I learned
the other day that
I had survived more than two decades as a writer without ever
fully understanding what a predicate was: My ten-year-old explained
it to me. I was glad he understood it, but I wondered whether
he still would when he was forty-one and how many times he would
get to use the information between now and then. I am wondering
again for now, a few days later, I have forgotten his explanation.
I don't fault his teachers
for instructing him on such matters, because it comes as part
of a package that also includes the foundation of good writing,
which is to write, write, and write again. They are always writing
something at that school: poems, interviews, ads, news articles,
book reports, lists. If they happen to pick up a bit of arcane
knowledge about the structure of language along the way, there
is no harm. It's like the baseball fan who remembers who played
first base with the Red Sox in 1946.
I know there are people
who feel the decline of the American language began when we could
no longer remember what a predicate was. Esquire gives space
regularly to a column predicated on predicates and such - a pleasantly
stuffy series by John Simon who weighs his words with all the
care of a deli owner measuring pastrami for a sandwich. People
like Simon and Edwin Newman are fun to have around; it's nice
to know that there is still a chance to make a living maintaining
standards, but the truth is that they are not going to save the
language or reverse our semantic senility. They are museum curators
inviting us into quaint restored rooms of our linguistic heritage,
but, like it or not, we are never going to live that way again.
I don't deny there's a
problem. There are people who right now are simplifying textbooks
to compensate for the growing sub-literacy of college students.
This town is awash in words that people have written, many of
them unnecessary or indecipherable. Congress recently considered
legislation affecting what it called "unitary hograising
structures" when it could have said "pigpens."
A research firm in North Carolina, asked to study how schools
could combat illiteracy, told the state board of education, "The
conceptual framework for this evaluation posits a set of determinants
of implementation which explains variations in the level of implementation
of the comprehensive project." DC's school superintendent
speaks fervently of the need for "self -actualization"
and thinks he's saying something.
I would submit, however,
that the solution does not lie in drawing up the wagons around
purity. Much as John Simon would prefer that we not use "hopefully"
the way we do, it is the sort of argument that quickly convinces
modern mumblers that preservers of language are elitist fools,
not worth the bother .
Rather, I think, we should
accept the fact that language is culture and art and that there
is no reason for it to be more static than any other aspect of
culture and art. The question is not whether we say it the same
way as our grandparents, but whether we understand each other
and whether we say things that offer enlightenment, entertainment,
or emotion. The problem is not that language is changing but
that the changes reflect other alterations in our society that
are less than desirable. The problem is not that our grandparents
would not understand us but that we don't understand each other.
Bureaucratese is the preeminent
example. It is constantly berated, yet it survives because we
fail to recognize that we're dealing with politics and not just
words. Bureacratese is bad not only because it sounds bad, but
because it accurately articulates what many bureaucrats are about,
namely obfuscation, indecision, and carefully padded prevarication.
Bureaucrats don't talk like that because they were poorly taught;
their language honestly reflects their mission. That's what we
I should be fighting. Better language will follow a better bureaucracy.
Next to bureaucrats (and
I lump Ph.Ds, sociologists, consultants, and people writing grant
proposals as their fellow-travelers), the worst damage is done
by the media. The media comes second only because its evil is
occasionally mitigated by contributions to idiomatic expression.
In an era when we all sorely need something in common, we should
not begrudge being able to share at least "We do it all
for you." No bureaucrat ever added anything useful to the
language, but advertising not only regularly replenishes our
supply of clichés, it provides an ever-changing source
of humor.
The press used to contribute
to language as well, but you hardly see a good Time Magazine
neologism any more and typically the new words the press does
bring us are ones devoured unquestioningly from bureaucrats trying
to deceive it. In recent weeks, for example, the press has, without
a whimper, accepted the notion that "mandatory conservation
" is a perfectly acceptable synonym for "rationing."
There was a day, sadly far gone, when reporters would have ridiculed
any bureaucrat who tried to get away with that. Perhaps reporters
no longer notice because they, too, are joining the bureaucracy.
The press and advertising
are part of what is known as the "communications" industry.
And here lies the rub. One writer has observed that communications
does not necessarily have anything to do with words at all. After
all, animals communicate. One of things that separates us from
them is our supposed ability with language.
