Beginning with the Pilgrims, the story of language in America is the story of our Declaration of Linguistic Independence, the separating from its parent of that magnificent upstart we call American English.
John Adams was one of the first to lead the charge for American linguistic autonomy. In 1780, sixteen years before he became president, he called upon Congress to establish an academy for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” “English,” Adams proclaimed, “is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations, will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use.”
At the time Adams made that prediction, an obscure Connecticut schoolmaster was soon to become a one-man academy of American English. His name, now synonymous with the word dictionary, was Webster. Noah Webster (1758-1843) saw the untapped promise of the new republic. He was afire with the conviction that a United States no longer politically dependent on England should also become independent in language. In his Dissertations on the English Language, published in 1789, Webster declared linguistic war on the King’s English: “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.”
In putting his vision into practice, Noah Webster traveled throughout America, listening to people’s speech and taking detailed notes. He included in his dictionaries an array of shiny new American words, among them applesauce, bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk—and skunk: “a quadruped remarkable for its smell.” Webster also proudly used quotations by Americans to illustrate and clarify many of his definitions. The likes of Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Jay, and Washington Irving took their places as authorities alongside William Shakespeare, John Milton, and the Bible. In shaping the American language, Webster also taught a new nation a new way to spell. He deleted the u from words such as honour and labour and the k from words such as musick and publick, he reversed the last two letters in words such as centre and theatre, and he Americanized the spelling of words such as plough and gaol.
Perhaps no one has celebrated this “American dialect” with more passion and vigor than the poet Walt Whitman. “The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world—and the most perfect users of words,” he predicted before the Civil War. “The new world, the new times, the new people, the new vistas need a new tongue. What is more, they will … not be satisfied until it is evolved.”
More than a century later, it’s debatable whether Americans are “the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world,” but there is no question that we are still engaged in the American Evolution and that our American parlance is as rollicking and pyrotechnic as ever. Consider our invention, in the past fifty years, of delectables on the order of carbon footprint, couch potato, mouse potato (a couch potato attached to a computer), digerati, hottie, humongous, ginormous, sleazebag, soccer mom, d’oh, OMG, and unfriend.
From the Age of Queen Anne (1702-1714), the British have thundered against what one of their magazines called “the torrent of barbarous phraseology” that poured from the American colonies. The first British broadside launched against an Americanism is recorded in 1735, when an English visitor named Francis Moore referred to the young city of Savannah as standing upon a hill overlooking a river “which they in barbarous English call a bluff.”
The British were still beating their breasts over what the Monthly Mirror called “the corruptions and barbarisms which are hourly obtaining in the speech of our trans-Atlantic colonies,” long after we stopped being colonies. They objected to almost every term that they did not consider standard English, protesting President Jefferson’s use of the verb belittle. They expressed shock at the American tendency to employ, in place of suppose, the likes of expect, reckon, calculate, and—a special target—guess, conveniently overlooking Geoffrey Chaucer’s centuries-old “Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.”
Returning from a tour through the United States in the late nineteenth century, the playwright Oscar Wilde jested, “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” Wilde’s fellow playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”
But our homegrown treasure Mark Twain put it all into perspective when he opined about American English, as compared with British English: “The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company, and we own the bulk of the shares.”
As the (probably apocryphal) tale spins out, back in the early colonial days, a white hunter and a friendly Native American made a pact before they started out on the day’s hunt. Whatever they bagged was to be divided equally between them. At the end of the day, the white man undertook to distribute the spoils, consisting of several buzzards and turkeys. He suggested to his fellow hunter, “Either I take the turkeys and you the buzzards, or you take the buzzards and I take the turkeys.” At this point the Native American complained, “You talk buzzard to me. Now talk turkey.” And ever since, to talk turkey has meant “to tell it like it is.”
