Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Mourning Direct Speech, Banter, and the Death of Honest Tongue.

WARNING: Do not continue reading if easily triggered, easily offended, and inclined to cancel. This piece will not be softened for your comfort. We are not nursing fragilities.

There is a word in Xhosa and in the streets of Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, and Valhalla Park, it is not a word so much as a verdict, delivered face to face, with full eye contact and zero hesitation:

Awusembi.  Awutyebe.  Awusemhle.
You are ugly. You are fat. You are  beautiful.

Not as an insult. Not as a weapon. As a statement of observable fact, delivered by someone who loves you, in the same breath as a hug and a plate of food.

I grew up in that world. I was formed by that register. And for the past decade, I have been watching it get buried, slowly, expensively, and with the full ceremonial apparatus of corporate wellness culture, social media mob justice, and the theology of psychological safety.

I want to talk about what we lost when we buried it.


The Vocabulary of the Streets I Come From
In the townships of Cape Town, direct speech is not aggression. It is intimacy. It is the register of people who have no time for the elaborate social performance that softness requires. When you live in a space where twelve people share a two-room house, where the queue for the communal toilet starts at 5am, where your neighbour knows your business before you do, you do not have the luxury of euphemism. You speak plainly. You receive plainly. You survive plainly.

The vocabulary was rich, specific, and delivered with a smile that meant: I see you. Not the curated version you perform for the world. You, the actual you, fat, ugly, beautiful, loud, ridiculous, magnificent you.

“Awusetyebe, ntombi”. You are fat, girl
“Umdala ke“.  You are old
“Akasembi, umbi umntana wakho“.  He/she is ugly — the child is ugly
“Umhle kakhulu“.  You are so beautiful
“Uyawathanda amadoda, wena“. You love men,  you are a hoe
“Yikaka yomntu leyo“. That person is rubbish
“Ungazothethi ikaka“.  Don’t talk nonsense

These were not hypotheses. They were not subject to peer review. They were not waiting for your consent before becoming real. Ugly was observable. Beautiful was observable. Fat was a measurement, not a metaphor. Old was arithmetic, not an identity crisis.

And crucially,  no one sued anyone. No one was sent a blank email by a People Partner with no subject line. No one was called to a soft interrogation that lasted three months and ended with you being told that defending yourself was “against company policy.”

You simply received the truth, made your peace with it, laughed if you could, argued if you had to, and got on with the business of living.


The Dutch, the Russians, and the Bosses Who Did Not Play Games

When I worked in London, I discovered a different species of direct speech. Not the warm community directness of a Cape Town township. Something colder, harder, more efficient  and infinitely more honest than what surrounded it.
My Dutch bosses. My Russian colleagues. The ones who delivered feedback the way a surgeon delivers a diagnosis: no cushioning, no theatrical preamble, no compliment sandwich. Just the information. Just the truth. Here is the problem. Here is what needs to happen. Here is what happens if it does not.

The English bosses I struggled with were not unkind. They were indirect to the point of deceit. I would leave meetings feeling fine and wake up at 4am, furious, having only then decoded the sarcasm and the insult my subconscious had processed while I slept.

The Dutch and Russian bosses never gave me that particular insomnia. I always knew where I stood. Sometimes I did not like where I stood. But at least I knew. And knowing,  even painful knowing,  is a form of respect that politeness can never replicate.

There is a tight line between direct and rude. I acknowledge this. The same line exists between courage and stupidity, between confidence and arrogance, between love and possession. The existence of the line does not mean we should camp on the safe side of it permanently. It means we should learn to walk it and trust that adults can handle the walk.


The Corporate Kangaroo Court
Let me describe the world I have also inhabited,  the world where therapy talk is the common language and a badge of honour.
In this world, you walk on eggs and eggshells at every meeting. Every sentence, particularly if English is not your mother tongue, carries potential legal consequence. You choose words the way a bomb disposal expert chooses which wire to cut. One wrong move and you are not dead, worse. You are the subject of a “concern” raised to HR.

The blank email arrives. No subject. No body. Just your name in the To: field and a calendar invite that says: “Mandatory. Please attend.” When you get there, you discover that someone, you are not told who, this information is “confidential”, has reported that something you said made them feel unsafe.

You have charges laid against you, all relating to hurting someone’s feelings. A Montessori kangaroo court is convened, and the verdict was decided before you arrived.