But the media is willing
to settle for communications. How fitting. Because the basic
task is not to get us to think, which requires language, but
to get us to feel. Feel like having a Michelob. Feel like we've
understood the world from the evening news. Feel like using the
right shampoo will bring us happiness. Feel like we're saying
something when we're actually engaged in a sensory transmission
as primitive as a robin's chirp.
The current sensory obsession
of America is phenomenal. Layouts become more important than
the articles they announce. Packages become more important than
the contents. Backgrounds become foregrounds, feelings become
ideologies, and what you sense overwhelms what you see and learn.
I think at times that our cat should be allowed to vote. She
arches her back when a dog wanders into the yard; she purrs and
paddles her paws when she is content; she feels and she communicates
and don't say nothing. She is the modern American hero. Warren
Beatty with fur.
Except for one thing.
For all our sensory glut - mood drugs, mood music, mood therapy,
mood theology , mood government - we still have this curious
ability to talk and write. So while some feelies mercifully boogie
themselves away wordlessly in the disco dens, others think it
unfeeling not to use this ability on others. Thus they write
and talk. And about what? Their feelings, of course.
The feelies are all around
us. They go to psychiatrists or group therapy to share their
feelings and then rush out to tell others what they told their
psychiatrist or therapy group. They come up to you at a party
and move instantaneously from their name to a detailed report
on their emotional EKG. They tell you that you are having trouble
expressing yourself or that you're not being honest with them,
though you may only be waiting for a break in their monologue.
They write books about how love, success, and salvation all depend
upon communications yet they rarely provide any information or
idea worth communicating.
It makes me think I should
get out of this writing business. If expressing oneself in words
is really that easy, why am I revising this page for the third
time?
Why do I have to say,
"I don't know" when everyone else seems to? Maybe words
are just harder for a writer. Someone else can say, "I'm
really getting into soup these days" and expect it to be
accepted as a statement of culinary fulfillment of the highest
order. I can't help but see them doing the backstroke through
a bowl of Campbell's Cream of Tomato. If I had been given a recipe
or anecdote, the assurance of involvement would have been more
convincing, even unnecessary, but the style in some quarters
to day is for language to be used for confession and profession
as though that sufficed without further elaboration.
Words can mean many things,
and once off the lip or on the page they gain a life of their
own, with meanings that may not coincide with the author's intent.
So you try to be careful, to think about what you say or write,
what it means to you and what it might mean to someone else and
then you end up like Jack London who said, "It is the hardest
thing in the world to put feeling, and deep feelings, into words.
From the standpoint of expression, it is easier to write a 'Das
Kapital' in four volumes than a simple lyric of as many stanzas."
I find I have a bad reputation.
In conversation I fumble around a lot, starting sentences and
then dropping them in the middle, like I would on a typewriter,
mentally crossing them out with silence. It amuses and frustrates
my friends. I think I know what the trouble is. I have discovered
that when I am speaking formally, to a group or on the air, I
am much more fluent than in personal conversation. The reason
is simply that I don't generally say anything on these occasions
that I haven't tested in the research & development section
of my mind. I mainly repeat myself. In other words, I don't really
think.
But in an informal situation,
I try to think and talk at the same time and my tongue sputters,
my mind keeps back-spacing and well-intentioned sentences turn
truant. This is especially true when I try to say how I feel
about something.
According to the contemporary
mythology this means I am either repressing my feelings or, worse,
don't have any. This presumption confounds me. If pushed or tired,
I'll just go along and spit out an appropriate cliché.
This seems to satisfy others, but not me, for my inarticulateness
stems from a difficulty in translating non-verbal sensations
into the limited vocabulary of our language. It is not that the
feelings are not there or that I am trying to suppress them;
it is just that I don't want to misrepresent them. This is why,
I think, we need music and art and hugs and caresses. For these
I am glad that words do fail us. I don't need a word for everything.
I probably take it too
far. It's partly a liability of my trade and partly the result
of a Quaker education. Quakers are one of the few groups that
still respect silence. I've also spent many months in Maine where
they tell the story of the tourist, befuddled by the quietude
of the town, who asks, "Is there a law against speaking
here?" "No," was the reply, "we just don't
believe in talking unless it improves upon silence." Such
a standard is cultural treason these days. We are expected to
communicate whether we have anything to say or know how to say
it, leaving our language like a field that has been reaped too
often without being sown or fertilized. It is not enough to witness
a tragedy and say simply, "Oh, my god!" We are expected
talk it out, explore our feelings with others, express our grief
verbally - and the more wordily the better .
