Talking Back
LEVIN, MARTIN
Talking Back John McWhorter on the degradation of the American language. BY MARTIN LEVIN John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialty is...
...When he sticks to his subject, McWhorter can offer fresh insights...
...What's the prognosis...
...McWhorter suggests that we may be experiencing yet another phase that the culture and the language will have to assimilate...
...There's an army of contenders who can more poetically fill that slot, beginning with Carl Sandburg...
...On the other hand, the author recalls that "this is not the first time English has undergone a dimin-ishment of resources...
...In From Dawn To Decadence, Jacques Barzun attributes social decay to the decline of authority...
...The rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address has given way to the style of Jack Kerouac...
...But his ideas muster vigor enough to survive his style...
...Vincent Millay...
...In Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, he takes up the public consequences of his academic specialty...
...The worst case is that we'll become so alienated from the written language that it can turn into a completely foreign tongue, like Esperanto...
...McWhorter is annoyed at being pigeonholed as a "black conservative...
...He materialized as a celebrity public intellectual in 2000 with his bestseller Losing the Race, in which he argued that the advancement of black youth was hindered by a cult of "victimology" that discouraged success...
...The implosion of popular music parallels the degradation of language...
...It was once customary to speak the written language...
...Instead of speaking the written language, we're now writing the spoken language...
...The author rambles...
...Call me a longhair, but to me it's anti-music...
...Back in the Middle Ages, gender endings dropped out and the language survived...
...The title is misleading...
...Two years later, in a polemic in the WashingMartin Levin is a writer in New York...
...About this the author is ambivalent: "Just as we talk when we make speeches, and write more and more like we talk, and just as our poetry imitates talking, we adore music that just talks...
...But not all of the assault on language can be blamed on oral communication...
...The author is not one of those fussbudgets worried about dangling modifiers or misusing "disinterested" to mean "uninterested...
...McWhorter connects the takeover by the spoken word with "the mainstreaming of the counterculture" in the late 1960s...
...He quotes admiringly from Amiri Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones, the defrocked poet laureate of the Garden State, whom he sees as the populist opposite to Edna St...
...His specialty is Creole languages, but he's better known outside the university as an enemy of social stereotypes that he sees as racial cul de sacs...
...My problem with Doing Ou^ Own Thing is that its rhetoric gets in the way of the message...
...But in the era of email and the cell phone, there has been a shredding of formal diction...
...Even the speeches of John If Kennedy, he notes, now seem a shade archaic...
...ton Post, he characterized the idea of "diversity" as "an Orwellian euphemism for treating middle-class black students as lesser minds...
...A society that cherishes the spoken over the written . . . is one that marginalizes extended, reflective argument...
...Stay tuned...
...McWhorter offers this sample from Paul Fry: "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the abstention of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading the helplessness—rather than the will to power—of its fall into conceptuality...
...the implications for an informed citizenry are dire...
...As a corrective, he sprinkles this book with old standbys from left-wing boilerplate, most of which happen to be irrelevant to his subject matter, as in "We have a President many assume to be underqualified and illegitimately instated...
...The result is that we live in a country "with less pride in its language than any society in recorded history...
...So does Mc-Whorter...
...The legacy of written English, he says, is not being passed on, or if it is, it's "through a bottleneck...
...The Supreme Court, says McWhorter, should "outlaw the use of 'diversity' as a fig leaf for policies that have kept two generations of black students from showing what they are made of...
...He regrets that English diction is taking a beating...
...Music that "just talks," namely rap, minus melody and harmony, is "spoken music...
...Bad ones...
...Phrases like "as I have noted before" have the aroma of a classroom lecture...
...He classifies positive values as B.C.: "Before the counter-culture...
...He warns that "the new linguistic order compromises our facility with the word and dilutes our collective intellect...
...His conclusion here is that our ability to write, speak—and maybe think—has been degraded by cultural wear and tear...
...Deconstructionism in the universities relies entirely on the written word to make meaning impenetrable...
...He has his eye on a more critical phenomenon: our national shift from a written to an oral culture, which, he argues, "has had broad and profound effects...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 8
