A sentence enters the discourse from somewhere. Within a week, it is being used by people who do not know where it came from. Within a month, it is being used by people who would not, if asked, agree with what it implies. By the time it is in a headline, it has lost almost all of its original content and is functioning as a piece of social shorthand — a way of signaling which side of a question one is on, without having to defend a position.
This essay is about one such sentence. It is not the most consequential sentence of the last decade. It is, however, a useful one to track, because the route it took from a single op-ed to common usage is unusually well-documented. We can see, with some precision, when each adoption happened, and who was carrying the sentence at each stage.
How a phrase travels
Phrases tend to move through three stages. First, they are arguments. Second, they are talking points. Third, they are passwords. By the time a phrase is a password, it does not have to be defended — only deployed. To use it correctly is to be inside; to question it is to be outside. The phrase no longer has to be true to be useful.
First, an argument. Then a talking point. Then a password.
A reader’s defense
The countermeasure is not contrarianism. It is the willingness to ask, of any phrase that has begun to travel without resistance, what argument it used to be. Sometimes the original argument is sound and the phrase is doing useful work. Sometimes it is not. The point is to be able to tell the difference, which requires reading the phrase the way it was written, before it was a password.
This is a slow discipline. It is also, in a discourse organized around speed, one of the few that holds up.