There was a time when
one might take a long walk in silence alone or with a friend,
meditate, pray, or just cry. But that will no longer suffice.
We might .try to comfort a person in some tangible way, perhaps
only by one's presence or touch. But today these seem lesser
ways of expressing feeling; now we judge feelings by their linguistic
form.
I looked up "silence"
in several collections of quotations. I found some apt phrases,
but then I noticed something more interesting. My Bartlett's,
first published in 1882, had more than two-thirds of a page of
its tiny type index devoted to silence and its variations. H.L.
Mencken's "New Dictionary of Quotations," published
in 1942 and a much more selective volume, still had two pages
of quotations dealing with silence. As with Bartlett's, silence
generally met with approbation. Then I came to "Peter's
Quotations: Ideas for Our Times," published in 1977. There
was no category for silence. Silence is clearly not an idea for
our times. It has been replaced, in both a technological and
cultural sense, by communications.
I don't deny the worth
of talk nor do I doubt that many say less than they should, but
I remain skeptical of the general assumption that if we talk
long enough, truth and joy will flow like water, and of the tendency
to blame the problems of world and the people in it on "a
failure in communications." We are, after all, something
more than bipedal citizen band radios. To so emphasize verbal
expression denigrates the true variety of our senses, feelings,
and opportunities for expressing them. An arm around the shoulder
may be as true a profession of friendship as some hackneyed phrase.
The spinning of a blues lines on the keyboard may relieve pain
as much as the weaving of words.
Yet we persist in the
faith that more and better communications will save us. The evidence
seems weak. I live in the communicating capital of the world,
where talking and writing are not only the major profession but
a major recreation and we need 25 times as many psychiatrists
per 100,000 residents as in inexpressive South Dakota. The availability
of information about alternate routes to self-expression has
soared in recent years, but so has the divorce rate. The social
restraints on saying what one thinks have declined, but so have
familial and community ties and public safety. Is social intercourse
better than fifty or a hundred years ago? Personal relationships?
Our understanding of each other?
We babble on in the hope
that by saying enough we will say something right. It is actually
more than a faith; it is an addiction. Words have become a drug,
not to cure by occasional use, but to sustain by constant injection.
Whether one is a teenager mesmerized by the tube or a senator
mainlining testimony at a hearing, we increasingly need a verbal
fix to get by. It is not by accident that some radio stations
have switched from music to an "all-talk" format; words
have become the atonal Muzak of our times.
So we not only say it
badly but we say too much, and with language being so abused
by the bureaucracy, the communicators, the hyper-feelers, and
other word junkies, I can hardly take the criticisms of a John
Simon seriously. He is the passenger on the Titanic asking for
another ice cube in his Scotch. The ship is sinking and he wants
us not to split infinitives? Hopefully, there's a better way
than merely getting people to use hopefully correctly.
The right course is not
to restore to language its antiquated rules but its reason. Many
of the old rules are inherently unreasonable and make the logic
of English worse. If they are forgotten so much the better. On
the other hand, there are rules that should be remembered and
reinforced. Among them are these:
Language should have
a purpose. It
should edify, argue, demonstrate, delight or sadden. Meaning
should reign over grammar.
Just because we are
able to speak and write
doesn't mean we have to, As someone once said, what this country
needs is more free speech worth listening to. Accumulating verbiage
without regard to its content is more likely to lead to indigestion
than understanding.
Language is a creative
tool, not a piece of office equipment. Too much language today sounds mechanically
assembled. In the case of word-processing this has become literally
true. Phrases and paragraphs are stored to be retrieved and recycled
constantly. One no longer needs to create, but only rearrange.
If it begins to sound the same, it's because it is.
It is all right to
change the language, but do it for the better. I try to avoid such inflammatory
language as "chairman" but I similarly try to avoid,
at all costs, its approved alternative, "chairperson."
