Roll Your Own

Harnessing the dangerous power of the catchphrase

When I was in college I fell in love with a man who loved to smoke. He consumed both pot and tobacco with a craftsman’s attention to detail.

I never much cared for pot, alcohol was my preference, but I did smoke cigarettes. I bought mine in packs from the gas station. At the time, I smoked Camel nons, what we used to call filterless cigarettes, the kind where you inevitably pick a fleck of tobacco off the tip of your tongue. This was before the trendy American Spirits, which I smoked later, but well after everyone knew smoking was bad for us.

This man rolled his own cigarettes. He was so skilled at it he could roll one handed, while driving, and come up with a perfect cylinder of tobacco wrapped in thin paper. I thought we were so cool, driving to his house by the beach, suntanned, young, windows open, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and drinking a cold Heineken. Yes, while driving – I was an alcoholic even then.

It’s summer now, warm, and I’m thinking about things I love that are inherently fraught. I love catch phrases, labels, easy tags. At work, I call them terms of art. A term of art is a phrase a group uses to describe a pattern or behavior. It can be as simple as a father whispering to his teen-aged kids “FHB” when Uncle Jim and his family arrive unexpectedly for dinner, meaning “Family Hold Back” as in, don’t take your customary second helping until everyone has eaten. It’s shorthand, but it often conveys cultural information. The FHB family – (this is a real example) values hospitality, and wants everyone to feel welcome. Nobody’s going hungry, there’s plenty of snacks for later, but with FHB Jim and family each get a plateful. In-jokes and neologisms can be terms of art, shorthand that conveys cultural information about what is in or out, a kind of linguistic side-eye, side-eye being a term of art.

When I coach work teams I invite them to come up with their own terms of art. What are phrases that can serve as shortcuts and emphasize cultural values or aspirations? A lot of my clients are in advertising, so they come up with some very creative ways of expressing things like a commitment to being direct or tolerating conflict or setting good boundaries with clients. Confidentiality precludes my sharing these phrases with you but they are usually memorable, sometimes involve profanity, and they really work.

But there’s a dark side to the labels, catchphrases and terms of art when we use them as shorthand at work or in our personal relationships. What could, in theory, be useful becomes, in practice, toxic and disruptive.

Catchphrases, when widely adopted, get encrusted with political, social and cultural baggage that makes them more damaging. They move from tool to weapon. It’s like pouring molten lead into a piece of wood to make a cosh, heavy and lethal.

I wrote a few weeks ago about therapy speak and recovery speak being co-opted by people who are not therapists and not in recovery to attack others. The backlash to those kinds of facile overused terms has been written and spoken about widely. And yes, it is bad for us. Bad for relationships, bad for communication, reductive and limiting.

Here's an example. The New York Times ran an article about the term “mankeeping” this week. Mankeeping is the emotional labor many women experience in opposite sex relationships when their male partner has no friends or social network and turns to his wife or partner to fulfill all his social and emotional needs.

Last week the Times ran a long article called The Trouble With Wanting Men about “heterofatalism” the sense of frustration, dread or doom women seeking men feel about the men they date. These men are described as commitment phobic, unreliable, immature, passive, helpless.

I read both these articles, and I will admit some of the points landed. I felt like the labels had some resonance. Women often talk with other women about their frustrations with their male partners, and I am susceptible to all the catchphrases we use to describe unskillful patterns of behavior that feel gendered. Often because they are gendered.

This is what made me think about the cigarettes. I loved smoking, and did it for a long time. There was a delicious subversive delight in the snick of the lighter, that first inhale, the kick when the nicotine hit my bloodstream. It was an excuse to step out of a party and a reason to gather with friends, huddled in a doorway outside of a club.

Labels that sum up behavior which irks or challenges, phrases that expertly sketch power dynamics run amok, give me that same hit. There’s a reason these terms take off on social media, because they are reductive and delicious, especially if you are the one who can wield them. Even though I really try to be less judgmental, more compassionate, to move with curiosity and openness rather than condemnation and censure, I can feel all the slights and damage of years as a woman in the world reach out for the tasty psychic snack of the snappy label drenched with derogatory implications.

To have one phrase so perfectly sum up your lived experience, an experience which has been discounted, can be gratifying, validating. I feel seen. I love words and words that do this triple duty of naming, indicting and honoring are intoxicating, I want to inhale them.

And if all I wanted was to feel seen, I could stop there. But what if I want to use a phrase in relationship as shortcut and cultural compass to change another person’s perspective or behavior?

A woman who tells her partner in an argument that he is gaslighting and tone policing and going full DARVO may be accurate in her assessment of all of those behaviors. In which case she should dump his ass. But if his lack of skill is manifesting in specifically objectional behaviors she would like him to see and change, it is unlikely he is going to listen better after a fusillade of catchphrases. Especially if he is one of those men who is reluctant to look at his male privilege or who lacks close friendships or family connections where he can check in and ask someone who is not his partner “am I the asshole here?” (And that question only counts if you ask a living breathing person who knows you well and will tell you the truth – AI or reddit doesn’t count.)

If the woman in question doesn’t want to dump his ass, would it be more effective to step back from the therapy speak short cuts and try to articulate a term of art that they can use together? Negotiate a term that encompasses her boundary and the kinds of behavior they would both like to aspire to without the baggage of shame or ridicule or invective in the pre-made social media hashtags. If they roll their own, come up with their own term, it might still be risky, but if they are skillful, it could help.

The problem is, it takes a lot of skill to be able to roll your own terms of art, whether you are doing it in a personal or professional relationship. Terms of art have to work for everyone involved. It has to be a tool, not a weapon.

To return to the example of my ad agency clients, one of the issues that has come up consistently is that teams in the Pacific Northwest are often quite conflict avoidant. Which means that necessary but difficult conversations and input are often avoided, to the detriment of the team or whatever it is they are building. In solving this problem, they first have to name it. Which is not easily done for conflict avoidant folks. Then they have to come up with a way of referring to it to invite a change, or flag future avoidant behavior.

If someone called out “stop being so passive-aggressive” when potential issues came up it would clearly be counterproductive. No one is going to change based on such loaded language. But if they have agreed, as we did at a place I used to work, to be “brave crusaders” then we could ask that. Is this a brave crusader conversation?

The most effective terms of art are a reminder of the invitation to change culture and behavior that we negotiated and agreed to together in a calm moment, so it can be a useful guide in the middle of the messy, challenging, rewarding business of building something with other people.