IF I HAD A STAMMER

Meghan Daum

 

 

 

A funny thing happened on the way to turning thirty-five. As though tripping on a string of Christmas lights that had edged themselves out of a dusty basement corner, I began losing battles in my war with sentimentality. These are the sorts of battles you don’t always realize you’ve lost until the new regime has taken over and ordered a new china pattern. It’s a nearly imperceptible series of defeats; first you cry at weddings, then you cry at the General Electric commercials that play during Meet the Press, then you both cry and laugh at what you suddenly perceive to be the great verbal acumen and emotional range of Calvin Trillin.

If that sequence of events reads to you like a list of warning signs to degenerative illness you are probably (a) under thirty and (b) absolutely within your rights as an under-thirty person to regard such sentimentality as tantamount to beholding a twenty- by forty-foot painting by Thomas Kinkaid, the Six Million Dollar Man of impressionism, and saying, “Now that’s art.” You have also (c) probably spent too much time in used-record stores and/or listening to public radio. How do I know? I can hear it in your voice (and in mine).

For reasons I will go to my grave trying to unpack (when you don’t have a mind for physics you’re left with this), there is now an entire class of people who have come to express their social and cultural pedigree through a particular kind of vocal intonation. In fact, if there is any hallmark of my generation’s literary sensibility, I’m inclined to believe it is not what we commit to paper but how we expel the words from our mouths. If such a concept as our literature exists, it does so in the form of the spoken word—not only in the spoken word genre but in everyday speech patterns, the manner in which we order eggs off a menu, the sounds of our voices on answering machines.

Call it the Stammering Class. Call it the Nasal Academy. Call it the sonic manifestation of affluence and postmodernism, the love child of Reaganomics and Grunge. The counterpoint to the much maligned, teenaged-girl-dominated “up talk,” this intonation takes anything ending in the upward sweeping sound of a question mark and flicks it onto the ground as though it were a fly. It is, for lack of a better term, down talk. The official tongue of hipsters, lesbians, and anyone whose voice has ever been heard on National Public Radio, it manages to convey a supreme sense of casualness while also taking itself very, very seriously. It sails over phrases like “cultural context” and “grass-roots effort” as though such phrases exist only within the utopian region of down talk’s dialect. Its sentences bask in the speaker’s lack of amusement, capturing the romantic disenchantment of the English major for whom Salinger has suddenly lost his allure (brainier down talkers will worship Salinger in high school but lose interest by college, ditto for Vonnegut, Kerouac, and Henry Miller). However, down talkers, no matter how obscure their tastes become, will never cease to worship William Burroughs.

This is a complicated business to suss out. For one thing, as you no doubt noticed, I am engaged in the rather futile exercise of writing about voice modulation rather than talking about it. If I sat before you now, I’d show you myself. I’d talk down talk to you. I’d press my tongue hard against that ridge of gum just above the inside of the upper teeth (for some reason, this is for me the proper starting position for the swan dive into down talk) and explain to you, you know, what the deal is.

Instead, the airwaves must suffice. Turn on the public or college station and listen for ten minutes. You will hear this literature on the hipper, fringier programs. Ironic music will toodle in the background, long pauses will leave discomfiting blank spaces. Upon occasion you will hear us reporting from the field, not from the front lines of wars or political campaigns but from the frontiers of American quirkdom. We’re the ones who tell you about the mom-and-pop groceries closing in Baton Rouge. We’re who tells you about a guy who rides a Segway Human Transporter over the Rocky Mountains, the Dalmatian that only responds to commands in Farsi, and just about anything that takes place in Seattle. You will hear us drop our voices at the end of sentences as if to suggest that what we’re saying, even if it concerns a Pillsbury bake-off, is a humanitarian crisis of genocidal proportions. You will hear us swallowing our words so that our syllables have the texture of lava rocks; call it vox gravelax. The words gurgle in the back of the throat like a boiling pot of ramen noodles. This is the sound of the ultimate seriousness brought to you by the folks from the ultimate casualness. Down talk is always measured, even sluggish, like an LP spinning just slightly too slow. The vowels are as attenuated as El Greco figures, screaming for mercy as we reach for the next word.

The flat, treeless plains of down talk’s terrain are nicked only by one notable variation in the topography, the chronic stammer. The richer, more glamorous cousin of the stutter, the stammer is the must-have accessory for the down talker who wants that little something extra in the intellectual department. Despite reflecting none of the political or cultural tastes of his tonal predecessors, the great down talker William F. Buckley set a stammering standard that is now carried out in world-class style by public radio personalities like Terry Gross and Ira Glass, both of whom are major heroes in the down-talking community. And who can blame us? Stammering is this literature’s antiminimalism, spoken word’s answer to hypographia. The verbal equivalent to descending a staircase two steps at a time, the stammer suggests that the speaker has so much to say there isn’t time to get all the words in. He is at once so unrehearsed and possessed of such a large vocabulary that the process of choosing a word is as overwhelming as devising a national health care system. He has all the makings of a literary genius, even if he’s never written a word.