I find that an ugly, inhuman word. I don't mind being one of
the people, but "we the persons?" No way. I think people
who call me a person are dehumanizing me as much as if I called
them a broad. I can't really explain this except that when someone
says "person" I don't see any faces, but with "people"
I do. "People" are friendly, but "person"
is a cold, analytical word that calls up visions of those silhouette
characters on population charts and I suspect whoever came up
with it in its modern context of being like that. So what I do
is duck the issue: "Mary Jones, who chairs the committee,
said. . ." or "Mary Jones, chair of the committee."
I was relieved to find that Bella Abzug, when recently relieved
of her chair, called herself "a chair" which is, after
all, a perfectly good word that has been around for years albeit
without much currency. There are often words in our linguistic
attic that we can dust off and use in a new context when some
present phrase becomes clichéd or objectionable and many
times it is far preferable to do so then to attempt to coin a
new one.
Language should be
enjoyable. Children,
untrained in the somber ways of their elders, recognize this
instinctively. They love riddles, puns, jingles and nonsense
rhymes. They also love slang. For example, this year at our neighborhood
school things are either "decent" or "gross"
(there is no middle ground, apparently) and the foibles of a
classmate risk identification as a "spas," a somewhat
infelicitous derivation from "spastic." It will be
different next year, no doubt, as indicated by a parent who had
asked the definition of "decent" being told, "It's
slang for cool.' To have slang for slang is a sign of vibrant
verbal culture. Adults, of course, have slang, too, but it lacks
status unless discreet and colorless as in the overuse of the
word "really." If you attended college you are not
supposed to descend into slang, although it is permissible, and
even at times demanded, that one use a particular form known
as jargon. Speaking of the "learning process" and calling
someone a "muther" are not as different linguistically
as they are indicative of a chasm in social class. Ironically,
educated jargon thrives on its meaninglessness; uneducated slang
often spreads because of its apt descriptive quality.
Recognizing that we
all use words that someone invented should encourage us to try
a little invention on our own.
While jargon has given us plenty of words we don't need, there
are still many things for which we could use a word, but don't
have it. Here are just a few possible entries I've created for
a really modern dictionary:
A worthbanger could be
someone who beats you out of a job or a promotion. Delapse could
be the sleep that occurs after you turn off the alarm clock.
Cibility is asking someone to have lunch with you sometime when
you don't really mean it. Two marathoners at a party engage in
joggon. A floid is the absence of anything good to watch on TV
as in "There's a floid, let's go to the movies." A
snefflehugger is an unreadable photocopy. A bureaucrat who tells
you something can't be done because it's never been done before
is being precautious.
A day with high pollution
levels is fenquid. A lackout is the time spent waiting for the
plumber to come. And so forth. I'm still searching for a good
word to give to one's ex-wife's mother's ex-husband. If we are
going to change the language let us do so to suit our own, rather
than institutional needs, and in a spirit of imagination and
playfulness, rather than permitting the changes to become unnecessary
additions to the tedium of our lives.
We should write for
the ear and not the eye. We
live in an auditory rather than a literary age and I'm not sure
that is entirely a bad thing. Given the cultural dominance of
television and radio, we can not in any case do much about it.
Further, the formal style, once the mark of a literate writer,
has been co-opted by government, academics, corporations, and
law firms. It is now mostly bad writing and even if you do it
well it puts you in bad company. Besides, if you wish to break
through the verbal barriers of these aforementioned powerful
institutions, matching style will never work. You break the barrier
by speaking and writing informally and colloquially, thereby
reminding the recipients of your words that they are humans as
well as professionals. They may cave when faced with this revelation.
There is nothing wrong
with simple and colloquial speech. The ear is a good judge of language. It
doesn't like ugly sounds; it shuns needless complexity; it invites
directness. We should, I think, be forced to listen to everything
we write.
Finally, we should
remember that language was created so people could talk to each
other. Much language
today is obviously not directed to anyone, but to institutions
and machines. Much is used like a night light, to keep us from
being afraid of the silence.
Words have better purposes.
The major evil of institutionalized and automated language is
that it is not human. There is no reason - no matter how complex
our thought or exalted the context - to speak and write other
than as one human to other humans. This means speaking and writing
directly, logically and with spirit.
Such rules seem far more
important than how we use "hopefully" and where we
place our prepositions. With their application, our language
might even flourish again. At least it would survive.