Let’s talk turkey about our Native American heritage. Suppose you had been one of the early explorers or settlers of North America. You would have found many things in your new land unknown to you. The handiest way of filling voids in your vocabulary would have been to ask local Native Americans what words they used. The early colonists began borrowing words from friendly Indians almost from the moment of their first contact, and many of those names have remained in our everyday language:
Food: squash (Narraganset), pecan (Algonquian), hominy (Algonquian), pone (Algonquian), pemmican (Cree), and succotash (Narraganset);
People: sachem (Narraganset), squaw (Massachuset), papoose (Narraganset), and mugwump (Natick);
Daily life: moccasin (Chippewa), toboggan (Algonquian), tomahawk (Algonquian), wigwam (Abenaki), teepee (Dakota), caucus (Algonquian), powwow (Narraganset), wampum (Massachuset), bayou (Choctaw), potlatch (Chinook), hogan (Navajo), hickory (Algonquian), kayak (Inuit), parka (Aleut), and totem (Ojibwa).
Pronouncing many of the Native American words was difficult for the early explorers and settlers. In many instances, they had to shorten and simplify the names. Given the Native American names, identify the following animals: apossoun, otchock, rahaugcum, and segankw.
The hidden animals are: opossum (Algonquian), woodchuck (Narraganset), raccoon (Algonquian), and skunk (Algonquian). To this menagerie we may add the likes of caribou (Micmac), chipmunk (Ojibwa), moose (Algonquian), muskrat (Abenaki), and porgy (Algonquian).
If you look at a map of the United States, you will realize how freely settlers used words of Indian origin to name the places where we live. Rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, mountains, valleys, counties, towns, and cities as large as Chicago (from a Fox word that means “place that stinks of onions” or from another Indian word that means “great, powerful”) bear Native American names. Four of our five Great Lakes—Huron, Ontario, Michigan, and Erie—and twenty-five of our states have names that were borrowed from Native American words:
Alabama: name of a tribe in the Creek Confederacy; Alaska: mainland (Aleut); Arizona: place of the little springs (Papago); Arkansas: downstream people (Sioux); Connecticut: place of the long river (Algonquian);
Idaho: behold the sun coming down the mountains (Shoshone); Illinois: superior people (Illini); Iowa: beautiful land (Ioway); Kansas: south wind people (Sioux); Kentucky: meadowland (Cherokee);
Massachusetts: great hill place (Massachuset); Michigan: great water (Chippewa); Minnesota: milky blue water (Sioux); Mississippi: father of waters (Ojibwa); Missouri: people of the large canoes (Fox);
Nebraska: flat water (Sioux); North Dakota and South Dakota: named for the Dakota tribe; Ohio: great river (Iroquois); Oklahoma: red people (Choctaw);
Tennessee: name of a Cherokee village; Texas: friends (Tejas); Utah: name of a Ute tribe; Wisconsin: gathering of waters (Algonquian); Wyoming: large prairie place (Delaware);
Some of our loveliest place names began life as Native American words—Susquehanna, Shenandoah, Rappahannock. Such names are the stuff of poetry. To the poet Walt Whitman, Monongahela “rolls with venison richness upon the palate.” William Penn wrote about the Leni-Lenape Indians: “I know not a language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness.” How fortunate we are that the poetry the First Peoples heard in the American landscape lives on in our American language.
From California to the New York island, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, I hear America singing. We are teeming nations within a nation, a nation that is like a world. We talk in melodies of infinite variety; we dance to their sundry measures and lyrics.
Midway through John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, young Ivy observes, “Ever’body says words different. Arkansas folks says ‘em different, and Oklahomy folks says ‘em different. And we seen a lady from Massachusetts, an’ she said ‘em differentest of all. Couldn’t hardly make out what she was sayin.’ “
One aspect of American rugged individualism is that not all of us say the same word in the same way. Sometimes we don’t even use the same name for the same object. I was born and grew up in Philadelphia a coon’s age, a blue moon, and a month of Sundays ago, when Hector was a pup. Phillufia, or Philly, which is what we kids called the city, was where the Epicurean delight made with cold cuts, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, and onions stuffed into a long, hard-crusted Italian bread loaf was invented.
The creation of that sandwich took place in the Italian pushcart section of the city, known as Hog Island. Some linguists contend that it was but a short leap from Hog Island to hoagie, while others claim that the label hoagie arose because only a hog had the appetite or the technique to eat one properly.
