Going at the Changes in, Ya Know, English

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Going at the Changes in, Ya Know, English
By EMILY EAKIN
 
n Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, Representative Charles A. Eaton,
Republican of New Jersey, made his case in the House
for why the nation should enter the Second World War.

"Mr. Speaker," his speech began, "yesterday against
the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American
people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call
to courage; a call to determination once and for all
to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of
tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow
over the hearts and homes of every land."

Last year, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of
Kansas, made the case for war in Iraq this way:

"And if we don't go at Iraq, that our effort in the
war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence
operation," he said. "We go at Iraq and it says to
countries that support terrorists, there remain six in
the world that are as our definition state sponsors of
terrorists, you say to those countries: we are serious
about terrorism, we're serious about you not
supporting terrorism on your own soil." 

The linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter cites
these excerpts in his new book, "Doing Our Own Thing:
The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We
Should, Like, Care" (Gotham Books). They not only are
typical of speeches made in Congress on both
occasions, he argues, but also provide a vivid
illustration of just how much the language of public
discourse has deteriorated.

Riddled with sentence fragments, run-ons and
colloquialisms like "go at," Senator Brownback's
speech is still intelligible, but in Mr. McWhorter's
view, it is emblematic of a creeping casualness that
is largely to the nation's detriment.

"We in America now are an anomaly," Mr. McWhorter said
over lunch at a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan this
week. "We have very little sense of English as
something to be dressed up. It's just this thing that
comes out of our mouths. We just talk."

Mr. McWhorter, 38, a professor of linguistics at the
University of California at Berkeley and a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a policy research
group in New York City, is hardly the first to
complain about Americans' brazen disregard for their
native tongue. But unlike many others, he says the
problem is not an epidemic of bad grammar.

As a linguist, he says, he knows that grammatical
rules are arbitrary and that in casual conversation
people have never abided by them. Rather, he argues,
the fault lies with the collapse of the distinction
between the written and the oral. Where formal,
well-honed English was once de rigueur in public life,
he argues, it has all but disappeared, supplanted by
the indifferent cadences of speech and ultimately
impairing our ability to think. 

This bleak assessment notwithstanding, Mr. McWhorter,
an intense, confident and — perhaps not surprisingly —
loquacious man, is not a curmudgeon or a fuddy-duddy.
Nor, for that matter, a nerd, despite a résumé that
bristles with intellectual precociousness. 

Self-taught in 12 languages — including Russian,
Swedish, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew, which he
initially took up as a Philadelphia preschooler when
he was 4 — he is a respected expert in Creole
languages. (In his spare time, he is compiling the
first written grammar of Saramaccan, a Creole language
spoken by descendants of former slaves in Suriname.) 

A college graduate at 19 and a tenured professor at
33, he has published seven previous books, including
the controversial best seller, "Losing the Race:
Self-Sabotage in Black America" (The Free Press,
2000), in which he accused middle-class blacks of
embracing anti-intellectualism and a cult of
victimology. An African-American who is an outspoken
critic of affirmative action, welfare and reparations,
he has aroused the ire of many liberals and earned a
reputation as a conservative.

[...]

"I cannot recite a single poem," he said. "You can
take a Russian teenager and say recite some poetry,
and they will give you strophes of Pushkin. We can't
do it. The only equivalent for an American under a
certain age is literally Dr. Seuss or theme songs."

Until the 1960's, he maintains, informal cultural
expression — like the experimental prose of Beatnik
writers — was relegated to outsider status. But by the
end of the decade, he insists, that had changed: the
counterculture went mainstream, ushering in the
laid-back new linguistic regime. 

Over lunch, he ticked off the evidence: the Beatles
and other rock 'n' roll bands became national
obsessions; "Bell Telephone Hour," a prime-time
television show featuring classical music, was
canceled; Hollywood began to make movies like "Easy
Rider" that captured the mumbling diction of everyday
speech; participants at a Dartmouth College education
conference declared that creative classroom learning
should be streseed over grammar rules and formal
essays. 

At the same time, Mr. McWhorter argued, the Free
Speech Movement was spreading on college campuses —
along with expletive-laden posters, sit-ins and skimpy
clothes. And black English, a language traditionally
spoken, not written, was becoming increasingly popular
among young people.

"During a counterculture era, when we've been taught
not to trust anyone over 30 and that our leaders are
corrupt, naturally the speech of the oppressed becomes
more attractive," he said. "It's in this era that most
pop music begins to be sung in a black accent even by
white people who grew up in Connecticut."

Mr. McWhorter paints an elaborate picture of a culture
in linguistic upheaval, but some scholars caution
against singling out the 1960's as a time of
unprecedented change.

"There has always been pop culture, or low culture,
alongside the high," said Robin Lakoff, a professor of
linguistics at the University of California at
Berkeley who studies the effects of language on
shaping social attitudes. "But because low culture has
traditionally been nonliterate and unattended to by
the higher punditry, it tends to vanish without much
of a trace. So people like John compare an imaginary
golden age of only high culture products with what we
have today, when low culture's products exist for
posterity on tape."

She might have cited Mr. McWhorter's book as an
example of low and high culture co-existing side by
side. Despite its high-minded content, it is written
in a breezy, colloquial style that seems paradoxically
to embody some of the linguistic traits that he
deplores. Sentences like "Back in the day, rhetoric
was how we sang our language to the skies" and
"Linguistically, America eats with its face now" are
common along with conversational locutions like
"however that rubs you" or "the times were
a-changin'." 

The book's free-wheeling prose and unorthodox usage —
Mr. McWhorter frequently combines a plural subject
with a singular verb — has put off at least one
critic, Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, who
ended his review with the words: "Physician, heal
thyself." 

Yet Mr. McWhorter, who defends his writing style in
the book, says it was a deliberate choice on his part.
"I wrote the book in a style that channels speech in a
way I certainly could not have gotten away with 40
years ago," he admitted. In part, he said, his goal
was not to sound like a scold. But his prose is also,
he insisted, a reflection of the era in which he was
brought up.

"I'm very much a part of this," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/15/arts/15JOHN.html

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree