Thursday, February 17, 2011

The demise of real communicative language.

The following was sent to me by email, and as an exponent of the correct use of language in an age when it is increasingly sidelined, I felt that it was well worth sharing. Written by Clark Whelton, the following was published in The National Post on Tuesday 15th February 2011. 
I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. "And he was like, you know, 'Helloooo, what are you looking at?' and stuff, and I'm like, you know, 'Can I, like, pick you up?,' and he goes, like, 'Brrrp brrrp brrrp,' and I'm like, you know, 'Whoa, that is so wow!'" She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late 20th century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-40s, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.
My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor's speechwriting staff was small, and in 1985, I welcomed the chance to hire an intern.
The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with "like" that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, "Well ... like ... yeah." Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All's fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. "You should," for example, has been replaced by "you need to." "No" has faded into "not really." "I said" is now "I went." As for "you're welcome," that's long since become "no problem." Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.
In 1985, I thought of "like" as a trite survivor of the hippie 1960s. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with "like." Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.
As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that "like" had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: "You know" had replaced "Umm ..." as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding "and stuff" at the end. Their writing samples were terrible.
Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? Ambiguity, evasion and body language, such as air quotes--using fingers as quotation marks to indicate cliches -- were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.
By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that "like" was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching ( "What I said was, I said ... ") sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation ( "So I'm like, 'Want to, like, see a movie?' And he goes, 'No way.' And I go ... " ) made their entrance.
I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.
In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he'd noticed any change in Vassar students' language skills. "The biggest difference," he replied, "is that by the time to-day's students arrive on campus, they've been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought."
He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. "Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers."
Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s. "Like" has a long and scruffy pedigree: in the 1970s, it was a mainstay of Valspeak, the frequently ridiculed but highly contagious "Valley Girl" dialect of suburban Los Angeles, and even in 1964, the film Paris When It Sizzles lampooned the word's overuse. All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness ( "I sort of landed on my side ... my arm sort of hurt"), complete with double-clutching ( "Finally, what I decided I'd do, I decided I'd ... ") and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles ( "I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore ... ").
Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?
In 1991, I visited the small town of Bridgton, Me., on the evening that the residents of Cumberland County gathered to welcome their local National Guard unit home from the Gulf War. It was a stirring moment. Escorted by the lights and sirens of two dozen fire engines from surrounding towns, the soldiers marched down Main Street. I was standing near the end of the parade and looked around expectantly for a platform, podium or microphone. But there were to be no brief remarks of commendation by a mayor or commanding officer. There was to be no pastoral prayer of thanks for the safe return of the troops. Instead, the soldiers quickly dispersed. The fire engines rumbled away. The crowd went home. A few minutes later, Main Street stood empty.
Apparently there was, like, nothing to say.
- Clark Whelton was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/like+whoa+that/4283409/story.html#ixzz1ECJM62o2

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