As a young adult I moved to northern New England (N’Hampsha, to be specific), where the same sandwich designed to be a meal in itself is called a grinder, because you need a good set of grinders to chew it. But my travels around the United States have revealed that the hoagie or grinder is called at least a dozen other names—a bomber, Garibaldi (after the Italian liberator), hero, Italian sandwich, rocket, sub, submarine (which is what they call it in California), torpedo, wedge, wedgie, and, in the deep South, a poor-boy (usually pronounced “poh-boy”).
In Philadelphia, we wash our hoagies down with soda. In New England we do it with tonic, and by that word I don’t mean medicine. Soda and tonic in other parts are known as pop, soda pop, soft drink, Coke, and quinine.
In northern New England, they take the term milk shake quite literally. To many residing in that little corner of the country, a milk shake consists of milk mixed with flavored syrup—and nothing more—shaken up until foamy. If you live in Rhode Island or in southern Massachusetts and you want ice cream in your milk drink, you ask for a cabinet (named after the square wooden cabinet in which the mixer was encased). If you live farther north, you order a velvet or a frappe (from the French frapper, “to ice”).
Clear—or is it clean? or is it plumb?—across the nation, Americans sure do talk “different.”
What do you call those flat, doughy things you often eat for breakfast—battercakes, flannel cakes, flapjacks, griddle cakes, or pancakes?
Is that simple strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk a berm, boulevard, boulevard strip, city strip, devil strip, green belt, the parking, parking strip, parkway, sidewalk plot, strip, swale, tree bank, or tree lawn?
Is the part of the highway that separates the northbound lanes from the southbound lanes the center strip, mall, medial strip, median strip, medium strip, or neutral ground?
Is it a cock horse, dandle, hicky horse, horse, horse tilt, ridy horse, seesaw, teeter, teeterboard, teetering board, teetering horse, teeter-totter, tilt, tilting board, tinter, tinter board, or tippity bounce?
Do fisherpersons employ an angledog, angleworm, baitworm, earthworm, eaceworm, fishworm, mudworm, rainworm, or red-worm? Is a larger worm a dew worm, night crawler, night walker, or town worm?
Is it a crabfish, clawfish, craw, crawdab, crawdad, crawdaddy, crawfish, crawler, crayfish, creekcrab, crowfish, freshwater lobster, ghost shrimp, mudbug, spiny lobster, or yabby?
Depends where you live and whom it is you’re talking to.
I figger, figure, guess, imagine, opine, reckon, and suspect that my being bullheaded, contrary, headstrong, muley, mulish, ornery, otsny, pigheaded, set, sot, stubborn, or utsy about this whole matter of dialects makes you sick to, in, or at your stomach.
But I assure you that, when it comes to American dialects, I’m not speaking flapdoodle, flumaddiddle, flummydiddle, or flurriddiddle. I’m no all-thumbs-and-no-fingers, all-knees-and-elbows, all-left-feet, all-hat-and-no-cattle, antigoddling, bumfuzzled, discombobulated, frustrated, foozled bumpkin, clodhopper, country jake, hayseed, hick, hillbilly, Hoosier, jackpine savage, mossback, mountain-boomer, pumpkin-husker, rail-splitter, rube, sodbuster, stump farmer, swamp angel, yahoo, or yokel.
If you ask most adults what a dialect is, they will tell you it’s what somebody else in another region passes off as English. These regions tend to be exotic places like Mississippi or Texas—or Brooklyn, where oil is a rank of nobility and earl is a black, sticky substance.
If the truth be told, we all have accents. Many New Englanders drop the r in cart and farm and say caht and fahm. Thus, the Midwesterner’s “park the car in Harvard Yard” becomes the New Englander’s “pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd.” But those r’s aren’t lost. A number of upper-class Northeasterners add r’s to words, such as idear and Chiner when those words come before a vowel or at the end of a sentence.
The most widespread of American dialects is that spoken across the South. It’s reported that many Southerners reacted to the elections of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton by saying, “Well, at last we have a president who talks without an accent.”
