(Pearson 1792: 43)
and
Proclamation. A fuppofed letter from the king to his People, in which they are informed when they are happy, and by which they learn an increafe of taxes to be an accumulation of comfort.
(Pigott 1795: 125)
Around a hundred years later and in the USA, where the focus of political exchanges had shifted to civil conflict, election campaigns and mass media reportage, a wider circuit—albeit confined to White men—was evident in Charles Norton’s Political Americanisms (1896). This was meant, according to Norton, to record ‘the current argot of the period, […] often as vigorously expressive as the most picturesque slang of the streets’ (v). Placing a collection of political terms as an ‘argot’ (in the OED: ‘The jargon, slang, or peculiar phraseology of a class, originally that of thieves and rogues’), similar to ‘slang of the streets’, took the discourse tagged as ‘political’ well out of the elite circles and coteries where eighteenth century dictionaries had centred it. Instead of ‘proclamation’ then, as a mode of political communication, Norton’s selection highlighted ‘war-cries’ every now and then. He used that term in preference to the synonymous ‘slogans’, and defined it thus:
War-Cries – The presidential campaign of 1884 saw the introduction of a species of political war-cry not previously in vogue. It was based on the well-known habit of drill-sergeants in marking time for a squad of recruits, to teach them to march in step. (120)
With the military metaphor, the command structures and campaigns of party politics rather than the tensions between gentlemen parliamentarians and monarch were now evidently centre-stage. Four decades later, the emphasis had shifted again for what a dictionary charts of political usage. On the one hand, it had come to serve the purpose of a name index, listing terms used as common reference points for political debates in the public sphere. Walter Theimer’s The Penguin Political Dictionary (1939), covering a list of concepts, proper names, and names of parties, movements, and policies exemplifies this. Its choices were grounded in the evolving geopolitics of its time, just on the eve of World War II. It could be considered a mapping of two political registers, the German, and the British or American. In conception, Theimer’s dictionary seemed now to gesture forward to the more scholarly tracking and mapping to come in Sperber and Trittschuh’s (1962) and then McLean’s (1996) political dictionaries. On the other hand, and as a direct development upon Norton’s approach, there was George Shankle’s American Mottoes and Slang (1941). Where Norton saw such terms as expressing a political ground level, fluid and alive as an ‘argot’ or ‘slang’, Shankle’s ‘mottoes’ and ‘slogans’ seemed redolent of responsible citizenship:
In American usage a motto is a word, a phrase, or an expression which tersely, concisely, clearly, and fittingly expresses some moral, religious, social, ethical, educational, or political truth upon which one builds his philosophy of life or upon which he founds his life’s activities. A slogan is some pointed term, phrase or expression, fittingly worded, which suggests action, loyalty, or which causes people to decide upon and to fight for the realization of some principle or decisive issue. (7)
For Shankle, evidently, political terms and usage were less rooted in campaigns on the streets and more in staid drawing-room discussion or formal debate. The class locus of political communication now appeared to be neither with the elites nor with the commons, but somewhere between (there is an unmistakable air of middle-class earnestness). A couple of decades later, with William Safire’s The New Language of Politics: An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage (1968) the lexicographical approach to political communication took a new turn. In this study’s Introduction, my initial notion of ‘catchphrase’, ‘catchword’, and ‘slogan’ were referred to Safire’s dictionary.
Insofar as political dictionaries for general reference go, those preceding Safire’s seemed to be conceived according to where political discourse is centred, or where political terms predominantly circulate: among the elites, in the streets, amidst responsible citizens. Naturally, political communication continued—and continues—to be variously socially stratified, but Safire’s approach to his dictionary seemed relatively uninterested in that. Instead, he focused on what makes words and phrases appealing in political usage, wherever that might be. Accordingly, his choices were especially attentive to the catchiness of ‘catchwords’, ‘catchphrases’, and ‘slogans’ in political usage, more so than earlier political dictionaries. He also performed a kind of lexicographical catchiness on his own behalf, by garnishing explanations with witty and humorous anecdotes—his was an ‘anecdotal dictionary’. For Safire, political communication was clearly more about the form of appeal rather than which social stratum is represented or catered for. He said as much in the Introduction:
This is a dictionary of words and phrases that have misled millions, blackened reputations, held out false hope, oversimplified ideas to appeal to the lowest common denominator, shouted down inquiry, and replaced searching debate with stereotypes that trigger approval or hatred.
