Creeping Gobbledygook

...Richard Poirier, another professor of English and an editor of the once holy Partisan Review, wants "What I want to suggest is that all the elements in what is called English studies aye, or ought to be...

...Grundy's reasons When a writer uses the same four-letter crutch with tedious regularity, it is a sure sign that he is as crippled in thought and conviction as he is poor in vocabulary As a British report on the teaching of English observed "What a man cannot state, he does not perfectly know, and the inability to put his thoughts into words sets a boundary to his thought ". Oblivious to the constraints of meaning, Marlene Nadler writes m the Village Voice "For Chef, through the concept of instant revolution he has come to represent, has fathered the Weathermen and the French students* rebellion, has sent young radicals around the world smashing, trashing, bombing, has sent them though the streets, certain they were catalysts for the Second Coming " Catalysts by definition lemma unchanged and the Weathermen and French students do not, but why quibble9 What has Christ's return to do with the advertising catch-phi as "instant revolution"9 And if Chef "fathered" the French rebellion, who was its mother9...

...It is a curiously ironic situation Chomsky, a political radical but a philosophical idealist, is linguistically on the side of a priori rationalism and rules Skinner, the spokesman for empiricism as the root of psychological behavior, is accused by radicals of being an enemy of freedom and individual liberty But when we consider their use of words, we find a plague in both houses In glorious understatement, Chomsky recently admitted,when asked about the frequent clumsiness of his own expository prose, that "the ability to use language well is very different from the ability to study it ". It was ever so In 1946, George Orwell complained that "the English language is m a bad way," and demonstrated how slovenly thought leads to slovenly language, which in turn muddles thought more than before Not out of academic whimsy did Orwell make language, m 1984, an indispensable totalitarian tool, the way to corrupt a man's mind is through ambiguous words In newspeak very bad is doubleplusungood??uncomfortably close to our present-day habit of calling the poor disadvantaged For in the years since Orwell drew up his list of verbal atrocities, language has deteriorated more swiftly and seriously than he lived to know Indeed, reading "Politics and the English Language" in the 1970s, one of his remarks seems uncannily appropriate to this moment "Underneath this [abuse of language]," he wrote, "lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes ". Orwell saw the decay of language as part of a larger political and social disintegration, but a quarter of a century later the creeping gobbledygook that offends our eyes and ears—on television, in newspapers, magazines, and literary criticism no less than in political rhetoric—has rotted its way into deeper levels of our culture than politics The revolutionaries in education and psychology scorn Aristotle's definition of rationality as the ability to establish a rule, instead, they insist that Niles seriously impede learning To John Holt, George Denison and Ivan Tillich, rules are constrictive and re-preserve, only 'free" experience is the measure of value When this attitude is applied to language—Owell??s natural growth"—it results m such sacrificial offerings on the Altar of Experience as the Thud Edition of Webster, whose editors, as the lexicographer Wilson Follett wrote, "deny that there is such a thing as correctness The language, they say, is what anybody and everybody speaks Hence there must be no interference with what they regard as a product of nature " And meanwhile words fall apart more rapidly and irreversibly every day If people confuse uninterested and disinterested, let it be??who cares that in depriving disinterested of its precise and useful meaning, impartial, the English language has lost a valuable word7...

...in motion, including the student and the teacher A beautifully lib-eating instability, a relativity rather than a relevance,' should be all we know and all we need to know " One tries in vain to extract some concrete sense from this backing and filling He cannot say what he means clearly because he clearly does not know??or doesn't want us to know, in our perpetuum mobile of unknowing As Sir Ernest Glowers remarked in Plain Woods, his brilliant manual for improving the prose of British civil servants "To express one's thoughts accurately is hard work, and to be precise is sometimes dangerous We are tempted to pilfer the safer obscurity of the abstract...

