ducksanddrakes

This word caught my attention yesterday. I heard it about six times in five minutes on the news, referring to the cascade of objections and rejoinders volleying between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama through the media. Hyphenated, contracted or otherwise, the term seems to be equally useful as both a verb (“we’ve got to push back on the special interests”), and also as a noun (“we expect pushback on our customer relations policy”). In either case, the term really seems to capture something about how people express verbal and public conflicts nowadays. As such, it deserves a little scrutiny.

In the last year or so, pushback has drawn interest from columnists and bloggers eager to dig into its background. According to what I’ve been able to find, pushback is used as a military term (to “push-back” the enemy; to experience pushback) and it is also used in airports to describe what happens when one of those little cars on the tarmac “pushes back” your plane from the gate. William Safire even recalls a time when “pushback” was an adjective describing a feature in reclining chairs. Safire doesn’t seem to object to the new usage, but language bloggers do, based on their trademark objection that it is simply “not a real word in the dictionary,’ as if this fussy rectitude had profound bearing on the matter. Actually, pushback was indeed submitted to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary last year. And it’s already in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that the term is also used in hockey to describe the backward pass with which game play begins.

I’d like to highlight a couple of properties and complications about this word and its usage. As in my posts “Ties,” “Tasers” and “Under the bus,” here I’m interested in how a word’s usage possesses dynamics that stretch, loosen or rigidify the written and argumentative constructions in which it appears. These dynamics surely derive from both the term and also its context, which is an unstable variable that prevents us from establishing any hard and fast rules about meaning. But it is profitable to think these dynamics through, in order to develop a kind of perceptive reflection that allows us to approach even these suddenly trendy terms in useful and deliberate ways. This way of thinking also enables us to interrogate such neologisms for the curiously meaningful information that they yield about the society to which they are directed.

To begin with, it seems that the current usage of pushback is being driven by the aural media. I’ve noticed that some TV commentators seem to pause ever so slightly before they use the term, as if embarrassed, but they are certainly key popularizers of the word. Because of this mode of popularization, expect pushback to appear in writing and speech that is based on interviews and public comments – TV shows, biographies, news magazines, radio shows, political news writing, sermons, interviews, blogs, polemical books – anything that is based upon, sourced to, or otherwise derived from some sort of talk. By the same principle, this usage will probably not appear so often in writing on culture or the arts, in reviews, scholarship or in fiction. This uneven distribution is important because it ensures that the term will appear more often in public writing rather than in private or professional writing; it also ensures that one’s reaction to the term will be partly defined by the sorts of writing one regularly encounters.

This leads me to a second observation. It seems clear that critics of this usage are probably literary types who would be apt to dislike pushback because it replaces too wide an array of words that denote speech acts. This is perfectly true. Although pushback is always about conflict, there the commonality ends: here pushback means disagreement on the part of super-delegates in the current election; here it means to ignore the common wisdom about financial problems; here it means to issue a riposte in a financial negotiation; here, it means dissent from a ban on lead solder in the EU; here it means to retaliate against a person; here it means to refute a media narrative. Of course, many words have such elasticity. But when elastic words replace rigid ones, language watchers lament the loss of a preceding specificity, as this change seems to make writing less informative and more open to misunderstanding. For instance, to most intellectuals, “dissent” and “retaliation” are two very different acts, but the differences are erased if both are replaced by “pushback.” However, this objection is not terribly powerful because it ignores the reasons that people opt for less specificity. Writers often choose ambiguity because they aren’t sure about whether a statement is intended as dissent, retaliation or something else, so it is most accurate to employ a null term. This is not dastardly; it is simply erring on the side of caution. Moreover, there are in reality lots of readerships for whom a less specific characterization is perfectly adequate, and it is folly to ignore the audience entirely when we estimate where a given statement rests on some putative grade of denotative specificity.

Anyway, pushback has at least one more interesting dynamic that bears note here: it seems to request a partner, and yet in virtually no usage does the term coincide with what ought to be its natural spouse – “push.” Instead, when someone is insulted, they pushback; when someone’s argument is discredited, they pushback; when someone is lied to they pushback. Rarely, however, is someone actually pushed before they pushback. This is important because it frames the aggressive act using a very specific and illustrative term, while it frames the defender in very generic and blunt language. This makes the defensive act seem slow, imprecise, confused, even childlike. In this sense, pushback resembles the term “damage control” inasmuch as it presupposes that there is a bad state of affairs that can only be modestly ameliorated, never triumphed over or deflected.

Since so many different sorts of conflict are expressed by the term pushback, I think that this last issue is a little troubling. The usage of pushback makes it seem as if all conflicts and allegations – irrespective of their source, intent or the size and character of the constituency behind them – automatically have more truth, merit and force than the retaliations that they might engender. In this way, even specious attacks have an infantilizing effect upon those who they indict, and must be pushed back upon no matter what their content.

Pushback is a word for a society that imagines that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will always hurt you.