Actually, Southerners, like everyone else, do speak with an accent, as witness these tongue-in-cheek entries in A Dictionary of Southernisms:
ah: organ for seeing
are: sixty minutes
arn: ferrous metal
ass: frozen water
ast: questioned
bane: small, kidney-shaped vegetable
bar: seek and receive a loan; a grizzly
card: one who lacks courage
farst: a lot of trees
fur: distance
har: to employ
hep: to assist
hire yew: a greeting
paw tree: verse
rat: opposite of left
rats: what the Constitution guarantees us
reckanize: to see
retard: stopped working at the job
seed: past tense of saw
tar: a rubber wheel
tarred: exhausted
t’mar: day following t’day
thang: item
thank: to cogitate
y’all: a bunch of you’s
Each language is a great pie. Each slice of that pie is a dialect, and no single slice is the language.
In the early 1960s, John Steinbeck decided to rediscover America in a camper with his French poodle, Charley. The writer reported his observations in Travels with Charley and included these thoughts on American dialects:
One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms, overtones, and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and sentences. I did listen everywhere. It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness by a slow, inevitable process.
I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
More than a half century has passed since Steinbeck made that observation, and the hum and buzz of electronic voices have since permeated almost every home across our nation. Formerly, the psalmist tells us, “The voice of the turtle was heard in the land.” Now it is the voice of the broadcaster, with his or her immaculately groomed diction. Let us hope that American English does not turn into a bland, homogenized, pasteurized, assembly-line product. May our bodacious American English remain tasty and nourishing—full of flavor, variety, and local ingredients.
Slang is hot and slang is cool. Slang is righteous and slang is wicked. Slang is the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, the cat’s whiskers, and the cat’s pajamas. Slang is swell, ducky, peachy keen, super, tops, nifty, far out, groovy, hip, excellent, endsville, flipville, copacetic, outasight, and totally tubular. Slang is fresh, fly, phat, fabulous, fantabulous, uber—da bomb. Slang is ace, awesome, bad, sweet, smooth, sassy, unreal, primo, fab, gear, tuff, the most, the max. Slang is beast, boss, dope, tite, mint, neat, neato, nasty, fetch, chill, cool beans, ice cold, large, rad, sick, sickening, ill, killer, def, epic, chunky, cretaceous, whoa, and like wow! Slang is smokin’, blazin’, kickin’, cruisin’, scoopin’, stylin’, bitchin’, bangin’, pimpin’, slammin’, frickin’ A, bomb-ass, and kick-ass.
That’s more than eighty ways of saying that, if variety is the spice of life, slang is the spice of language. Slang adds gusto to the feast of words, as long as speakers and writers remember that too much spice can kill the feast of any dish.
What is slang? In the preface to their Dictionary of American Slang, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner define slang as “the body of words and expressions frequently used by or intelligible to a rather large portion of the general American public, but not accepted as good, formal usage by the majority.” Slang, then, is seen as a kind of vagabond language that prowls the outskirts of respectable speech, yet few of us can get along without it. Even our statespersons have a hard time getting by without such colloquial or slang expressions as hit the nail on the head, team effort, pass the buck, and talk turkey.
Nobody is quite sure where the word slang comes from. According to H. L. Mencken, slang developed in the eighteenth century (it was first recorded in 1756) either from an erroneous past tense of sling (sling-slang-slung) or from the word language itself, as in (thieve)s’lang(uage) and (beggar)s’lang(uage). The second theory makes the point that jargon and slang originate and are used by a particular trade or class group, but slang words come to be slung around to some extent by a whole population.
The use of slang is far more ancient than the word slang itself. In fact, slang is nearly as old as language itself, and in all languages at all times some slang expressions have entered the main stream of the vocabulary to pollute or enrich, depending on one’s view of the matter. We find traces of slang in the Sanskrit of ancient India, where writers amused themselves now and then by calling a head a “dish.” In Latin literary records we discover, alongside caput, the standard term for “head,” the word testa, which meant “pot” or “jug.” Both the Sanskrit “dish” and the Latin “pot” share the flavor of our modern crackpot, jughead, and mug.
The fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer used gab for “talk” and bones for “dice,” exactly as we employ them today. William Shakespeare, the literary lord of stage and classroom, coined costard (a large apple) to mean “head” and clay-brained and knotty pated to mean “slow of wit.” We discover “laugh yourself into stitches” in Twelfth Night, “not so hot” in The Winter’s Tale, and “right on” in Julius Caesar.