...that is, tapering off " The head of the Boston Broadcasting Institute harrumphed to a reporter that he was "finalizing my tentative plans" Sequin advertises its excerpts from the correspondence between F Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins from these letters "between author and editor emerges Maxwell Perkins as a sort of one-man trinity " Balaam's ass cared more about the sanctity of meaning than this copywriter Nor are such howlers peculiar to broadcasting and advertising If we assume that college classrooms are the place to cure metaphor blight and dispose of verbal garbage, one need only read a letter from Professor Maxwell Goldberg of Pennsylvania State College, inviting scholars to a "consultation" on computers and humanistic studies "Confronting this question is new neither to the 'thinking world' at large nor to [our] studies and programs Yet there are circumstances that give to this question particular timeliness Among these are 1) the meteoric changes in the cybernation] fields themselves, 2) the shifts in socio-cultural attitudes and socio-political trends, 3) the mushrooming literature " From meteors to mushrooms m three easy stages, jumping socio-hurdles all the way...

...The ability to learn a language??any language is a property of mind, according to Chomsky, it is innate to human beings, and not acquired through conditioning As the Scotch linguist John Lyons has paraphrased Chomsky's thought "The principles underlying the structure of language are so specific and so highly articulated that they must be regarded as being biologically determined part of what we call 'human nature' and genetically transmitted from parents to their children " Chomsky's argument raises the hackles of behaviorist linguists, who insist, often with the aid of sputtering invective, that the mind of man acquires language through inductive experience reinforced by reward, and not through the intuitive ability to grasp rules and patterns...

...One comes back dispiritedly to the old Russian question, which in this context, appropriately, is rhetorical What is to be done9 At a time when the very concept of rules is in bad odor, handbooks of usage are not the answer In any case they are, with few exceptions, written by supercilious purists for self-congratulatory snobs Most teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, are, like My Fair Lady, condemned by every syllable they utter Perhaps a change will come only when language has reached such depths of confusion that men will no longer be able to understand each other in the simplest exchange of words As Louis Ginsberg tells us in The Legends of the Jews, his rabbinical exegesis of the Old Testament, that happened when God confounded the language of men at Babel "Thenceforth none knew what the other spoke One would ask for the mortar, and the other handed him a brick, in a rage, he would throw the brick at his partner and kill him Many perished in this manner...

...Looking to latter-day Fowlers for sane presence of mind in the midst of chaos, we find one of them, Theo-doer Bernstein, the New York Times editor whose avocation is usage, walking in the wrong direction A few months ago Bernstein published Miss Thistle bottom??s Hohgoblms (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 260 pp , $6 95), in oidet "to lay to rest the superstitions that have been passed on tromp one generation to the next by teaches, by editors and by writers—pinhibitions deriving from mere personal prejudice oil tromp misguided pedantry or from a cold conservatism that would freeze the language if it could " But who still needs to be persuaded about such dinosaur taboos as the split infinitive'' His pie-missive arguments are aimed at a nonexistent enemy, as any college teacher of freshman English can tell Bernstein, Miss Thistle bottom??s iron pedantry is as dead as Palmer penmanship, and a little of her tonic formalism might not be a bad idea...

...This was the sort of thing that S J Perelman once assassinated expertly through parody, but now that he is old and gray and nodding by his expatriate fire in London, where is one to find a powerful corrective force against abusage7 How many unties today own a copy of Fowler's Modem English Usage, much less bother to consult that witty and lucid sentinel'' The notion that there is a difference between correct and incorrect usage is usually dismissed these days as uptight or reactionary In the age of liberation anything goes, right7 Alas, right (on), as we learn from The Strachey rave Statement, lames Kunene??s diary of the student occupation of Columbia He airily tells us "The best way to read this book would be to rip it up and throw the scraps all over your house Then, later, should you come across a piece, read it, or don't read it, depending upon how you teal Above all don't spend too much time leading it because I didn't spend much time writing it' When contempt tor craft is thus celebrated, language has virtually leached the point of no return...