You are advised: do not retaliate. It is against company policy. What this means, translated from the corporate therapeutic register into plain English, is: give the other cheek and let the person who reported you take another shot. Your right to respond is a policy violation. Their right to wound you is protected speech.

I am not describing an exceptional case. I am describing a system. A culture. A regime of managed speech that has spread from HR departments in multinational corporations to university campuses to social media platforms to the dinner tables of people who consider themselves progressive.

And what it produces, apart from three-month soft interrogations,  is a workforce that has stopped saying anything real. Not because they have nothing real to say. But because real things are dangerous in the language of feelings-as-law.


The Euphemism Treadmill Runs Faster Than Honesty
The linguist Steven Pinker identified what he called the Euphemism Treadmill: the process by which a neutral term for a stigmatised condition eventually acquires the stigma of the condition itself, forcing us to coin a new neutral term,  which then acquires the same stigma, requiring another new term, in perpetuity.

Cripple becomes disabled becomes differently abled becomes person with a disability becomes person living with a differently configured body.
Fat becomes overweight becomes plus-sized becomes body positive becomes, where are we now? a category so protected that to observe a medically defined condition is to commit an act of violence.

The treadmill runs forever. The stigma never actually leaves. We just keep coining new words to outrun it. And in the running, we exhaust language itself. Words lose their ability to describe reality because reality has become the problem we are trying to manage.

My grandmother in Gugulethu did not need a treadmill. She had one word. It meant what it meant. And because it meant what it meant,  it could also be said with love.

That is the thing the sanitisers do not understand. Direct speech is not the opposite of love. It is often its most honest expression. The mother who tells her daughter she is getting fat is not a body shamer. She is a woman who loves her daughter enough to say the thing the world will eventually say without the love attached.

The question is not: do we want truth or kindness?

The question is: do we understand that truth, delivered well, is the highest form of kindness?

And that kindness without truth is just the management of feelings,  which is not kindness at all. It is convenience, dressed in a therapy jacket.


Everyone Gets a Medal. Nobody Gets Better.
Something happened to the concept of standards when the religion of feelings took over.

Suddenly everyone got a medal for participating. A certificate for attendance. A grade for being present in the building. Thirty-three percent became a new acceptable standard because no child was to be left behind, which in practice meant pass one, pass all, and let the next system deal with the consequences of the lie we told this child about their readiness.

The sports day where no one wins and everyone gets a ribbon. The school where the teacher cannot mark in red pen because red is aggressive. The workplace where negative feedback is rebranded as “a development opportunity” so relentlessly that the recipient cannot tell whether they are being managed out or promoted.

Objective reality was knocked out. All became subjective. Facts became opinions. Opinions became cancellable offences.
And the cruelty of this system, the deep, structural cruelty that nobody in the feelings-is-law camp seems able to see,  is that the person most harmed is not the high performer who never needed the encouragement. It is the child from the township, the first-generation university student, the young person from a community where no one has ever navigated corporate culture before.

They are the ones who needed honest feedback most. They are the ones who could have used someone saying, early and clearly: this is not good enough. Here is what good enough looks like. Here is the distance between where you are and where you need to be.

Instead, they got a certificate. And they walked into the world believing they were ready. And the world told them otherwise,  without love, without warning, without the cushion of community that the direct speech of home always carried with it.
The therapeutic culture that protected their feelings in the building destroyed their ability to survive outside it.


The Brave Typists and the Chief Cancellers
The enforcers of the new speech regime are not brave people. Let me be direct about this.
They are brave typists. They are fierce behind the glass of a screen, carrying unlimited data and sophisticated smartphones, deploying the vocabulary of harm and trauma and violence against any sentence that does not conform to the current approved register.

They type hard. They organise fast. They cancel efficiently.

Face to face, they are often much quieter.
The Chief Cancellers Association of Social Media World has never had to sit across a table from the person they are destroying and look them in the eye while they do it. That distance,  the screen, the platform, the anonymous report submitted to HR,  is what makes the courage possible. Remove the distance and most of the courage evaporates.

The community I grew up in was not gentle. But it was direct. And in the directness was a form of accountability that the screen cannot replicate. When you said something to someone’s face, you owned it. You had to live next to the person. You had to survive the consequences in real time.
Social media cancellation has no such accountability structure. You can destroy a person’s reputation, livelihood, and mental health from the safety of anonymity, and then log off and make tea.

