Staying safe from word tricks.
How language hijacks hope.
I live in London.
There are many good things in London, like the thrilling old school bounce of the seats on the Bakerloo line, or the fairytale glass-walled lift in the Southbank Centre, or the sunset song of the Evening Standard distributor1.
There are things that add a little sag to my shoulders too, like the way my nearest big Tesco seems intent to obliterate the letter h from the word yoghurt.
I rarely think about the origin of these slices of city but perhaps, if I did, I would spot patterns where I expected none. I am offering this theory because it turns out that some of my favourite things in this Roman mess of poorly insulated brick and parks the size of Monaco owe their existence to someone very interesting.
His name is Nicholas Saunders.
Saunders was the subject of this Guardian Long Read. He was a post-war maverick with a very specific philosophy around building community, namely that we should do it.
So that’s what he did. A lot of his experiments revolved around making good food available at reasonable prices, although he was not particularly interested in food. And in the process, after tinkering with ideas about the related field of accessible good coffee, he almost accidentally created a business called: Monmouth Coffee. This was followed by experiments in yoghurt (long before my Tesco wanted to get involved with the word) and, eventually, around the corner from Monmouth Coffee: Neal’s Yard2.
There followed a generation of disciples, the present incarnation of Borough Market, and, ultimately, his influence was a palpable part of the late nineties Cool Britannia dream that the UK could exist on world food maps without a warning label.
None of this came from how he thought about food. It came from how he thought, full stop.
Food for Thought
I love secret knowledge. I also love a person with a philosophy. I suppose because on some level I feel like I’m always looking for one, some kind of Universal Theory of Everything Else.
This passage stood out to me.
As a child, if Nicholas had a question that his father, Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, the director of the London School of Economics, could not immediately answer, Alexander would retreat to his study. A few days later, he would present the young Nicholas with a thorough answer. The idea that the information you need could always be made available was a lesson that never left Saunders.
When I was younger, keen to win at Only Child Bingo, I was into magic. What could be more interesting than knowing how to deceive a friend’s eyes in real time? I spent weeks and months trying, not very successfully, to master secret card cuts and coin vanishes.
In time, that drive to dupe morphed into a fascination with less wholesome trickery: advertising, PR, and how they are used to monopolise attention and steer opinion - whether for McDonald’s, online gurus, or government policy.3 When somebody uses sleight of hand to gain money without consent, they stop being a magician and become a con artist.
And the more I learned how it all worked, the more I noticed certain narratives being deployed in my direction, generally by people who really wanted me to look at the shiny queen of hearts of hope and not think about my watch. As I tried to climb the rungs of this strangely ladderless career of acting, I became a person worth advertising to: a mark.
Let’s talk about hiding the lies.
Steam Weasels
For the sake of example, suppose that you are constructing an argument. Bafflingly, you’ve chosen not to do so in the form of a meandering actor’s newsletter but instead as a concise sentence. Almost like maths.
Perhaps:
You should do this because [reason].
And if we divide up the salient parts of the argument, it might be:
(You) should (do this) because ([reason]).
Or:
(You) + (do this) = ([reason]).
Or:
a + b = x
x could be anything. It could be 99.9% of climate scientists agree. It could be you will get a broader perspective. It could be you will be fed.
Here’s where it gets clever. From that x, we, intelligent people who get invited to parties, can infer new information.
- because [99.9% of climate scientists agree] (and therefore you are helping the planet).
- because [you will get a broader perspective] (and therefore make a more informed choice).
- because [you will be fed] (and therefore you will not be hungry).
And thus we progress.
Assuming, that is, we’re interested in general progress and not just personal.
There is another way to approach this argument equations, a shadowy way of pirates and cut-purses and whoever it was who decided that affordable decaf would taste of ankle-meat.
If you’re feeling unscrupulous, you might prefer not to offer an argument that is quite so complete. You might ask yourself: ‘Hang on, I’ve been working bloody hard on both the a and the b of this equation, shouldn’t this person I’m talking to pull their weight when it comes to x?’
And so, you leave the value of [reason] as, simply, [reason]. Then throw your hands up, open a bottle of fizz and look smug.
The difficulty with this approach is that the person you’re trying to convince will react by assuming that you’ve been overdoing it and need a holiday, what with all the fizz soaking into your hair, so you need an extra step. You need to disguise what you’re doing.
To do this, you rephrase the argument in such a way that it seems like it’s saying something. Throw some gibberish in in the place of the evidence and suddenly the person you are talking to is no longer worried about you, they are worried about themselves not pulling the right conclusion.
- because [obviously] (and therefore duh).
- because [it’s what we do] (and therefore come on).
- because [it’s good] (and therefore you are good).
You said it so confidently. You must mean something. Right?
If you are challenged that you haven’t said anything, double down. You’re not wrong so it must be them. Don’t look down at the hand holding the words, look up here in the sunlight at the one holding the sober and certain tone of voice.
