Cancelled: talking about bodies

So intent are we on not making judgments or not being seen to make judgments on other people’s bodies that we’ve decided to separate the body from the person.

A friend was laughing about an expression he heard on a radio show about health and fitness, where a health professional referred to “people living in a large body”. “You mean body dysmorphia?”, I said to him. No, he said, this was about people who were large but didn’t want to be identified as large so they prefer to say they are living in a large body.

The real estate reference flummoxed me. It’s not like people pop in and visit a large body. Make a house call on themselves. I doubt they could move out, have a holiday in a tiny body or go the whole five-star and live in a body that has been lifted, shaped, Botox-ed, boot-camped and pampered. Not that I’m saying that is the ideal.

We have finally disembodied ourselves. So intent are we on not making judgments or not being seen to make judgments on other people’s bodies that we’ve decided to separate the body from the person and done it so effectively that we may as well think of the body as a lease or a squat, rather than an ownership.

We’ll get used to this, in the same way that we no longer think of “people with a vagina” as people who have a strange sounding heart condition or – gulp – people who work at the morgue and take souvenirs home. It’s another step along the path of treating the body as something that can be recreated by the mind. Or recreated by language

Until recently, descriptions of bodies were couched in medical terms. The expressions overweight and underweight referred to people, who may have medical concerns because of their weight. Neither was ideal, both were at the Watch and Act stage but they weren’t meant to be insulting.

The other way of describing a human body was more data dependent – that is, you might be average weight, above average or below average. Statement of fact. Again, useful for medicos but also for people designing chairs, planes, doorways, cars and whatever spaces people have to fit into.

The desire to remove adjectives from descriptions of bodies is understandable. It’s an easy way to say we won’t tolerate people judging others by their appearance.

Fair enough. We live in such a body conscious age that a person’s weight often brands them with character traits, moral failings, even political leanings.

But the route to treating people kindly is ­taking a toll on language. It’s not just the grammatical contortion needed to accommodate the identity moniker, they/them, it’s the discomfort we feel whenever we try to give a fulsome ­description of something.

It’s a war on adjectives. Sure, adjectives are often a lazy use of words – a failure to find a more appropriate word – but they do give a particular flavour to a noun and they’re a quick calibration in conversations. It’s not just a cat sitting on a deck, it’s a silky cat sitting on a sunny deck; it’s not just police entering the room, it’s armed police entering the room; it’s not just a man stepping into an alley, it’s a large man stepping into a dark alley.

When you use descriptives you are colouring their essence; you are calibrating their meaning for the sake of clarity and you are, indeed, making a judgment because that’s the nature of ­language.

If we are sterilising the language, then at least these clunky/timid expressions are serving another purpose. When we hear a strange expression, we are being warned that we’re entering sensitive territory and we ought to think twice before stepping in – or taking up residence.

[e-mail]