There are some very human reasons why the river of slang courses through every language. One of them is that people like novelty and variety in their lives and in their language. To satisfy this urge, they continuously coin new slang words and expressions. This small disquisition began with eighty breezy ways of saying “wonderful,” but that feat pales next to the 2,964 synonyms for drunk that Paul Dickson trots out in his book Drunk—from the euphemistic tired to the comical plastered, from the nautical afloat to the erudite Bacchi-plenus, from the elegant inebriated to the scatological shit-faced, and from the terminal stiff to the uncategorizable zoozled.
Second, slang allows us to break the ice and shift into a more casual and friendly gear. “What’s cooking?” or “How’s it going?” sound more easygoing and familiar than “How do you do?” “Slang,” said Carl Sandburg, is “language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and gets to work.”
A third motive is sheer playfulness. Slang such as rubbernecker for a sightseer in a car and motormouth for someone who gabs on and on, and reduplications such as heebie-jeebies and okey dokey tickle our sense of humor.
Finally, as G. K. Chesterton proclaimed, “All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.” American slang abounds in fresh figures of speech that evoke arresting word pictures in the mind’s eye. We intellectually understand “an angry, persecuted husband,” but the slanguage version “a henpecked husband stewing in his own juice” takes a vivid shortcut to our imagination.
An English professor announced to the class, “There are two words I don’t allow in my class. One is gross and the other is cool.” From the back of the room a voice called out, “So, what are the two words?” Slang is a powerful stimulant that keeps our American language alive and growing. Slang is a prominent part of our American wordscape. In fact, the Dictionary of American Slang estimates that slang makes up perhaps a fifth of the words we use. Many of our most valuable and pungent words have begun their lives keeping company with thieves, vagrants, and hipsters.
“Hey, First-of-May! Tell the butcher in the backyard to stay away from the bulls, humps, stripes, and painted ponies. We have some cherry pie for him before doors and spec.” Sound like doubletalk? Actually, it’s circus talk—or, more technically, circus argot, argot being a specialized vocabulary used by a particular group for mutual bonding and private communication. Communities are most likely to develop a colorful argot when they have limited contact with the world outside of their group. The circus community is a perfect example of the almost monastic self-containment in which argot flourishes. Big-top people travel in very close quarters, and because they usually go into a town, set up, do a show, tear down, and leave, they have little contact with the locals. They socialize with each other, they intermarry, and their children acquire the argot from the time they start to talk.
First-of-May designates anyone who is brand-new to circus work. That’s because circuses used to start their tours around the first day in May. A candy butcher is a concessionaire who sells cotton candy (floss) and other food, along with drinks and souvenirs, to the audience during the show. The backyard is the place just behind the circus entrance where performers wait to do their acts. A bull is a circus elephant, even though most of them are female. Among other circus beasts, humps, stripes, and painted ponies are, respectively, camels, tigers, and zebras. Cherry pie is extra work, probably from chairy pie, the setting up of extra chairs around the arena. Doors! is the cry that tells circus folk that the audience is coming in to take their seats, and spec is short for spectacle, the big parade of all the performers.
Trust me: This topic ain’t no dog and pony show—the designation for a small circus with just a few acts, also known as a mud show.
What we call the toilet circus folk call the donniker, the hot dog or grill concession trailer where the circus can snag a snack is a grease joint, and a circus performer is a kinker. The townspeople are towners or rubes. In the old days, when large groups of towners who believed (sometimes accurately) that they had been fleeced by dishonest circus people, they would come back in a mob to seek retribution. The cry Hey rube! went out, and everyone knew that the fight was on.
A full house is called a straw house from the days when straw would be laid down in front of the seats to accommodate more people than the seats could hold. Distances between engagements were called jumps. Thus, an old circus toast rings out: “May your lots be grassy, your jumps short, and your houses straw.”
What may be the most useful expression of universal communication ever devised, OK is recognizable and pronounceable in almost every language on earth.
