Bah humbug!

The indispensable Anthony Daniels parses the difference between bullshit and humbug.

I talk bullshit if I discourse on a subject about which I know nothing, with the intention of making others believe that I am in fact knowledgeable about it. But this is not humbug.

The extra dimension that humbug has is that of moral or emotional strain. A humbug affects a moral or emotional concern that he does not really feel. Because he cannot admit to others, and in part even to himself, that, actually, he doesn't give a damn, he adopts exaggerated and high-falutin language to cover up the absence of feeling.

The quintessential humbug statement, to my mind, is Bill Clinton's notorious "I feel your pain," a statement which shows what a fine feeling fellow he is but requires nothing on his part. Another common humbug is concern for "the children," the favorite bugaboo of National Review's Andrew Stuttaford. Daniels has his own examples.

Pecksniffery is amusing in individuals, but when it becomes the ruling characteristic of government and administration it is a serious matter. I have heard many hospital administrators, for example, say that they care "passionately" about the medical service they are just about to reduce or eliminate, in order to be able to employ yet more of their own type in offices. But why should we be interested in the alleged emotional life of hospital administrators? Why do they feel compelled to use high-flown language? And why are so many people taken in by it?

My own particular bete noire on the humbug front concerns the wearing of ribbons. A few years ago, you may recall, there was much discussion of the ribbons worn at the Oscars: the pink ribbons connoting the wearer's determination to wipe out breast cancer and the ever-popular red ribbon which assured us of the wearer's brave stand in the war against AIDS. Doubtless many of these people had given to the causes they cared so passionately about, thus making the ribbons akin to the poppies worn on Veteran's Day after giving a buck to a Veteran standing outside the grocery store. But the talk was all about the "stands" the various wearers had taken, their courage, as if they deserved special consideration for their fine feelings on the matter. Humbug!

One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes had the best response to this nonsense. Kramer decided to enter the AIDS walk to raise money for AIDS, but he refused to don the ribbon. For that he was hounded by a bizarre pair of activists who wanted to forcibly hold him down and pin a ribbon on him. Hilarious.

Back to Daniels for a summing up:

There is an important characteristic of humbug: it uses language that has connotation but no denotation. It commits the speaker or writer to nothing, but leaves the impression that he is, in the cant phrase, "a caring person". Just as a modern hospital administrator hopes one day to have a hospital entirely without beds or medical staff, so politicians hope one day to have language deprived entirely of anything except connotation.