loved ones'?

On a walk with a friend a couple of weeks ago, talking about the way that our language is seemingly changing without  much question, we had both noticed that  during the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly over more recent months, I’ve noticed the term ‘loved ones’ used in the media coming out of the NHS, the care sector more generally and even in interviews with people who I hoped would know better.

 

it’s generally used when talking about people who are dying or have died and to denote their close family and friends, and even the wider circle of people who know/knew them… And I’m completely sick of it, both in terms of being fed up of overhearing a term that I find irritating in its superficiality and manipulativeness,  and in terms of the sense of nausea it evokes in me by the way it’s used and the implications implicit within it.

 

The term has caught on in that thoughtless way that language does, and has quickly come to trump (can we still use trump as a verb?) ‘family and friends’, ‘people close to them’ etc perhaps because it is seen to raise the emotional and unchallengeability stakes. I suspect that it is used to make victims seem more victimly, sadness even sadder, pity more pitiful and tragedy more tragic. It also reduces the complexity of familial relationships and friendships to something superficial and fluffy.

 

Next time you hear it, listen for the timing and the tone of voice used. It might just be me of course, but what I hear ‘loved ones’ enunciated in a similar way to the (equally loaded) term ‘carers’, or the way that some people tell you that they have a relative with dementia or an autistic child. It’s used in the same way that people commonly talk about charity – that knowing confident pseudo-sincerity. It’s used as a throw-away, and yet  spoken with a slight softening of the voice, the downward inflection and often that little pause immediately afterwards.

 

What’s it all about, well I think it is designed to evoke pity, and in it too, an invitation to sigh a nod of understanding and agreement, a nod of collusion  or buy-in. somehow it is worst that someone with ‘loved ones’ has died than someone who had a partner, sons, daughters, grand-children, close friends all of whom they loved.

 

There must be something particular, some emphasis, credential, in-crowdness or whatever  to using ‘loved ones’. It seems to give those relationships an extra layer of value, emotionality, nostalgia, tradition, moral highground, unquestionability… I think it is the addition of the word ‘ones’, I might think about my partner, family and close friends as the people who I love, but I’d never think of them as my ‘loved ones’ – it seems to add a layer of manipulation that is used thoughtlessly and by people who buy into a mainstream simplistic view of relationships and of love.

 

Thoughts?

 

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