This is also a dictionary that shows how the choice of a word or metaphor can reveal sensitivity and genius, crystallize a mood or turn it into action; some political language captures the essence of an abstraction and makes it understandable to millions (vii).
The modality and effect of communication was the key to political usage here. Unsurprisingly, ‘catchwords’, ‘catchphrases’, and ‘slogans’ in those terms were centred, and each defined according to that which makes them appealing. Thus, ‘a catchword’ ‘crystallizes an issue, sparks a response’ (68); ‘catch phrases used as slogans summarize and dramatize a genuine appeal’ (68); a ‘slogan’ is ‘a brief message that crystallizes an idea, defines an issue, the best of which thrill, exhort, and inspire’ (403). Political usage and therefore politics itself, Safire suggested, is primarily about appeals and only secondarily about the characteristics of the polity and the ideologies of political actors.
Leaving aside scholarly and academic dictionaries, Safire’s turn seems to mark a general drift in political lexicography and general usage that has only grown since. Politics remain grounded, as always, in the power structures that reify or modify social stratifications, but political communication has increasingly been—is now dominantly—perceived as a different matter: consisting in making appeals, having messages that catch or do not catch, that provoke or revoke actions and subscriptions. I am inclined to think of this shift as being political itself, engendering the mainstream politics of the present as well as describing the contemporary thrust of political communication. In this respect, in fact, political communication acquires cadences which are largely indistinguishable from commercial communication. That is to say, contemporary politics and business bear upon and penetrate into each other. When I started this study by making a threefold distinction between political catchphrases and commercial catchphrases, I was, as observed already, tacitly acknowledging that the latter are inescapable in our time. More than the distinctions made, it is arguably the enmeshing of political and commercial catchphrases, of politics and business, that characterizes the contemporary idiom. That is one of the reasons why it seems to me that the circulations and networks of political catchphrases offer a helpful grid for doing contemporary history. Catchphrases/words capture more than any narrow or conventional conception of politics and much of the contemporary as a historical (or historicizable) juncture. The catchphrases/words examined in this study have repeatedly shown that political and business interests, ideological principles and commercial calculations, coalesce seamlessly in the current idiom.
The catchiness of catchphrases
Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1976) also has the appearance of a political dictionary, but his introduction steadfastly refused any such association and described it thus instead:
It is […] a record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. Every word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself on my attention because the problems of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss. [… The notes on words address] a problem of vocabulary, in two senses: the available and developing meanings of known words, which needed to be set down; and the explicit but as often implicit connections which people were making, in what seemed to me, again and again, particular formations of meaning – ways not only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central experiences.
(Williams 2015 [1976]: xxvii)
Williams’s approach to his chosen terms focused on their shifting connotations and interconnections, and their epistemological significance. They are used, he said, both to refer to and to structure experiences and offer pathways into ‘practices and institutions which we group as culture and society’. That the chosen terms were designated as ‘keywords’ put the immediate emphasis on their epistemological significance; the notes on them substantiated that designation. Despite Williams’s equivocation about their academic basis and insistence on their ordinary currency, collectively they do seem inclined towards the academic. At the least, his choices were redolent of an intellectual register. His notes on ‘intellectual’ (122–23) usefully gestured towards the scope of this register, and the ambiguous regard in which those au fait with it are held. As Stephen Heath (2013) observed, ‘[M]ost of the Keywords words are abstract nouns of Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon provenance, representative of what Williams would call “the vocabulary of learning and power”’ (6–7). Unsurprisingly, much admiring discussion has been devoted to Keywords in scholarly publications: by following his example when analysing later or other ‘keywords’; by elaborating on Williams’s view of culture and society; and occasionally by distinguishing ‘keywords’ from, for instance, ‘catchwords’ or ‘buzzwords’ (an American synonym).
