SAD AND PROUD

Dick Pountain/17:02/07 November 1995/IDEALOG 15

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sad (sæd) adj. sadder, saddest.
1. feeling sorrow; unhappy.
2. causing, suggestive, or expressive of such feelings.
3. unfortunate; unsatisfactory; shabby; deplorable.
4. (of pastry, cakes, etc.) not having risen fully; heavy.
5. (of a colour) lacking brightness; dull or dark.
6. Archaic. serious; grave.
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As a keen student of the vernacular I just love to watch the way the meaning of words changes through daily usage, without regard for the keepers of the Queen's English. For example the way that 'wicked', which had been a term of disapproval for several centuries suddenly transmuted into a term of approval for teenagers. A particularly interesting case study is the word 'sad' which has recently become an all-purpose term of contempt, with a meaning I can best render as 'incurably uncool'. Before it just meant unhappy (except among the ranks of pastry cooks.) The logic of this shift seems to have been from "it makes ME sad to contemplate your crap lifestyle" to "YOU are sad", by condensation and displacement. Sad is actually here being used in the sense of definition 2, "causing unhappiness". And what are the things that cause such unhappiness? The wearing of anoraks or other items of sturdy outdoor clothing, especially if purchased at advantageous prices from Millets. Showing too much interest in how anything is made, or works, or collecting anything. Or indeed showing too much interest in anything at all apart from sex, drugs and personal appearance.

I suspect that sadness is relative, so that for example yoof TV presenters  find businessmen sad, who find computer people sad, who in turn find real-ale afficionados sad. And absolutely everybody finds trainspotters sad, so they fester at the bottom of the ego foodchain. Perhaps the archetypal form of this new usage of sad is that advert for John Smith's bitter (careful now boy, remembering the name of the beer is a bit, well, sad) where Jack Dee asks "Have you ever wondered how the widget works?", and then pronounces, "In that case you're very sad." There we have it in its naked purity - displaying any form of curiosity whatsoever is sad, whereas pouring John Whatsisname's foul metallic brew down your throat is the opposite (presumably 'happy'.) What seems to have happened is that meaning 6, the archaic meaning of sad as 'serious' or 'grave' has been revived and extended so that anyone who is not entirely frivolous is, ergo, sad. 

Well I'm coming out right now, so say it loud, I'm sad and proud. Of course the really keen style policeman will have spotted that MERELY WRITING this article already announces my sadness, because I've betrayed far too much interest in how the word 'sad' works. But there's worse than that, much worse. I know how the widget works. There, I've said it. At a pinch, if stuck on a desert island I could actually make a bloody widget, using only young green bamboo stem and a sea-urchin spine. I can write programs in thirteen different languages, and what's more I DO IT FOR FUN! I would like the court to take into consideration 1,834 other offences, including: knowing the difference between synchronous and asynchronous bus protocols; drinking Marston's Pedigree with relish on sundry occasions; knowing how to set the tappets on a variety of defunct motorbikes; and having read Don Quixote, Moby Dick and Thus Spake Zarathustra all the way through at least 4 times each. My fantasy football team has Karl Friedrich Gauss in goal, Richard Feynman as striker, and plays a 3.9-2.2-3.9 formation. But I never spotted trains, ever, honest.

Coming out as a sad person is tremendously liberating, for I can now proceed
to deconstruct the concept of 'sad' with nothing further to lose. The first question to ask when investigating any social phenomenon is 'who benefits' (in Latin 'cui bono' as we sad persons say) and the answer here is anyone who has anything to sell. The current concept of sadness is just another way of saying that consumption is cooler than production; a sad person is a shorthand for anyone who has anything to do with making things, as opposed to consuming them or talking about them on TV. But, you may object, trainspotters do not make trains; no indeed, but they celebrate the fact that someone made a train, and that's what makes them 'sad'. In fact they may be perfectly happy as they tick off engine numbers (but I wouldn't know for sure because I am not, nor have I ever been, nor have any members of my family...)

Sad isn't a new idea, but rather a new manifestation of a very old English romantic tradition that goes back to Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' and before. And that in turn was just a distorted reflection of the world-view of the landed aristocracy, who didn't need to make things because they lived off rents - they had the leisure to cultivate a life of good manners, fine clothes and genteel pursuits, while despising the sad toilers who made the industrial revolution. This attitude, amplified through its effects in our educational system, is perhaps the deepest cause of our unstoppable industrial decline over the last century.

All that's happened now is that an unholy alliance of tabloid editors, pop-culture pundits, advertising execs and lottery promoters has succeeded in convincing a significant chunk of the population that such drone lifestyles are still desirable, even though the nearest that chunk will ever get to a life of leisure is a sweeper-up's job in a municipal leisure centre (assuming the council hasn't bought a French robot to do that.) Meanwhile we find that just about nothing is manufactured in this country any more and even our electricity is likely to be soon US owned. But I'd better stop here as this is getting a bit too serious, grave, and, frankly, sad.