The explanations for the origin of OK have been as imaginative as they have been various. But the late Columbia University professor and language maven Allen Walker Read proved that OK did not derive from okeh, an affirmative reply in Choctaw; nor from the name of chief Old Keokuk; nor from a fellow named Orrin Kendall, who manufactured a tasty brand of army biscuit for Union soldiers in the Civil War and stamped them OK; nor from the Haitian port Aux Cayes, which produced superior rum; nor from “open key,” a telegraph term; nor from the Greek ola kalla, meaning “all good.”
Rather, as Professor Read pointed out, the truth is more political than any of these theories. He tracked down the first known published appearance of OK with its current meaning in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839: “The ‘Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Balls’ is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have the ‘contribution box,’ et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.”
Doctor Read demonstrated that OK started life as an obscure joke and through a twist of fate went to the top of the charts on the American hit parade of words. In the 1830s, in New England, there was a craze for initialisms, in the manner of LOL, OMG, aka, and TGIF, so popular today. The fad went so far as to generate letter combinations of intentionally comic misspellings: KG for “know go,” KY for “know yuse,” NSMJ for “‘nough said ‘mong jentlemen,” and OR for “oll rong.” OK for “oll korrect” naturally followed.
Of all those loopy initialisms and jocular misspellings OK alone survived. That’s because of a presidential nickname that consolidated the letters in the national memory. Martin Van Buren, elected our eighth president in 1836, was born in Kinderhook, New York, and, early in his political career, was dubbed “Old Kinderhook.” Echoing the “oll korrect” initialism, OK became the rallying cry of the Old Kinderhook Club, a Democratic organization supporting Van Buren during the 1840 campaign. Thus, the accident of Van Buren’s birthplace rescued OK from the dustbin of history.
The coinage did Van Buren no good, and he was defeated in his bid for reelection. But OK has become what H. L. Mencken identified as “the most shining and successful Americanism ever invented.”
Mothers sewed stuffed bears before President Theodore Roosevelt came along, but no one called them teddy bears. Not until November, 1902, when the president went on a bear hunt in Smedes, Mississippi.
Roosevelt was acting as adjudicator for a border dispute between the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. On November 14, during a break in the negotiations, he was invited by southern friends to go bear hunting. Roosevelt felt that he could consolidate his support in the South by appearing there in the relaxed atmosphere of a hunting party, so he accepted the invitation.
During the hunt, Roosevelt’s hosts cornered a bear cub, and a guide roped it to a tree for the president to kill. Roosevelt declined to shoot the cub, believing such an act to be beneath his dignity as a hunter and as a man: “If I shot that little fellow I couldn’t be able to look my boys in the face again.”
That Sunday’s Washington Post carried a cartoon, drawn by Clifford Berryman (1869-1949), of President Theodore Roosevelt. T.R. stood in hunting gear, rifle in hand, and his back turned toward the cowering cub. The caption read, “Drawing the line in Mississippi,” referring both to the border dispute and to animal ethics.
Now the story switches to the wilds of Brooklyn, New York. There Russian immigrants Morris and Rose Michtom owned a candy store where they sold handmade stuffed animals. Inspired by Berryman’s cartoon, Rose Michtom made a toy bear and displayed it in the shop window. The bear proved wildly popular with the public.
The Michtoms sent President Roosevelt the very bear they had put in their window. They said it was meant for Roosevelt’s grandchildren and asked T.R. for permission to confer linguistic immortality upon him. The president replied, “I don’t know what my name may mean to the bear business but you’re welcome to use it.”
Rose and Morris began turning out stuffed cubs labeled Teddy’s bear, in honor of our twenty-sixth president. As the demand increased, the family hired extra seamstresses and rented a warehouse. Their operation eventually became the Ideal Toy Corporation.
The bear was a prominent emblem in Roosevelt’s successful 1904 election campaign, and Teddy’s bear was enshrined in dictionaries in 1907. Cartoonist Berryman never sought compensation for the many uses of the cub he had created. He simply smiled and said, “I have made thousands of children happy; that is enough for me.”
Some people lament that speaking and writing these days are simply a collection of faddish clichés patched together like the sections of prefabricated houses made of ticky-tacky. They see modern communication as a mindless clacking of trendy expressions, many of them from movies and television sitcoms.