A touch of mystique attaches to the epistemological significance that Williams discerned in his chosen Keyword words. That significance is better recognized than defined, easier to demonstrate than theorize about. The significance of these terms, it seems, surfaces through observing culture and society carefully; the perspicacity of the observer is confirmed by being able to understand their significance. Metaphorically, those observers have the ‘keys’ to culture and society. The mystique of Williams’s ‘keywords’ has inspired a significant number of volumes emulating his book: with a focus on culture (e.g. Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris, eds. 2005; Burgett and Hendler, eds. 2007; MacCabe and Yanachek, eds. 2018), and numerously for specific themes and disciplines. Studies in linguistic semantics and argumentation have occasionally sharpened the rationale of how such keywords work in usage (Wierzbicka 1997: Chapter 1; Bigi and Morasso 2012). These do not divest ‘keywords’ of that mystique; they show how certain terms, invested with such significance, find their place in the structure and strategies of communication acts. Occasionally, understanding this quality of significance in ‘keywords’ is also a matter of understanding other words which may seem similar but are not as significant: ‘catchwords’ or ‘buzzwords’ are mooted as such at times. The mundaneness of the latter offsets the significance of the former and vice versa. That the latter are designated ‘catchwords’ emphasizes their catchiness—their popularity and frequent usage—but that emphasis is itself taken as showing that they are not quite ‘keywords’, that catchiness and significance are contrary thrusts. Thus, Annabel Patterson (2004: 77) observed: ‘When is a potential keyword not a keyword? When it is merely a catchword’. Taking Safire’s dictionary of political catchwords as the source, Patterson felt that keywords have a ‘dignity and difficulty’ (78) that ‘catchwords’ do not, though in a few instances ‘catchwords’ may become ‘keywords’. In considering ‘nature’ as a keyword, Noel Castree (2014) observed:
‘Nature’ is a keyword rather than a buzzword. Keywords, as Raymond Williams (1976) argued in his famous book of this name, have three characteristics. First, they are ‘ordinary’, which is to say used widely and frequently by all manner of people in all manner of contexts. Second, they are enduring rather than ephemeral – they do not come-and-go in a way that buzzwords like ‘globalisation’ or ‘post-modernism’ do. Finally, keywords possess what cultural critic Tony Bennett and colleagues, in their update of Williams’s book, call ‘social force’. (8–9)
Actually, it is doubtful whether Williams regarded keywords as enduring. His introduction mentioned choosing keywords which show both ‘continuity and discontinuity’ (2015 [1976]: xxxiv), and it is questionable whether some of his keywords (like ‘dialectic’ and ‘reactionary’) have quite endured. It is of course similarly questionable whether ‘globalization’ is a ‘come-and-go’ buzzword. The key to ‘keywords’ as differentiated from ‘buzzwords’ here is in the perceived deep significance, the ‘social force’. Accepting Castree’s distinctions, Thomas Skou Grindsted (2018: 57–8) felt that nevertheless a term like ‘sustainability’ lies somewhere between being a keyword and a catchword.
I have given this brief account of Williams’s notion of ‘keywords’ mainly to distance the remainder of this argument from its powerful influence. In this final section, I explore the issue of the catchiness of ‘catchwords’ and ‘catchphrases’, without assuming that catchiness is contrary to significance. How significant the catchphrases/words taken up in the previous chapters are, and by what criteria, is evident in the discussions and do not involve the sort of epistemological weight attached to keywords à la Williams. Insofar as understanding the catchiness of catchphrases/words goes, I feel that can be productively considered via keywords, but not in the sense Williams used the term, indeed in quite another sense. But before taking that up, let me be clear about the purpose with which the notion of catchiness is raised here. Attention to the catchiness of words, phrases, slogans, idioms, etc. has conventionally tended to focus on their content and context: what catches, where, and when? Safire’s (1968) notes on catchphrases/words and slogans focused on their catchy content-in-context, which included factors such as ambiguity, word-play and wit, aural effects like alliteration and rhyming, and crystallization of an issue, etc. With regard to political catchphrases/words, a voluminous body of publications in research areas like ‘political marketing’ and ‘campaign advertising’ have explored such factors, mainly with applied interests, sometimes in terms of consumer and social psychology or as a matter of historical richness. That is not the dimension of catchiness I consider here; that dimension has cropped up to the extent needed in the case studies. A significant body of research has also investigated the processes through which catchphrases/words, slogans, etc. spread: how do they catch? In the main, such research takes recourse to quantitative methods: for example, tracking frequency of usage, modelling proliferation, and factor analysis of targeting and uptake. These methods have been especially profitably employed, with capitalizable outcomes, for and in the digital environment. That too is not the direction I pursue here.
