During the Covid-19 pandemic a rhetorical idiom gained popular currency and soon became widespread. It was heard in media reports and ordinary conversations, it was seen in high-end scholarly writing and online comment threads alike. Like all newly-popular locutions it seemed infectious, and as it spread it took on a compulsive quality. Worse, it appeared to shape people’s thoughts like an imperative command. And so, adding stupor to misery, the pandemic coincided with a generalized debility of language.

In pre-Covid times, a speaker might have used a simple “X and Y” phrase structure to distinguish between two different things; now they would reach for the more unwieldy “not only X but also Y.” The grammarians at the online Cambridge Dictionary aver that not only X but Y is used in “formal contexts,” but the construct has manifestly spread to all speakers and circumstances. Even the most ordinary statements seem to require this wordier, fancier, Shakespearean flourish; “I was hungry and tired” becomes, needlessly, “I was not only hungry but also tired.”1

Not only X but Y is a correlative conjunction. Sentences using this turn of phrase differ from the more basic “X and Y” construct by creating emphasis: the first thing mentioned is minimized to highlight the second. This allows a speaker to make a meaningful contrast between things rather than merely enumerate them. Sometimes that contrast is implicit in the nature of things, like their relative size, scale or extent: not only here but everywhere; not only today but forever. At other times it requires a weighing of values, like their relative awfulness, which, in a time of manifold emergencies, has led to a vast, ongoing rhetorical triage of horrors.

“Social distancing is slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too,” proclaimed a hopeful Quartz headline early in the pandemic. Another article, less optimistic, informed us that climate disruptions of the past “brought not only drought and famine, but also war.” In a report on the effects of radiation from a nuclear meltdown, Andrew Cockburn evoked “the millions of people exposed not only to the invisible cloud, but to its residue in the landscape from which they drew their food” – a residue that, he pointedly notes, “had global reach.” This last example illuminates how an infectious turn of phrase can, like a symptom, indicate a broader historical ailment. Indeed, the rhetorical inflation of industrial horror to a cosmic scale seems purpose-built to illustrate the dialectic of enlightenment, inverting what one sunny humanist, at the rosy dawn of our age of calamities, called man’s destiny “to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world.”

An alternate phrasing replaces “only” with “just.” One recent book reviewer saw lessons for the future in American disaster novels and said “natural forces governed not just their quotidian lives, but all of human civilization.”2 Unfortunately, this second usage leads to all kinds of malapropisms due to the legal connotations of the word just. At a civic-minded exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery an informative text begins, inauspiciously, “The American Revolution was not just,” a phrase so clumsy that we’re brought up short and stumble our way into the rest of the sentence: “…a political event, but a revolution in consciousness.” In the same locale we’re informed by a no doubt well-meaning curator that “slavery was not just immoral but unconstitutional” – but why belittle morality, we wonder, as if higher justice were only second best to (Caucasian) law? One is tempted to think that this mounting chorus of “not just” expresses a stammering awareness of unspoken, ubiquitous injustice on the part of some still inchoate political constituency. On the other hand, since the word has become nearly phatic in common parlance (“I just wanted to say,” “I just feel,” “I just think,” “I just assume,” etc.), we may be witnessing a hollowing-out of meaning precisely at a time when “not just” is pertinent to nearly everything under the sun.

In the meantime, language is badly mismatched to our political actuality. In her national address on December 6, 2022, the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Vice President Kamala Harris scored a new land record for would-be lofty rhetoric. A mere twenty seconds into the speech she dropped a leaden phrase evoking “dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars but a place in our collective memory,” and she went on to employ the “not only X but Y” phrase structure a total of five times in just over one and a half minutes. In Harris’ speech, as in general current usage, these turns of phrase are mostly superfluous and often wholly inept. What results is verbiage rather than a well-crafted distinction. There are, in any case, almost innumerable other ways to express a significant contrast – a non-optional feature of passable mental activity. To delegate that cognitive activity to a reflex pattern of sounds might be considered a betrayal of civic responsibility. Moreover, when contrasting two things understatement often works best. Which is worse, “cruel” or “unusual”? What, exactly, is the connection between “rich” and “stupid”? To its credit, “X and Y” doesn’t necessarily say.