Why is English parlance in such a parlous state? Maybe it’s because verbal knee-jerkery requires no thought. It’s so much easier not to think, isn’t it? It’s so much easier to cookie-cut the rich dough of the English language. It’s so much easier to microwave a frozen dinner than to create a meal from scratch. After all, when we were children, we loved to pull the string on the doll that said the same thing over and over, again and again.
That’s what fadspeak is—the unrelenting mix of mimicry and gimmickry. Fadspeak comprises vogue phrases that suddenly appear on everybody’s tongues—phrases that launch a thousand lips. Before you can say, “yada yada yada,” these throwaway expressions become instant clichés, perfect for our throwaway society, like paper wedding dresses for throwaway marriages. Fadspeak clichés lead mayfly lives, counting their duration in months instead of decades. They strut and fret their hour upon the stage of pop culture and then are heard no more.
To demonstrate, I offer here a narrative composed almost entirely of clichés, not just any clichés but fadspeak clichés that have slithered into our language just in the last decade or two or three. That I can actually cobble together a coherent rant composed of new clichés is, I believe, a sad tribute to the ascendancy of fadspeak. OMG, how cool is that?
Hey, would I, your deep-pockets, drop-dead-good-looking language columnist, your poster boy for user-friendly writing, ever serve you anything totally bogus like fadspeak? I don’t think so. Not a problem. I have zero tolerance for anything that lowers the bar for what makes world-class writing.
Work with me on this. I’ve been around the block, and I know a thing or two. I know that I wear many hats, but I’m not talking trash here. I’m not the eight-hundred-pound gorilla out to bust your chops. I feel your pain, and I’m your new best friend. At this point in time, you’re on my radar, and I know you da man! Yessss!
Hey, people, this isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. Call me crazy, but it’s simply a no-brainer—a dropkick and a slam dunk. I, the mother of all language mavens, will go to the mat 24-7 for fresh, original language. You know what? I’m my own toughest critic, so I get more bang for the buck when I avoid those new clichés. I want to do the heavy lifting, level the playing field, and give something back to the community. Join the club. Do the math. Get used to it. It works for me. Welcome to my world.
So I’m making you an offer you can’t refuse. Maybe it’s TMI, but I’m never going to slip into those hackneyed, faddish expressions that afflict our precious American language. Having said that, how about we run that one up the flagpole and see who salutes? Sound like a plan? It’s a done deal because I’ve got a full plate and I bring a lot to the table. I come to play, and the ball’s in your court.
Sheesh. Get over it. Doesn’t it push your buttons, yank your chain, and rattle your cage when a writer or speaker puts dynamite language on the back burner? Doesn’t it send you on an emotional roller coaster until you crash and burn when they try to put a good face on it? Doesn’t fadspeak just blow you out of the water and make you want to scream, “Oh, puh-leeze! In your dreams! Excuuuuse me! It’s my way or the highway! Why are you shooting yourself in the foot? You’re history! You’re toast! You’re going down! That’s so twentieth century! Put a sock in it! Don’t give up your day job!”?
As for me, I’m like, “Are you the writer from hell? You are all over the map. You are like a deer caught in the headlights. Lose the attitude, man. You are so-o-o-o busted. Read my lips! Maybe it’s a guy thing, but get real! Get an attitude adjustment. Get with the twenty-first century! Get a life! And while you’re at it, why don’t you knock yourself out and get a vocabulary?” Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Anyhoo, off the top of my head, the bottom line is that fadspeakers and fadwriters—and you know who you are—are so clueless. I am shocked—shocked!—that they just don’t suck it up, get up to speed, go the whole nine yards, push the envelope, take it to another level, and think outside the box. All they do is give you that same-old-same-old, been-there-done-that kind of writing, and you can take that to the bank.
Tell me about it. Fadspeakers and fadwriters just play the old tapes again and again, and their ideas just fall through the cracks. They’re sooo clueless. They’re not playing with a full deck. The light’s on, but nobody’s home. Elvis has left the building. Ya think? Go figure.