By way of drawing this study towards a close, I turn to a question which is neither about the content of catchiness and nor about the measures of catchiness, but which bears upon both. This is a question of articulating the concept: what is catchiness in relation to a catchphrase/word? How can it be described? What sort of condition does it manifest? A concept of catchiness such as the following had, at any rate, led me into this project, and may retrospectively clarify some corners of the case studies that I have examined..
Let me go back to keywords, but not in Williams’s sense. The OED gives the following senses of the term ‘keyword’:
1a. A word that serves as the key to a cipher or code;
1b. A word or idea that serves as a solution or explanation for something; a word, expression, or concept of particular importance or significance;
Williams’s use of the term was in sense 1b, which is related to 1a (both under sense 1). In terms of sense 1a, Williams’s keywords could be thought of as keys to crack the code of culture and society. Sense 2 puts keywords as practical devices for structuring information about texts and accessing information from texts. Here ‘text’ has a broad sense, including written documents, recordings, linguistic corpora, datasets, and collections of any or all of those. Insofar as the search terms featuring in a book index or library catalogue are regarded as keywords, these are chosen and arranged so that readers can find what they are looking for in the book or library. Similarly, if the most frequently used words featuring in a linguistic corpus are taken as keywords, researchers can use listings of these to explore the corpus for various purposes. These are examples of sense-2 keywords.
To hone this argument, let us consider sense-2 keywords in books (in codex form). Some sense-2 keywords appear and guide reading from the beginning: terms in the title, contents listing, and chapter headings and sub-headings. These could be considered text-describing-keywords. They map the overall structure and sequential order of the book. Other sense-2 keywords are listed in alphabetical (or some such) order at the end, the indexed-keywords. Readers use indexed-keywords to locate particular themes or names which are discussed in the book. These indexed-keywords are listed by the book’s indexer because they expect readers to look for them; that is to say, these keywords have some significance beyond the book, which readers are likely to bring to their search. That is why the indexer chooses and lists them in anticipation: let us call this their received-significance. At the same time, a reader looks for a particular keyword in the index not simply because it has a received-significance but because it has some specific significance for that reader, is somehow relevant to their purpose: let us call this attributed-significance. The attributed-significance is likely to lead into ‘about’-questions that a reader asks: for example, ‘let me see what this book says about this concept, person, event, phenomenon, etc. (which are named as keywords)?’ In consulting the index to find a keyword, the reader hopes that its received-significance and attributed-significance coincide. The keyness of these indexed keywords rests in the frequent concurrence of received-significance and attributed-significance. In other words, the keyness is in these words having some general significance already and in being conferred some particular significance for a search. In the case of a book, the indexed-keywords are understood as conditional to the text-describing-keywords. The received-significance is delimited according to the discursive remit of the text-describing-keywords; and the attributed-significance is sought with reference to that remit. A book’s keywords, then, are structuring devices of the book as well as devices to structure reading.
Somewhat more complex considerations arise for sense-2 keywords with that afterthought in the OED definition: ‘any word entered as a search term in a database or search engine’. Let’s call these search-keywords, used for accessing digital resources. These are akin to indexed-keywords (both are in OED’s sense 2), and yet these are obviously different. Let me focus on the basic functions of a search engine where search-keywords are used to look for information and material in the World Wide Web (Web hereafter). To some extent, search-keywords are used for the Web in similar ways as indexed-keywords for books. But the differences are germane, arising from the fact that the Web and the book are very different kinds of texts. Consequently, the keyness of indexed-keywords and search-keywords operate in different ways. The Web could be thought of as a very large text—the largest there is—and extremely fluid: a super-text. As such, the Web incorporates within its super-textual structure all kinds of texts, in numerous forms and modalities, variously accessible from widely distributed portals; moreover, incorporated texts are variously interconnected (hyperlinked); and further, texts are in an ongoing process of incorporation, accruing second by second, while a great many texts are also continuously removed from the Web. The only unifying feature of these texts within the Web’s super-textual structure is that they are incorporated through machine code. This machine code has no meaningful relationship with the textual codes that are prolifically displayed, that is to say, to the substantive content of the texts incorporated in the Web. Therefore, unlike a book, as a super-text, the Web can have no text-describing-keywords. It is simply too prolific and fluid to be grasped in toto or sequentially. For the same reason, the Web as a super-text, can have no meaningful listing of indexed-keywords; only relatively small and coherent bits of the Web can be indexed. Search-keywords for the Web are a means of replacing the functions that both text-describing-keywords and indexed-keywords serve for a book.
