On ‘disdain’ and decorum

For over 30 years now, I’ve been teaching a course in UP – Creative Writing 198, Special Topics: Professional Writing – which I myself designed to give undergraduates a foretaste of what it’s like to write for a living. They may know enough Shakespeare, or Villa, or Woolf, and some might even be writing prodigious fiction or poetry. But many don’t have the foggiest idea of writing neither for school nor for literary fame, but for a client or an employer like an ad agency promoting a bar of soap, a newspaper with daily deadlines or an NGO needing a script on vasectomy (yes, I did that once). My first-day lecture begins with this dictum: “There’s writing that you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others. Don’t ever get the two mixed up.”

While I’ve been retired for seven years now, I’ve exercised my privilege as professor emeritus to continue teaching a class a semester. And while I’ve focused on teaching graduate courses, I’ve occasionally made an exception for CW 198, so I can keep in touch with our young students and hopefully give them the benefit of my half a century of experience of writing to put food on the table and gas in the tank. I did that again this semester, and with barely a month left for classes, we moved last Thursday to what will likely be our last major project: the speech.

In this exercise, I want my students to assume another person’s voice, know him or her inside out well enough to anticipate his or her thinking on a given topic and to produce a draft speech that will project his or her ideas clearly, positively and sympathetically – all this, regardless of what you yourself may feel about your client and that person’s principles (or lack thereof). In other words, in a professional setting, you could find yourself working for someone dubious or even spiteful, but short of resigning (an option I’ve taken more than once), your professional obligation remains to serve your client or principal to the best of your ability, like a good lawyer might.

So our speech assignment runs this way: I write down our current senators’ names on 23 slips of paper and have my 12 students pick one out of a hat, and then I write down 12 themes or topics – education, national security, arts and culture, the environment, the economy, etc. – and have them choose one as well. If you pick Robin Padilla to speak on science and technology, tough luck, but it’s not entirely inconceivable – heck, the guy was on top of constitutional reforms, right? – and you’d still have to give it your best shot. Whoever they get to write for, I tell my students to empathize, to pick their words carefully and not to condescend. The client might decide at the last minute to toss your draft aside and to extemporize, but you’ve done your job.

This was on my mind when I heard Sen. Pia Cayetano’s pained lament at the Senate impeachment hearing last week, accusing the prosecution of indifference to the idea of supporting young athletes, because it had questioned Atty. Mans Carpio’s purchase of over P250,000 worth of Nike shoes for Filipino players competing in Kuala Lumpur. These were her exact words:

“Prosecution, I’m warning you. I will not hide my disdain. I will not. I cannot, I cannot. I don’t even know where to begin…. Is it the prosecution’s intention to make a parent relinquish their parental duty in terms of rearing their child in the manner they feel is the best to promote character, leadership, teamwork, just because one of the parents becomes a public official?”

What caught my ear was the word “disdain” – an emotionally laden word, one not used carelessly or casually, and I’m sure the good senadora didn’t mean for it to be taken lightly. Although I wasn’t certain what exactly the word was aimed at – disdain for the prosecutors, disdain for their alleged intention? – it piqued my attention enough for the English professor in me to look up the word’s provenance, because it seemed to me to be, shall we say, out of place?

With a little help from AI, I found this: “Disdain is the feeling that someone or something is beneath your notice. It differs from plain dislike in that it carries a claim of superiority, and Merriam-Webster glosses it as an arrogant or supercilious aversion to what is regarded as unworthy. The word is built on worthiness. It came into Middle English from Old French desdeign, based on Latin dedignari, from de- (reversal) plus dignari, ‘consider worthy’ (from dignus). That makes it the mirror image of deign: to deign is to consider worthy, and to disdain is to consider unworthy.”

The chase led me back to Chapter 2 of  El Filibusterismo, where on the steamship Tabo, Isagani says that Doña Victorina “gazed at me with (a) disdain” when she learned he was a lower-deck passenger.

Now, Sen. Pia is, of course, no Doña Victorina, shall we agree? But her outrage, presumably on behalf of all unshod student athletes and the parents and generous sponsors seeking to give them proper shoes, does imply a certain moral superiority. How dare the prosecution question such a well-intentioned expense, as if charity were immoral and in this case possibly even criminal?

Never mind that the outburst was, in the context of the proceedings, entirely tangential if not irrelevant. I should tell my CW 198 students that “sometimes, your client will deal with an issue by not dealing with it – by changing the subject, indeed by making oneself the subject.” But maybe I should reserve that for the advanced, graduate-school version of the course, on evasive argumentation.

I had to rewatch the video to make sure Sen. Pia wasn’t reading off some notes; she was not. Her remarks were unscripted, apparently heartfelt – and therefore even worse, because this was instinct at work, and her “disdain” reveals how detached she feels from the substance of the trial, picking up only on the parts that sound like prompts for another stage entrance, another aria.

I offer my students lifetime technical support, so if some of them ever make it to the Senate staff and get to write speeches for their bosses (some have), I might be able to give them some advice on how to make their clients sound more likeable and or at least less annoying. Sometimes you do that just by shutting up when you have nothing pertinent and sensible to say – to use another big word, by observing decorum. Otherwise, disdain goes both ways.

*      *      *

Email me at [email protected] and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.