Hel-loh? Earth to clichémeisters. Duuuh. Boooring. What’s wrong with this picture? Are we on the same page? Are we having fun yet? Are you having some kind of a bad-hair day? Are you having a midlife crisis? A senior moment? Maybe it’s time for a wake-up call? Or maybe a reality check? I don’t think so. In your dreams. Not even close.
O-o-k-a-a-a-y. You wanna talk about it? You wanna get with the program? Why don’t you man up, wake up, and smell the coffee? How about we cut right to the chase? I mean, what part of “fadspeak” don’t you understand? Deal with it. You got that right. Or maybe I’m just preaching to the choir.
Whatever. As if. At the end of the day, it is what it is.
Now that I’ve got your attention, here’s the buzz on viable, cutting-edge communication. Whenever I find some of these snippets of fadspeak strewn about a sentence, I’m in your face. I’m your worst nightmare. Those flavor-of-the-month phrases just make me go ballistic, even to the point of going postal. After all—and I’m not making this up—what goes around comes around.
All right. My bad. I understand that you’re not a happy camper, and maybe you just don’t want to go there. But I do because I’ve got all my ducks in a row. I mean, is this a great language—or what? I mean, it’s a language to die for. I mean, if they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they teach people to write well?
Gimme a break. Cut me some slack. What am I, chopped liver? Hey, what do I know? I’m just old school. And now that I’ve thrown my hissy fit about fadspeak, here’s what’s going down.
We’re done now. Thanks a bunch for letting me share. Now that I’ve been able to tell it like it is, it’s time to pack it in. I’m outa here. Talk to you soon. Buh-bye—and have a nice day.
In one of the megachain bookstores, a woman asked a young clerk for the author of Like Water for Chocolate. After the salesperson had spent five minutes searching and still could not locate the famous title, the customer realized that the young man had been looking for Water from Chocolate.
It’s like … you know.
Nowadays two speech patterns of the younger generation squeak like chalk across the blackboard of adult sensibilities—the sprinkling of like throughout sentences, like, you know what I’m saying, and the use of another species of like as a replacement of the verb say: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s like totally wicked awesome.’”
Linguists call this second use “quotative,” an introduction to direct speech.
Professor Mark Hale, of the Harvard University Department of Linguistics, says of these speech markers: “This is national in scope. It is not idiosyncratic in any particular part of the country. But it is observed most often among younger people, usually younger than twenty-five.”
As a trained linguist, I am fascinated by all change in language, and I don’t rush to judgment. The burgeoning of like in American discourse appears to be a verbal tic in the linguistic mold of “uh” and “you know.” It offers the speaker’s thoughts an opportunity to catch up with his or her onrushing sentences or to emphasize important points. Take the statement “I didn’t hand in my book report because, like, the dog peed on my Cliff’s Notes.” Here like is an oral mark of crucial punctuation that indicates “important information ahead.”
According to Professor Hale, increasing numbers of speakers press into service go and like for say as a badge of identification that proclaims, “I am a member of a certain generation and speech community.”
Hmm. My professional rule of thumb is that all linguistic change is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Still, the promiscuous employment of like and go stirs my concern about the state of our English language. To most of us, like is a preposition that means that something is similar to something else but is not the idea or thing itself. Thus, dusting statements with a word of approximation seems to me to encourage half thoughts. I fret that the permeating influence of like makes imprecision the norm and keeps both speakers and listeners from coming to grips with the thoughts behind the words. “I’m like a supporter of human rights” lacks the commitment of “I support human rights” because like leads off a simile of general likeness, not a literal statement.
I believe that it is not a coincidence that the quotative like, just as introductions to quoted speech, has accompanied the burgeoning of like as a rhetorical qualifier. I sense a fear of commitment both to direct thought and to the act of communicating—saying and asserting one’s observations and opinions. Whenever I hear a young person—or, as is increasingly the case, an older person—declare “She’s, like, ‘I’m like totally committed to human rights,’” I want to say (not I’m like), “Is she really committed? Did she really mean what she said?”
“Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast,” declared the philologist Max Muller. The boundary between our species and the others on this planet that run and fly and creep and swim is the language line. To blur that line by replacing verbs of speaking with verbs of simile is to deny the very act that defines our kind.
I’m like it’s totally uncool.