Nevertheless, search-keywords for the Web have an affinity to indexed-keywords in a book. Where the reader searches for an indexed-keyword of interest to them amongst those listed in a book, a Web search engine allows the searcher to input their own keyword and then locate where in the Web it appears. The engine’s search-results then appear as a listing of texts within the Web where that keyword appears. For any one search-keyword there are usually many results listed. That plethora is managed in two ways. On the one hand, the results listing could have some criteria of ordering, for example by date, length, or relevance (frequency of the keyword’s occurrence in a text). On the other hand, the searcher can narrow down the search by combining several search-keywords and phrases.
As with searching through indexed-keywords for a book, in choosing search-keywords for the Web the starting question is likely to be an ‘about’ question: for example, ‘let me see what information can be found on the Web about this concept, person, event, etc. (named by the keyword)?’ The main difference between indexed-keywords for books and search-keywords for the Web is in how their attributed-significance and received-significance are negotiated by the searcher. For indexed-keywords of a book, inclusion in the index acknowledges received-significance, the searcher brings the attributed-significance, and both are conditional to and delimited by the scope of the text-describing-keywords. In choosing search-keywords for the Web, the searcher’s attributed-significance is very much determinative and the received-significance seems relatively indeterminate. It could perhaps be estimated by the searcher from general usage outside the digital environment of the Web, which in any case would be implicit in the attributed-significance. Since the Web offers no text-defining-keywords, no other direction about received-significance is available to the searcher in appointing search-keywords. However, as the search is undertaken and develops, the received-significance of the search-keyword is anticipated, estimated, and sharpened by degrees with the attributed-significance in mind. In the process of using the search engine with search-keywords—after they are keyed in and results consulted and search narrowed by combining search-keywords and so on—the searcher gradually gauges the received-significance and accordingly adjusts the attributed-significance of search-keywords. Thus, search-keywords for the Web are inevitably opened to negotiations of both attributed-significance and received-significance within the process of searching. Search-keywords, we may say, are implicitly processive. The processing continues till the searcher feels content that the ‘about’-question has been answered sufficiently or has become irrelevant.
A Web searcher working through search-keywords typically does two other kinds of activities alongside which are intricately woven through the search process. The infrastructure of the Web and the facilities built into search engines encourage such enmeshing of activities. First, searching could give way to surfing or surfing could become a form of open-ended searching. This effectively removes the focus on an ‘about’-question and leads into unplanned encounters with texts in the Web. That could be a matter of finding some unrelated but interesting text appearing from a keyword search, or following a chain of hyperlinks between texts. Second, in the process of searching and surfing, the searcher-surfer could become a contributor to the Web, or, in other words, become a participative reader and writer. They could add texts to the Web by putting comments on existing texts or, more elaborately, by generating (posting) their own texts. Searching via keywords could slide in and out of surfing and contributing in a continuous process, where the negotiations of attributed- and received-meanings of keywords flicker and blur, are matched and mismatched, and meet and depart from each other; keywords may be forgotten, switched, and acquire unexpected associations and connotations. Instead of searchers simply using search-keywords in search engines, we really have searcher-surfer-contributors following a search-surf-contribute process. Though search-keywords vis-à-vis the Web have some affinity with indexed-keywords for a book, their usage is considerably more multifaceted. This is so much so that the OED could well put in a sense 3 of the term ‘keyword’ for Web searching, separated from sense 2.
