We all love word-watching: we’re howling with delight that binge-watch, amazeballs and YOLO have recently been added to the dictionary (see Glosso’s earlier post on YOLO), and a universal groan went up when literally officially took on its new (and historically opposite) meaning, “figuratively”. Cementing and legitimizing the words and phrases that pepper our language — if not by making dictionary entries out of them but just by observing and recognizing their widespread usage — is a powerful form of social commentary. The language we speak reflects the thoughts we share: what better insight into the 21st-century mind than by noting the words and expressions we use to articulate them?
So what a sad and unsettling fact that the phrase “mourning sickness” has taken root in our vocabulary to describe a growing phenomenon: “a collective condition characterised by ostentatious, recreational grieving for dead celebrities and murder victims” (as reported in the UK’s Telegraph more than a decade ago.)
The world wept when it learned of the tragic death of Robin Williams last week. He was a comedian, actor and entertainer who made millions of people laugh and cry: a public figure who graced TV and movie screens over several decades and a man whose private, inner life was known by very few. Social media channels lit up as the news of his death broke: for the first hour or so there was an understandable communal expression of shock and disbelief that this extraordinary man should have made the unfathomable decision to take his own life. But within about an hour of the news settling in, the tone of the discussion began to change: people started to relate their own associations with or memories of Williams, anxious to lay their own claim to a portion of the big grieving pie and to feel part of the public event. (And I’m no exception: I posted something in his memory here on this blog, with only a tenuous connection to the subject of language.) Mourning sickness had started to kick in …
“Mourning sickness,” as Wikipedia defines it, “is a collective emotional condition of “recreational grieving” by individuals in the wake of celebrity deaths and other public traumas. Such traumas may be linked to hyper-attentive, intrusive, and voyeuristic media coverage.” The history of mourning sickness in the UK — as Wikipedia notes, along with giving examples of its various manifestations — can be traced back to the public reaction to the Dunblane massacre in 1996 when 16 schoolchildren and their teacher were killed by a lone gunman in Scotland, and then to the enormous and almost unprecedented public expression of grief the following year when Princess Diana died in a car crash. So this is a relatively new phenomenon, first observed towards the end of the 20th century and given its rather cynical label just a couple of years into the 21st. Interestingly, it was identified and labelled before the internet had begun to take over our lives, but since then its magnitude and intensity have grown to almost grotesque extremes with the advent of social media and instant global sharing. I’ll leave it to the psychologists and anthropologists to explore the reasons for this particular type of herd behavior, which can verge on mass hysteria. But suffice to say: it’s apparent and common enough now to have acquired its own name.
A related expression is “grief porn”: what Wiki describes as “a pejorative, neologistic expression usually used to describe the behavior of the news media in the wake of trauma. It is distinctly different from Schadenfreude in that it describes a forced or artificial commiseration in response to unfortunate events, whereas the latter refers to a joy at the misfortune of others.” “Grief porn” certainly goes hand-in-hand with “mourning sickness”, and the media is all too quick and eager to manufacture and distribute it. “Inside his final hours” screams a magazine cover just two days after Williams’s death. As Carol Sarger said in the Sunday Times back in 2007, in her article titled “This new and peculiar pornography of grief”: “Ersatz grief is now the new pornography; like the worst of hard-core, it is stimulus by proxy, voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private, for no better reason than frisson and the quickening of an otherwise jaded pulse.”
What’s particularly interesting to me is the very naming of these two unsavory phenomena: they both involve wordplay that seems inappropriate. First, punning on pre-noon pregnancy nausea to describe “recreational grief” seems wrong. And putting the words grief and porn next to each other makes you wonder what on earth we’re all thinking. An earlier Glossophilia post looked at the wider and more cynical use of the word porn to capture the idea of satiating an inappropriate or over-indulgent appetite for or interest in something that isn’t normally desired. Grief being at the bottom of the desirability spectrum makes this expression that much more shocking — but perhaps that’s the whole point. To use Sarger’s words, it’s clearly wordplay that’s designed to quicken our otherwise jaded pulses. Have we become that jaded?
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