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[johnslat]

Here's what I think is an interesting article from the NY Times about how American English has deteriorated. It's a review of John McWorter's new book:""Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care".


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


So, whatta ya think?
Regards,
John

[FGT]

Dear John,
I assume you are a subscriber to the NEW YORK TIMES. For the rest of us your URL doesn't work. Thanks for the effort. I'm curious to read the article. Can you download it to Dave's?

[johnslat]

Dear FGT,
Your wish is my command:

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 r�sum� 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.

But none of these exploits, he is at pains to show, should be taken to mean that he is not hip. His conversation is peppered with knowing allusions to pop culture � Britney Spears, Tori Amos, television sitcoms, rap and Broadway. ("I'm the world's only straight musical-theater cast-album fanatic," he joked.) An experienced bass-baritone who plays cocktail piano and has performed in amateur theatrics, he illustrated a point about contemporary English usage by singing two lines from Stephen Sondheim's new musical, "Bounce." In many ways, he insists, he is a typical product of America after the 1960's, the decade to which he dates the beginning of the nation's linguistic decline.

"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.


Regards,
John

[george61]

Oh,definitely,American language is extremely awful. BTW....what kind of piano causes the censor to go "BLEEP" in your C/P article?
Daves censor is a wowser!

[johnslat]

Dear george61,
Aha - the culprit (for the "beep") was the word "c o c k t a i l " preceding the word "piano".
Regards,
John

[denise]

I actually kinda like this trend towards...uh... the "dumbification" of the language. The old prescriptive rules are still there, and provided that they are TAUGHT effectively (which is a whole 'nother issue), then allowing a "lower status" of English to creep into common use seems, in my opinion, to simply expand the language and allow for more creativity.

And if language is a reflection of culture, then why single out America?

d

[FGT]

Thank you for your very prompt response.

I'm still digesting the meat of that article but certainly feel that the first two examples would appear to support the hypothesis. Along with the apparent degeneration of written English, I mourn the demise of oratory.
You provided two examples from the left side of the pond. One could do the same from the right - Churchill vs Blair - no contest. And I'm not talking politics.

[denise]

Hmmm... After reading FGT's response, I have re-thought. (uh, re-thunk?)

I do think there should be some sort of line drawn between "common/casual usage"--e.g., the sort of language that you use in the pub with a group of friends--and more formal usage. Public debates, speeches, etc., in my opinion, sound better when adhering to more formal/prescriptive rules. Casual pub conversation, conversely, sounds damn awkward when adhering to such rules.

d

[FGT]

Why, thank you Denise. And I agree with you that it would be inappropriate to stick to "grammatically" correct English in the pub.

There should be a place for all. Isn't that one of the beauties of English, that it is rich in variety and can be most effective because of the broad spread. It would be a pity to lose that.

[johnslat]

Dear FGT,
Actually, I wasn't too enamored of Rep. Eaton's rhetoric (although, when you compare it to Sen. Brownback's, it does sound pretty good). It seemed a bit too flowery to me. Now, Churchill was the Master. I liked your remark, which indicates that this "deterioration" (if, indeed, it has happened - and my opinion is that it has) is not confined to the good old US of A.
Regards,
John

[donfan]

Fair dinkum, don't come the raw prawn with me. American English never was any good - OZ English is the best, awrite?

[Wolf]

The horror, the horror. That's a site filled with what young people write today. Sift through it at your peril.

I'm afraid I have to agree. As an English lit major, I was musing the other day on how fewer and fewer read for pleasure. From those paperish rectangles that don't have animated gifs. I read a few online reviews of The Lord of the Rings a while back. And I wanted to beat the reviewers. Severely. It was obvoius that they had never, ever read the books. And yet they felt perfectly justified in making flippant remarks about how the "leaf" the halflings smoke was marijuana. It clearly says in The Hobbit that Halflings smoke tobacco.

As to other cultures knowing poetry. A lot of my Japanese students didn't know a lot about their own literatry traditions. My Chinese students seem more aware of their literary past, but many do not reflect upon it/incorporate it into their lives. (I'm guessing not into their speech either, but that's a guess.)

[Kurochan]

Well, I don't know...

I can think of Jesse Jackson as an example of a very good American orator. He uses rhythm and alliteration really well.

I'd think if there is a decline it's related to two things. First, there's the anti-intellectual current in American life, which has always been present, and maybe is amplified now due to the democratization of media. (Or maybe I shouldn't say media INPUT is really democratized, it's that the output has to appeal to a wider audience because of emphasis on profits.)

Here's my second theory -- do you guys think lowering of teacher quality is tied to this, and if it is, what is the reason for lower quality? In my memory, when I was a college student, the education majors I knew were generally not good writers, with very little command of grammar and spelling. My theory is that in the past, women who wanted to work could choose just a few occupations: teacher, secretary, nurse. The most intelligent, talented women had these professions because they were the only choices. But now, women have a full range of choices, and talents are dispersed throughout all the professions. I'm not saying all teachers today are dross, it's just that because of the few options for women in the past, women of great intelligence were basically forced into teaching, which affected quality of instruction. Maybe, ironically, women's rights have had a negative effect on American education.

[Roger]

Come to think of it - in France people even to this day remember the exuberant decade that followed le may de dix-neuf soixante-huit, that is, the soixantehuitards, the generation that was marked by the events of 1968, with its revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian drive.
It had a tremendous impact on social mores, though far less on the French language. But, turning to America, I do think in the USA it changed the language more profoundly.
Also, it produced Noam Chomsky and all those who have been following in his foot steps. Teaching seems to have been affected as can be seen in East Asia's TEFL scene, not for the better, by the way.
And, as someone (Wolf) noted, reading is on the decline. Reading English fiction is not something you will catch your students doing.
At least this has not changed in France - anyone attending a lycee will have read a tonne of classical works, and be interested in recent writing as well. TV is comparatively less important. How many hours a day do American teenies spend watching TV? In FGrance, it's way below two hours. Many don't even watch more than once a week!

[some waygug-in]

How many hours a day do American teenies spend watching TV?

I think therein lies the crux of the problem. No one reads anymore, at least not the majority of the masses.

Incidently, just as a curiosity, my father had the collected works of Wm. Shakespeare, a number of books by Winston Churchill, collections of poetry, prose by various authors, and some volumes about art history and culture in his private collection. He was not an English major, or even literary, he was an industrial arts teacher.

I on the other hand have a few books from my university English classes, some strange but true kind of books, ufo abductions, and some sci-fi paperbacks. But here am I, teaching English of all things.