The Wit's Guide to Subtlety

Or, the anvil's in the details

Saint Augustine at his desk, receiving an epiphany while his little dog looks on knowingly.

My friends, we are living in anvilicious times. That neologism is the perfect antonym of subtlety, a portmanteau of delicious anvils that can be dropped on the soft noggins of anyone who’d rather tune you out. Per TV Tropes, anviliciousness happens when someone labours “so unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head.” It’s not so much that they say the quiet part out loud as that we can’t hear the quiet parts over all the yelling.

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

One might posit that surtle is a better antonym for subtle, but no: It’s too subtle.

“Subtlety is not a proof of wisdom. Fools and even madmen are at times extraordinarily subtle.”
— Alexander Pushkin

Many celebrated communicators have inveighed against subtlety. Tell them what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em, remind them they got told, and then tell ’em that Churchill told you to tell ’em that way. Or to tell you that again:

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time — a tremendous whack.”
— Winston Churchill

Consider the widely reported note that Netflix gave filmmakers, asking them to recap plot details in every scene to help retain distracted viewers. Less on the nose, more in the eyes, as per the best Conan O’Brien skit at this year’s Oscars. As this overcorrection spreads through society, expect to see cars with multiple speedometers, eulogies that continually repeat the full name of the deceased, and clocks that highlight the time with the word “that’s now!”

“Don’t be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.”
— Billy Wilder

At some point, though, do people get sick of being pile driven? Maybe they shout at us is we’ve all turned down the volume on their metaphorical hearing aids, like the beleaguered husband at the end of Revolutionary Road.

“On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle.”
— Linus Torvalds

Subtlety is good. More of it would be welcome! Anvilicious is a slang term for heavy-handed messaging. Anvils are not delicious. They are made of metal.

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“Art is like theater. If you want to whisper, you have to whisper loudly enough so that the audience hears you, and knows it’s a whisper. So the artist has to be able to blow the subtleties up proportionately, and at the same time have them be recognized as subtle. It’s what makes a good artist, even if he is painting badly.”
— Eric Fischl

The good news is that there’s never been a better time for subtle insults. I’m writing this from California, where I can adapt Will Rogers’ old line and say that whenever a Canadian moves to the U.S., it raises the IQ of both countries. Next week?

Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I’m happy to have contributed to Molly Young’s Treasury of Book Dedications, an ongoing collection of the best authorial inscriptions. A subtle gem from the most recent installment:

“This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.”
— Diane Wakoski, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems

Blink enough times and you’ll have missed Get Wit Quick No. 365. You can always hear the squawks of Magnus the magpie, named after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you gently gently tap the ❤️ below, only you and I will notice.