Maybe the most insidious aspect of this overuse of “not only X but Y” is that such phrases open with an apparent negation without in fact articulating a significant opposition. In this way the phrase allows every speaker to mime critical language even as they sideline dialectics. But even the sentences of otherwise articulate speakers are warped by the seeming obligation to use the expression. “The subaltern cannot only not speak but her words must be banished,” asserted a scholar in the terrible year 2021. Cannot only not?

Roland Barthes once observed that authoritarian states are defined less by what they forbid than what they oblige us to speak. The compulsive usage of “not only X but Y” might be seen, then, as an internalized prescription and, as such, the symptom of a failure of autonomous discourse at a time of unravelling democracy. In a recent grim prognosis on the collapse of civilization, Giorgio Agamben reminds us that “the transformation of language is the condition of all other transformations of society,” and he argues that only by confronting the present degradation of language – and restoring its ethical, poetic and philosophical qualities – will we be able “to understand how the political and legal transformations we have before our eyes could have taken place.”

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This predicament is illustrated by media coverage of current environmental politics. On May 26, 2021, shareholder rebellions at Exxon and Chevron forced those companies to adopt policies in line with progressive calls for a sustainable, decarbonized future. Environmentally-minded directors were elected to Exxon’s governing board, while a majority of Chevron’s shareholders endorsed plans to cut the company’s carbon emissions. This seeming “paradigm shift” at two major U.S. polluters coincided with a Dutch court ruling against Royal Dutch Shell that ordered the company to immediately cut its C02 emissions and to reduce them by 45% by the end of 2030 – a decision one excitable lawyer called “a turning point in history.”

In her account of the “boardroom coups” at Exxon and Chevron, Guardian columnist Jillian Ambrose informs us that the climate-conscious hedge fund Engine No. 1 that spearheaded Exxon’s reforms was not acting primarily with the environment in mind. “Engine No. 1 puts profits first,” she points out. While this is eminently clear – and unsurprising –, the columnist inadvertently muddies the picture for us by adding, “ultimately, the aim is to create wealth.” Profit, accordingly, is not only the investors’ primary aim, it’s also their ultimate aim. It comes both first and last. Could it be that the writer is not aware that ultimate means “final”? The lapse is more than a failure of diction. It points to an inability to adequately frame the stakes of politics where finality is genuinely concerned.

Marxist theorist and cultural critic Fredric Jameson famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This fateful condition seems to be enacted in the Guardian columnist’s lapse, which conveys business imperatives as the be-all and end-all of existence, even in a story of apparent environmentalist victory, and when the fate of a livable planet is at stake. Perhaps more telling than this, however, is her employ of the viral phrasal structure “not only X but Y.” In her account of Big Oil’s “Black Wednesday,” Ambrose asserts that “the world’s biggest investors are finally aligned with climate campaigners” – surely an overstatement, but one that might be forgiven in a time of desperate hope. Worse, however, is the inversion that follows: the columnist asserts that the investors in question have joined with environmentalists “in accepting that sustainability is not only essential for the survival of the planet, but for the future of major companies too.”

In another context this inversion of emphasis might be a comical way to illustrate warped priorities, but ironizing the logic of heedless profit does not seem to be the columnist’s purpose. In any case, the question of purpose is no doubt beside the point; the viral turn of phrase seems designed to void intention and even mental awareness. Still, it provides a helpful glimpse of what must be pictured and imagined, even in the midst of disaster and degraded language: “to imagine capitalism,” as Jameson says, “by way of imagining the end of the world.”

“He being thus lorded / Not only with what my revenue yielded, / But what my power might else exact” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2: 97-99).Matthew Sherrill, “Forbidding Planet: George R. Stewart’s Novels of Natural Disaster,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2021, 76.