Do do that due diligence you do do so well

“Due diligence.” I would do horrid, unspeakable things if it meant never hearing that phrase again. I’d French-kiss a donkey. I’d let a hippopotamus with swine flu hock a loogie in my ear. Anything.

It’s something I hear a lot while covering various municipal meetings, and to be fair to the people saying it, most probably aren’t aware of how tired and overused those words have become. Language, after all, is contagious. The longer you’re immersed in a situation – whether it be a city council, an Army regiment, or a middle school history class – the easier it becomes for the native jargon to seep into your own vernacular, become a part of your natural modes of speech. Hear “due diligence” enough times, and it quietly slips into your consciousness on a subliminal level; before you know it, you’re tossing it around as though the two words were born together, ejected from humanity’s lingual womb like a set of conjoined twins. 

Only that’s not what really happened. What really happened is that someone, somewhere, said “due diligence” and decided it felt good on their lips and tongue. So they said it a few more times. The person sitting next to them thought it had a nice ring to it, so they started saying it. And on and on, until now you can’t be on a board or committee without dutifully doing your due diligence. Of course, “do your due diligence” is the mutant child of that parent phrase, and sounds like some tongue-twisting line in a ’50’s Motown ditty. “Do do that due diligence you do do so well.” Gladys Knight and her Pips only wish they’d thought of it.

Not that I’m annoyed or anything.

Actually, I’m probably being a bit harsh, considering most of us have done something similar at least once in our lives. When I was around 10, it was fashionable to utter a sentence, and then tack the word “not” to the end of it to indicate that we really meant the opposite. It worked something like this: “I enjoy being manhandled by coke-snorting gorillas. NOT!” Colloquially, it was a way for us kids to make a statement in a “hip” or ironic manner, with the added bonus that it confused adults and made them regard us as though we were a species of tiny space aliens. Grammatically, it was an abomination. But it caught on and spread, and I’m totally proud to have been a part of it. Not.

Such phenomena were inevitable since the very point of language is to spread. It’s how human beings communicate with each other. When a person is born, the mind is a blank slate, and it gradually gets filled with the language and thoughts of others. My first word was “car” because my father was fond of talking about vintage muscle cars. To this day, I owe him credit for much of my salty vocabulary, populated by unprintable words that mostly refer, in unflattering terms, to various body parts and biological acts. It’s only natural that we carry with us some infantile vestiges of mimicry, and repeat the things we like. Monkey see, monkey do, as they say.

Where this becomes a problem is that we live in an era in which language, unfortunately, has been simplified and parsed down to its essentials. That leaves a shallower pool from which to draw our pet phrases and sayings. This wouldn’t have been a problem in, say, Victorian England – an era in which the mother tongue was nimble from wrapping itself around ornate, creatively complex turns of phrase. A quote from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” illustrates what I mean: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” A beautifully rendered description, but outdated, since it doesn’t fit into the 140-character limit of a Twitter post. Nowadays, that same sentiment would be whittled down thusly: “Dude, score.”

With options and influence decidedly more limited in this age of monosyllabic brevity, we fall into the trap of uttering the same phrases over and over again. And it doesn’t stop with “due diligence.” There’s a long list of cringeworthy sayings which, in a perfect world, would be stricken from use under punishment of bludgeoning from a steel-knuckled goon. These include “at this point in time”; “moving forward”; “in my opinion”; “outside the box”; “putting the cart before the horse”; “it is what it is”; and “at the end of the day.” These have been repeated so often, they’ve almost stopped meaning anything; you could assemble a sentence by arranging them in just about any order, and still manage to say nothing of substance. “At the end of the day, we have to think outside the box moving forward at this point in time.” “In my opinion, at the end of the day, we have to do our due diligence moving forward and stop putting the cart before the horse.” Ugh. Someone whack me in the noggin with a rusty shovel.

Oh, well. It is what it is.

It’s easy to fall back on that kind of stuff, especially with the demands of modern life placing strains on our originality. So no one’s to blame, really; it’s just one of those things that happens, like the spread of a flu virus. But as language has shown a capacity to evolve, so too does it have the ability to devolve. Sometimes I wonder what Dickens would think, facing an onslaught of generic nonsayings and trite palaver. I imagine it would inspire him to weep silently into his own dog-eared copy of “Oliver Twist,” despairing as only a writer would over a bruised and battered lexicon.

Though I hate to be a pessimist. I’m sure the language will rebound from this scourge and flourish in a glorious renaissance, a tongue triumphant in its rise from the ashes.

Not.