Thus far, I have been describing what a searcher-surfer-contributor (for brevity, let’s call this person SSC) does with search-keywords and search engines on the Web. Now, let’s consider how this picture looks from the perspective of tracking the activities of such SSCs on the Web. Over a given period, an SSC’s activities may show some such behaviour as the following. As a searcher, the SSC’s habitual or preferred search-keywords lead to results listings in which those keywords are frequently associated with a small number of words or phrases. For example, if the SSC searches ‘football fixtures’, they find that many of the results listed are of texts which are headlined or otherwise associated with the phrase ‘new normal’. Further, combining such words and phrases (as search-keywords themselves) with other search-keywords, such as ‘new normal’ combined with ‘shopping’ instead of ‘football fixtures’, brings up result listings of similar scale and density. As a surfer, the SSC finds that following hyperlinks starting from any search-keyword leads to various texts where that small number of words and phrases features. Thus, if the SSC starts with a text on ‘football fixtures’ and then surfs through hyperlinks and further searches to texts on travel, food, schools, etc., they find that ‘new normal’ seems to come up one way or another in a great many of them. As a contributor, the SSC then starts using those words and phrases themselves, in their comments, messages, etc. The search-keywords which structure the SSC’s entry and activities into the Web, amidst its ever-growing multitude of texts, thus throw up some words and phrases which are used with particularly high frequency and in diverse contexts in the period in question. These are catchphrases and catchwords.
If search-keywords enable the SSC to find their way in the Web, catchphrases/words allow them to acclimatize themselves with the super-text that is the Web and share the idiom of other SSCs there. An SSC’s choice of a search-keyword is made in terms of its attributed-significance, which opens the searching-surfing-contributing process in the Web. That process constitutes the SSC’s presence in the Web, and along the way the SSC apprehends something of the search-keyword’s received-significance. Gauging the received-significance of the search-keywords is mainly a matter of locating them according to the prevailing idiom in use in the Web, a kind of aggregate of characteristic linguistic habits of all SSCs in a given period on the Web. The catchphrases/words that the SSC latches on to while searching-surfing-contributing provide the idiomatic grid in terms of which the received-significance of any keyword—all keywords—is placed. They could be thought of as similar to text-defining-keywords in a book, but instead of being given first they are discovered gradually. The process of starting with a chosen search-keyword and searching-surfing-contributing could be regarded as a process of becoming acclimatized to catchphrases/words which give the SSC some command over the super-text that is the Web.
If, over that period, the online activities of all the SSCs who use English were tracked, some such picture as the following would appear. It would be evident that certain search-keywords are more frequently employed than others, some texts are more often hit upon than others, some SSCs surf more texts than others, and some SSCs make more contributions than others. These could be represented in different distribution charts. If the bearing of catchphrases/words were factored into these distribution charts, they would be tagged to the dense areas of distribution. That is to say, the catchphrases/words would appear most frequently in search-keyword results listings and as keywords themselves; the catchphrases/words would provide the most frequent pathways in surfing; the catchphrases/words would be employed most often in contributions. That describes the catchiness of catchphrases and catchwords.
In beginning my researches into the case studies for this book, that was the description of catchiness I had in mind. I figured that visualizing catchiness thus, in terms of search-keywords and Web search engines, has a larger import. The mechanics of communicative actions and interactions on the Web are analogous to and overlap with other modes and spaces of communication. The Web is both a part of the social world and reflects practices prevalent across the social world. Habitual oral and written, unthinkingly performed and thinkingly staged, interpersonal and collective communications in various areas of social life are difficult to visualize because they are habitual and transient and we are immersed in them. However, they become more tractable when considered in terms of the mechanics of the Web, where every aspect of the habitual has to be engineered and becomes retraceable. So, the description of catchphrases/words which applies in the digital environment is indicative, if not directly revealing, for understanding catchphrases/words in word-of-mouth exchanges or print and broadcast circulations.
However, this description of the catchiness of catchphrases/words says little about the political and commercial interests that play in them and the social forces that bear upon them. The description merely tells us what catchiness is and what makes catchphrases/words recognizable as such. It gives few clues about how catchiness starts being generated, when and why catchphrases appear as such, when they change connotations or cease to be catchy, to what extent they are voluntarily designed, and to what extent they emerge spontaneously. Such questions implicate too many variables to allow for satisfactory anticipatory generalization; these questions are best considered on a case-by-case basis. The case studies offered in the preceding chapters were devoted to answering these questions. This book has thus analysed the political and commercial forces and interests that go into the production and career of a small number of, specifically, political catchphrases: ‘new normal’, ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’, ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’ and ‘We are the 99%’. I hope that in the course of analysing these, the mechanics of catchiness has been clarified to a certain extent and some of the contours of contemporary history have been mapped.