...Cult words, of course, are used most often and vigorously by exactly those who attach only the murkiest meaning to them, or like them for their tansy sound Politicians are not popular, they have charisma People are no longer busy, they lead highly structured lives Astronauts home from the moon do not report on their extraordinary journey, they are debriefed Nothing is possible if it can be viable (or, not so long ago, feasible) Ecology, torn from its biological ground, is expected to survive in the barren sands of vagueness is a recent sociological study of British literature that claims to examine "the ecology of modern writing in England ' As the words used for simple things are habitually overcomplicated, language develops hardening of the arteries...

...Though the social scientists are constantly accused, often justly, of being the worst offenders when it comes to jargon-madden abstractness, the near-lunatic fringes of psychology harbor the unchallengeable champions The catalogue of Karros, a "sensitivity-training" institute in Caledonia, comes closer than anything I have encountered to the total collapse of language It states "The unique contribution of our style of education has been our concern with the development of the whole person, specifically his nine ecology We have, however, removed him from his context, his outer ecology In a sense, we have been concerned with the whole person but not with the whole BEING his whole epistemological system' Further on in this unwedded Luna Park of generality, we are told that "We have a dormant strength at the base of the spine, and each individual will follow one method that is most suited to him in relieving this strength " Typo9 Oh, no—for strength is relieved more than once It isn't the dormant strength at the base of my spine that needs relieving when I read such twaddle...

...Christmas Book Issue CREEPING GOBBLEDYGOOK BY PEARL K. BELL Never in academic history has there been a more obsessive interest in the study of language??what it is, how human beings learn to speak, how Adam was able to name the animals The scientific, philosophical and anthropological probing of man's divine faculty of speech has in the last 10 years reached a feverish polemical pitch One typical controversy is the acrimonious debate between the "mentalist" school, led by Noam Chomsky, and the behaviorists, led by B F Skinner...

...In American politics today this can lead to, in another catch-phrase, the credibility gap As Irving Kinston recently pointed out in an essay on political rhetoric, most of us are so inured to the hot air steaming out of Washington that we no longer see it for what it is, let alone try to clear it away "No Secretary of State," Kinston writes, 'can today describe the governments of Greece or Peru or Bolivia or Spain as what they obviously are—mmilitary dictatorships It would cause a diplomatic row, these nations have become so accustomed to our hypocritical double-talk that they would sense some sinister intentions in any deviation from it" And only in Washington can a Committee on Congressional Oversight mean a group that oversees...

...In the name of revolution, the counterculture and its attendant political radicalism are hastening the mortal decay of words at a frightening pace With the democratization to culture, they tell us, each person can make his own rules for everything What this comes to mean, in practice, is that adversary slogans ("Power to the people," "Kill the pigs," "Male chauvinist"), festooned with garlands of like and wow1, turn into cant as soon as they are spoken, owing in part to the magnified repetitive publicity they receive Middle-class rebels discover the lumpenproletariat, and crush the natural vitality of street litany by debasing it into the code words of revolt M ^van those who should know better employ earthy illiteracy to hedge against being damned as outsiders In Push Comes to Shove, an account of his undergraduate years at Harvard, Steven Kerman means to defend the rational values of social-democratic radicalism against the excesses of the SDS Yet he weakens his case immeasurably by sinking into the gutter idiom that identifies him with his generation "Why do you think I'm a Socialist9 Shit, man, I don't go in for any of this shit liberal stuff about workers being reactionary Shit, it's fine for inch students to go around making their little revolutions But workers have too much to lose How can they know how the revolution's going to turn out''" Is that any way for a nice Jewish boy from Harvard to write7 In fact it isn't, but not for Mrs...

...TM here is even a name for the awkwardness, imprecision, high-flown vagueness and obscurity that today seem to afflict anyone who opens his mouth or touches a typewriter??Melvin Maddocks calls it semantic aphasia, and though Orwell was optimistic about a cure ("if one is willing to take the necessary trouble"), it is hard to be sanguine in 1971 We seem very close to the listless surrender of Eliot's Sweeney "I've got to use words when I talk to you/ But if you understand or if you don??t/ That's nothing to me and nothing to you ". A Providence newscaster announced last summer "The cost of living is the same this month as last...