The very community that polices speech in the name of safety has created the most unsafe speech environment in human history,  for the person being spoken about.
They are not without power. They have enormous power. What they lack is courage,  the specific courage required to say hard things to people, by name, in person, and then sit with the consequences.

That is the courage I was raised with. The courage of the streets. The courage of the direct word, delivered face to face, with love.


What We Lose When We Lose Banter
Banter is not cruelty with better PR. Let me say this carefully, because the distinction matters enormously.

Banter is a social technology. It is the mechanism by which people who care about each other negotiate reality,  including hard realities about each other, without the weight of formal judgment. It is governed by reciprocity: both parties can give and receive. It is governed by context: you can banter with someone you know, in a relationship of trust, in a way that a stranger could not. And it is governed by love: the underlying message of banter is not “I want to wound you.” It is “I know you well enough to say this, and you know me well enough to know what it means.”

What we lose when we eliminate banter,  from workplaces, from schools, from the public square,  is not just laughter. We lose the social glue that allows people with differences to coexist without formal mediation. We lose the outlet valve that prevents grievance from becoming resentment. We lose the signal that says: we are close enough for me to tell you the truth.

Banter is radical honesty dressed in humour. It is the democratic therapy room where no one needs credentials, a couch, or R2,500 an hour to hear something real.

When we remove it, we do not remove the hard truths. We remove the cushion. The truths remain,  they just find their way out through silence, through passive aggression, through the blank email with no subject line, through the HR complaint filed on a Tuesday afternoon by someone who smiled at you on Monday.
The world that eliminated banter did not become kinder. It became less honest,  which is a different thing, and in the long run, a more dangerous thing.


Can There Be Truth Where There Is No Offence?
This is the question I have been sitting with for ten years. And I am no longer sure I am asking it rhetorically.

Some truths are inherently uncomfortable. Not because the person delivering them is cruel, or because the receiver is fragile, but because reality itself does not always conform to what we would prefer it to be. The diagnosis that changes your life. The feedback that exposes the gap between where you are and where you think you are. The vote count that tells a community its candidate did not win.

A culture that cannot tolerate the discomfort of true things cannot correct itself. It cannot identify its failures, because naming failure is a form of offense. It cannot improve its institutions, because improvement requires the acknowledgment that current practice is inadequate. It cannot produce great art, because great art, from Miriam Makeba to Trevor Noah,  is built on the willingness to say the uncomfortable thing in a form the audience can receive.

Instead of fostering open debate and dialectical maturity,  the ability to hold and juggle multiple truths simultaneously, these labels are used defensively to pathologise intellectual disagreement and socially isolate the person holding the contrarian view.

The minority perspective is not always wrong. History’s longest list of correct predictions was compiled by people who were, at the time of prediction, in the minority. Galileo. Semmelweis. Every abolitionist before abolition was popular. Every freedom fighter before freedom was fashionable.

A world that cancels minority perspectives does not protect the majority. It makes the majority more fragile,  more dependent on agreement, less equipped for the reality that disagreement is the engine of progress.

We did not make the world safer. We made it quieter. And quiet is not the same as safe. Quiet is what you get when the honest people have learned it is too expensive to speak.


What I Am Not Saying and What I Am
I am not saying that cruelty is acceptable because it is direct. The line between directness and abuse is real and must be maintained. I am not saying that all language policing is wrong, some of it is right, and necessary, and overdue. The language of dehumanisation,  the language that strips people of their humanity before stripping them of their rights,  has a history so bloody that it deserves every restriction placed on it.

What I am saying is that we went too far, too fast, and in the wrong direction.

We traded honest disagreement for managed consensus. We traded banter for compliance. We traded the hard love of direct speech,  the kind my community delivered with a smile, a plate of food, and full eye contact,  for a therapeutic culture that protects feelings at the expense of truth, and in doing so protects no one.
We removed the Thumbs Down button. And we convinced ourselves this made the platform kinder.

All it did was remove our ability to know what was not working.

I want the Thumbs Down button back. I want the Dutch boss who tells me to my face that my work is not good enough. I want the Gugulethu elder who looks me up and down and delivers a verdict that I did not ask for and cannot appeal.
Not because I want to be hurt.

Because I want to be known. And truth , direct, unvarnished, community-held truth, is the only instrument capable of doing that.

Awusembi does not mean I hate you. It means I see you clearly enough to say the hard thing. That is not violence. That is love. The kind that does not lie.


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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..
Behavioural Scientist · Author · Social Entrepreneur · Child of Gugulethu & Khayelitsha.