“Today I had a frank and constructive first call with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar” by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband
The Vocabulary of Suppressed Violence
“Frank exchange of views” is the single most useful phrase in the diplomatic lexicon, precisely because everyone involved knows it is a lie and nobody involved will admit it. A former UK diplomat once put it plainly in a Language Log discussion: a frank exchange of views is just shouting. If the participants throw things at each other, it upgrades to a full and frank exchange of views. That is not satire. That is a professional’s working definition.
The Bush White House gave the phrase its fullest flowering. After Dick Cheney’s 2004 meeting with Senator Patrick Leahy, a spokesman told reporters the two men had engaged in a frank exchange of views, which Salon correctly decoded as Cheney inviting the senator to perform an anatomically improbable act upon himself. Cheney had reportedly used the same register two years earlier with a room full of Arab leaders. One imagines the interpreters were paid combat rates.
Even the tabloids have cottoned on. A columnist for the Weston Mercury called it, with some affection, the Foreign Office description of an old-fashioned diplomatic punch-up, noting that it manages to make an ambassadorial hissy-fit seem more dignified. Which is, when you think about it, the entire function of a foreign ministry: laundering tantrums into transcripts.
The Concern Economy
Then there is “deeply concerned,” a phrase so overworked it ought to unionise. A former State Department deputy director for policy planning explained its precise calibration to NPR: it sits in the Goldilocks zone, more than a passing concern, but not gravely concerned. In one April alone, the department was deeply concerned about judicial conduct in Turkey, freedoms in Egypt, a raid on a US-funded clinic in Uganda, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Burma, among a small library of other crises. Concern, it turns out, is infinitely renewable and costs nothing to issue.
The escalation ladder runs roughly: concerned, then deeply concerned, then gravely concerned, and only when someone has actually started shelling a city does the vocabulary admit to alarm. UNICEF was still reaching for “deeply concerned” to describe the effect of active military escalation on children in Iran, which tells you the word has been stretched so thin it now covers everything from a rude tweet to a war crime.
The Nigerian Dialect
Nigerian diplomatic and political statements have their own regional accent within this universal grammar. “Government is aware” means government found out from the newspapers, same as everyone else, and is currently deciding whether a response is legally required. “The matter is receiving the attention it deserves” means the matter is receiving no attention whatsoever, because the amount of attention it deserves has been internally assessed at zero. “We call on all parties to remain calm” is issued exclusively by the party responsible for the loss of calm in the first place, and is best read as a request that the aggrieved stop being aggrieved out loud.
The Translation Table, Rendered in Prose
If “candid” appears in a readout, someone was rude. If “robust” appears, someone was ruder still, and possibly a table was involved. If the statement says the two sides “agreed to continue discussions,” no agreement of substance occurred and both delegations are privately relieved the cameras have gone. If it says relations are “at a crossroads,” relations are in fact heading downhill and everyone has simply agreed not to look at the gradient. And if a foreign minister describes a first call as “frank and constructive,” the honest transcript would read: we talked, we disagreed on the fundamentals, nobody hung up first, and we are both calling this progress because the alternative is admitting we achieved nothing on the first attempt.
The genius of the form is that it is technically never dishonest. Every word is true. It is simply arranged so that the truth requires a decoder ring, which is precisely why one exists.
