It’s interesting to reflect on the implications of American slang for approbation and enthusiasm.  Old-timey slang included terms like “the bee’s knees,” “cat’s pajamas” and “copacetic.”  They were humorous and light-hearted expressions of appreciation, without the expectation of control in the relationship with the admired object.  The 1950s beat slang saw a bemused irreverence for daddio, slouching into passivity when the with-it were cats and chicks, and things were cool, man.

The ’60s saw more mind-bended vernacular for enthusiasm like “far out,” “groovy,” “out of sight,” “dig it,” and “down with it.”  Popular music of the ’80s and ’90s contributed baleful terms like “bad” and “bad-ass” for the earthier-spoken, and a strange term of high praise — “sick” — perhaps resonant with admiration for hard drug culture.

A few years ago, there was a subtle change in slang words used to express enthusiasm.  Slang seemed to bifurcate along lines of education and class into, on the one side, intense street-level expressions for the hot and hip, and on the other, more urbane, tech- and New Age–driven verbiage.

An example of the latter is the recently popular phrase “leaning in.”  Rappers do not lean in.  It takes little effort to lean one way or the other.  The phrase may have originated in advice to the glassy-eyed generation destined to sit in front of screens 18 hours a day, with only the option of occasionally changing posture toward the gray light when autonomically reacting to a limbic trigger on screen.

Leaning in has now been replaced by the more psychological slang of “creating” or “holding” space.  Everywhere, one hears sophisticated, wellness-driven people talking about holding space open for objects, experiences, and relationships they want in their lives, and no longer having space for apparently expired experiences and connections.  The summative, yoga-mat truism to describe people and things that need to be unspaced is that they no longer serve one, as if every connection in life needs to be a service provider.

The ethos of creating space for newly desired experiential investments seems to be a zero-sum game, where current involvements and relationships have to be taken out of the space-grantor’s life to make way for the new.  The traditional lyrics “make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other is gold” seems to be the opposite of the message of the modern recourse to creating and closing space as a means of lifestyle change.

It is understandable that in a world drenched in material surfeit, saturated with unsolicited stimuli, and burdened with complex procedures for even the simple tasks of everyday life, people feel exhausted and that they have no more room in their lives for anything new until they cancel the old.  In these unnatural and stressful conditions, the right to throw people and things away seems to be a psychological imperative.  On a deeper level, is the current idiom about creating space a euphemism for the relentless destruction of values like loyalty, commitment, responsibility, forbearance, patience?  Is the attitude of opening and closing spaces in one’s life another of innumerable symptoms of the decline of humane civilization?  Or am I just becoming a fuddy-duddy?

Image: Ilmicrofono Oggiono via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.