Are you or anyone you know “unserious”? Probably, I’m afraid. This is the put-down du jour in Britain today. If you come across someone whose opinions you don’t respect, or who you feel is making a flimsy argument, you may now consider them not just trivial or thick – but unserious. Its use has spiked in the UK over the last three years: it’s highly likely by now that if you’re not using it, you’re the unserious one.
No one is more serious about unseriousness than Sir Serious himself, Keir Starmer. Over various bouts of PMQs and Commons debates since he became Prime Minister, he has called Kemi Badenoch “unserious” 12 times, by my count. His henchmen (because surely it’s only men who arbitrate quite how un our seriousness is) also love using it. A No 10 aide accused Labour welfare rebels of “deeply unserious stuff from deeply unserious people”. During that row, another Starmer ally declared “our political class is so deeply unserious”. This year alone, it’s been used in the chamber more than in the previous three years put together.
“I love you, but you are not serious people,” Logan Roy growled at his children in the final season of Succession. It seems this last gasp of a monstrous patriarch sounded pretty good to a bunch of our politicians – never too burdened by a linguistic hinterland – who have embraced the rhetoric of seriousness ever since.
This is also the language of “grown-ups in the room”, of “credibility” and “competence”, and “steady hands” and “cool heads”. It’s a way of saying: I deem you unserious, because I’m the opposite. And it’s so po-faced. What a bland word. That Newspeakish “un”. That weak streak of sibilance. That anticlimactic Latinate ebb of stress. And so dull! Of all the fun insults you can chuck at a person, you choose this. What happened to “silly”? Or “trifling”? It is a sad day for the English when they have forgotten their trifles.
More serious readers than I will point out how unBard of me it is to poo-poo the prefix Shakespeare famously popularised. But these guys aren’t Shakespeare. They just can’t think of any other adjectives. Historic uses of the term, kindly supplied to me by the English word expert and author Mark Forsyth aka The Inky Fool, show more flare deployed alongside it: “Frothy, vain, and unserious persons” (J. Flavell, Saint Indeed 199, 1668); “What a plaything, a trifle, an unserious affair” (N. Hawthorne, English Notebooks vol. II. 460, 1860). Make British debate frothy again, and drop the “unserious”. Seriously.
[See also: Diane Abbott v the Labour Party]
Content from our partners
Related