We’ve had the useful phrase ‘weasel words’ to describe this sort of behaviour since the 1900s. They are words of insinuation, of implication, of hint. Said with confidence, they give the impression of giving information even though they live their duplicitous lives happily undefined.
Let’s return to Felix Trench, naïf mark.
As you might have noticed, most of our job as actors is finding work. We spend our days writing, social mediaing, creating, promoting. We update headshots, footle with showreels, worry agents, and sometimes even ask our flatmates and/or neighbours if they want to start a podcast. And then, for approximately twelve minutes a year, that work turns into something paid.
This can be dispiriting. The kind of dispiriting that leads you to try to figure out where you, personally, are lacking. You might identify areas that you need to work on that have a way forward [“I need more on-set experience”] or you might identify areas that will never be solved [“I dunno, I think it’s just me”].
The thing about this second type of area is that it’s undefinable and impossible to disprove. You’ve created your own ‘I’m not working because [reason]’.
I am a fanciful person who likes an image, so I have a silly name for this kind of “it’s just me” reasoning and that name is steam weasels - little vapour clouds of undefineable unfact-based rubbish. Because a) weasel words and b) when you really look at an argument like this, it evaporates.
Partly, these steam weasels are perfectly happy to rise up unbidden from our own heads. But if they’re struggling with that, they have allies in the outside world. Oh boy, do they have allies.
Adventures in Careful Learning
Team.
You know me.
I think ongoing education for actors is a wonderful thing. Take classes, read books, watch YouTube deep dives, analyse performances, learn by doing, take yourself for a walk and have a really good think, do all the things because there’s tons of work that’s been done in this field and, while you are welcome to refine it, you do not have reinvent this particular wheel.
But there is an idea that seems to crop up a lot. It re-emerges in different shapes with different vocabulary every few years. And I want you to be on the watch for it because this particular steam weasel is pure ear-poison.
The thesis of this damp rodent is that there is something intangible, immeasurable, hell, undefinable which decides whether people work or people don’t work. And you hear it and read it everywhere.
You might know it as:
Star power!
The it factor!
The X factor!
Pizzazz!
Funny bones!4
There’s just something about them!
Celebrity energy! (a new one I’m seeing around)
etc! etc! etc!
So what’s the equation?
If (You) want (work), you need
Fizz!
or
Sparkle!
or, I don’t know,
Citroen C3 exhaust fumes!
You + Work = [Whatever we’re calling it today] (and therefore, if you don’t have that, you will simply never be as castable as somebody who does. So why bother? Mate. Just leave.)
This is nonsense and, I’d wager heavily, it is nonsense born from money. If you can control the narrative of what makes an actor, you a) can get people to exclude themselves from the outset and b) have a handy excuse to draw on when you or people you know have achieved a stable career through luck.
Everything Can Be Learned
The flip side of recognising that these shortcuts are nothing but pointy-nosed mist is that if everything can be learned, to learn it you have to actually put the time in to learn it. And that often takes a lot of work. It is a useful fantasy to believe that some people are born with that little bit of
Goat burp!
and some are not. Because that means that if you are already on the inside, getting the work, you must deserve to be there above somebody who wasn’t born with
The warm hug of an Airbus crashing into a frog!
But to normalise knowledge and craft over
The magic of the Windows ME Start Menu stunned to find itself in the finals of the Bundesliga playing Bayern Munich!
we have to acknowledge them fully. Acknowledge that there is a deep body of work with millennia of history behind it, work and ideas sparking right now across the world, work that none of us can hope to fully master, but work that is, or should be, for all of us.
Next time you see this kind of linguistic trick being deployed in a blog post or in someone’s class, ask yourself why it’s there. I think 99% of the time it’s not malicious but rather an excuse, a way of acknowledging that this profession is hard and none of us have a Universal Theory of Everything Else, however much that would be nice. A sad prayer to the god of “I dunno man, you tell me”.
Generously, you might think it’s meant to be comforting. It probably is. But I find more comfort in Nicholas Saunders and his dad.
The information you need could always be made available.
Could it really? I dunno man, you tell me. I can’t prove it. But if I’m going to accept an undefinable, continuously pursuing knowledge seems like a much more useful one than figuring out how to cover myself in:
Yogurt!
NEWS
Happy new year! For the second time, I skipped an edition of this newsletter over late December/ early January so I’ve not been bothering your inbox in a while. I think we have to wait until next year to see if this is a pattern.
In the spirit of sharing craft tools, there’s a new book coming out that I’m very excited about. The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnelan is a standard text of the last 20 years that I recommend to anybody who wants to know about the job. Well, he’s got a new one coming in March: The Actor and the Space. I found out about it on the Cheek by Jowl Instagram.
ee-ni-SHTAAAAA
If you’re reading this outside the UK, I might as well have just said Starbucks and Babybel.
I was never interested in going into either professionally. However, there’s always been the related discipline of acting. Actors are contractual hucksters: an audience gives us money for lies.
I included ‘funny bones’ because a) I work a lot in comedy and b) ‘must have funny bones’ is a classic of casting breakdowns for commercials in the UK.