Riding the coattails of tortured vowels’ spit-producing stammers is one of the linguistic bedrocks of down talk, the construction “very sort of.” In the last six months, I have heard “very sort of” used no less than forty-five times, at least thirty-seven of those usages occurring at bookstores, literary events, or coffee shops on to whose tip jars are taped little notes reading “support counter intelligence.” Members of the stammering class, particularly those who feel pressure to hold opinions about the arts while not alienating the creators of the art, who may be standing behind them at the gallery opening, find “very sort of” to be just the ticket.

“Wilco’s latest album is very sort of experimental, but not overly so.”

“I always find Riesling to be very sort of twee.”

“I feel very sort of hungover this morning. It must have been those six shots of Everclear.”

In the world of down talk, people with multiple graduate degrees see no semantic conflict in characterizing everything from Ikea sleeper sofas to the art of floral arrangement as “very sort of, like, Zen.” Most people use “very sort of” when they really mean “not even remotely like” (“Laurel Canyon is very sort of Haight-Ashbury in the eighties with foliage.”). Most often, however, “very sort of” is a place holder for nothingness. I would bet money that a detailed linguistic survey of the usage of “very sort of” would show that it’s almost always a way of saying, “I don’t know what to say about this.” In French, that would be je ne sais quoi, but resorting to French is very sort of . . . 1980s.

Though fancying itself the exact opposite of bourgeois pretension, down talk is primarily about social class. It is a speech pattern that reveals not only economic status and region but tastes and hobbies and political affiliation. Down talk, like eating disorders and Botox, is most often found in the middle and upper middle class. It is rarely spoken by political conservatives, even less often by those who enjoy sports. Though down talk can appear rooted in white culture by virtue of its lackluster sheen and mashed-potato-like texture, any ethnicity is free to adapt it, though for some reason Asians do so in greater proportions than blacks or Latinos. As I mentioned earlier, lesbians, at least many of them, must carry a gene for down talk—and lucky them! In the clutches of down talk’s lock-jawed, simmering intensity, every statement, even one involving handbags, is a political statement. Down talk is an express train to being taken seriously, so who wouldn’t want to take it? It is possible to combine down talk with a southern accent (most notably the Austin, Texas, Athens, Georgia, or Oxford, Mississippi, varieties) but entirely impossible to do so with a prominent New York, New Jersey, or Boston accent. Californians and midwesterners are at an advantage in this arena, their native accents having prechewed their words into the mealy syllables on which down talk thrives. Most college students, but especially those majoring in the liberal arts, will experiment with down talk as readily as with marijuana (indeed the latter is a mighty enhancer of the former). Like schizophrenia, down talk most commonly presents itself in one’s early twenties. It is rare to hear it from any but the most precocious teenagers. It is even rarer for it to develop afresh in anyone over twenty-five. As with mental illness, once a person has been afflicted with this voice modulation, it is nearly impossible to achieve a complete cure.

And so I return to down talk’s arch enemy, sentimentality. If down talk is Ira Glass and Wilco and much of the literature that appears in the many fine, small literary magazines being published today, sentimentality is Diane Sawyer and Celine Dion and nine out of ten fiction titles on the best seller lists of America. If down talk is the cultural elite, then sentimentality is everyone else, the hard-working men and women of this country, the people who listen to AM radio because ostensibly they still haven’t figured out that FM exists. Welcome to the two Americas. But the problem is that that’s not true. There are not two Americas but something closer to 250 million Americas. The problem with down talk, with this emotional literature so many of us adore, is that it masquerades as an expression of individualism when it is, in fact, about as generic as the linens aisle at Target (down talkers love Target, incidentally, and not even in a campy way).

So this is why I can no longer listen to certain public radio programs without wanting to send a giant box of throat lozenges to every local affiliate in the country. I can no longer buy a latte, an old Clash record, or, for that matter, a piece of handmade jewelry without being made to feel that I am participating in some kind of franchise of coolness. This isn’t because I’m not a fan of irony—when that day comes I’ll have to relinquish my black-framed glasses, rendering myself blind—but because down talk somehow manages to undermine genuine irony by letting voice modulation steal the show. With down talk, every utterance becomes ironic. Office chitchat starts to sound like banter on Comedy Central. You can’t order pancakes in a diner without causing the waitress to wonder if you really mean it. Moreover, everything upon everything—from making a dinner reservation to purchasing a can of paint thinner at the hardware store—takes on the stammering, lackadaisical qualities of a certain kind of voice on National Public Radio. Or at least that’s what happened when I made a dinner reservation and bought paint thinner earlier today. What’s most interesting to me about this “literature” is the power wielded by the very fact of its not being literature at all. By seeping into our consciousness like an invisible gas, it does what more definable categories of culture (for instance, books) simply cannot do; it does the work for us. It make us seem sincere when we may be lying and smart when we may be stupid. Even better, it make us bookish without our actually having to read.

Talk about best-selling stuff. How very sort of brilliant.