Language Barriers

...Fulsome’ is formed from the words ‘full’ and ‘some,’ and originally had no bad connotations at all...

...That such a book should enjoy such success indicates not simply that Packard had an important story to tell, as in fact he did, but also that the hunger he was feeding was as widespread as those addressed by diet books and Gothic novels...

...What a spectacular career...

...How many Winnebagos exhorting onlookers to "Save the whales...

...the next day...

...I chided my friends in university linguistics departments for their permissive attitude toward usage...

...As a schoolboy in a small western town where I was far from the toughest character on the playground, 1 eventually seized upon knowing more and longer words as a useful way of distinguishing myself from the mob...

...I wrote this off as yet another symptom of the slackness of contemporary social science...

...Typhus fever decimated the school periodically"-C...

...Obviously the beautiful bimbo did not realize that she was really offering "gross, offensive" thanks...

...He shows that the big names of English lit have used the very constructions that Newman and Simon see as telltales of illiteracy...

...The rules of the game encourage those who can sniff the changing winds, who argue against people rather than ideas...

...Someone like Elizabeth Taylor would take the podium and offer her "fulsome thanks" to all the little people who made it possible, and those in the know would chuckle meanly into their hands...

...Gotcha...

...But 1 did systematically correct misused "that"s and "which...

...the message of the other is "I am more intelligent than you...

...Who are you speaking of...

...But his argument also suggests a certain wrong-headedness on the part of the experts, rather than mere errors of fact, which affects questions of greater magnitude than simple syntax...

...The book’s subtitle was "An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future...

...It is sometimes hard to judge which party suffers most from these transactions, the one who is nervous lest he make a misstep or the one thinking, "Trash...

...He says at the beginning, "This is a book against Edwin Newman, Theodore Bernstein, the Harper’s Dictionary of Contemporary Usage...

...might, in fact, be the subtitle of Jim Quinn’s book...

...What might a man of John Simon’s acuity accomplish were he not dissipating his talents enforcing a tyranny of anxiety...

...I spoke in slow, careful fashion when meeting a powerful journalistic figure renowned for being able to "sniff out the middle class in anyone...

...This ‘new’[i.e., Tayloresque] meaning is the fruit of ignorance...

...Thackeray...

...A book that in other ways was remarkable in its prescience about America’s social development-Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers, published in 1959-played skillfully on these fears...

...In Washington, this mainly involves indicating where you work, which is why the inevitable first question in that city is, "What do you do...

...I can’t abide words that through debased usage by adolescents, commentators, or careless authors appear overnight in our literature and, like nouveau riche Southern rednecks who have found oil OD their property, try to make ugliness and ignorance fashionable.’ " Quinn’s only mistake, it seems to me, is to limit this phenomenom by identifying it as a ‘‘liberal’’ pattern...

...His prey is the big game of the proper-usage business...

...But no American who has lived in England can fail to notice how much more class-bound that society is than our own...

...William Safire differs from many of the other word experts in sounding a more jovial and tolerant tone...

...If so, they have pointed us to a style of thought like their perfect sentence: careful, safe, and ever glancing backward over its shoulder to see if anyone’s laughing...

...There is a "gotcha...

...How do you freat your children...

...I shuddered when a copy editor at a publishing house pointed out that, for the first 30 years of my life, 1 had been using the know-nothing "different than," instead of the well-bred "different from...

...I had long been a member of the make-a-fussover-usage school of linguistics...

...Many who have felt observed by alleyes in a small town have craved the anonymity of the city, where they may approach strangers with a clean slate...

...Is it right to like Jonathan Schell’s writings about nuclear war when they are in She New Yorker but embarrassing to do so after the book has been published and attacked...

...And what deprives the joke of its humor is that its effects have become so profound...

...They will resort to sentence diagrams to prove that "everybody" is singular and "their" is plural, so no one of culture could possibly say, "Everybody makes their own choices...

...The meaning of ‘simple abundance’ lasted from the first appearance of the word (c...

...Or, with a slightly different twist, "I am classier than you...

...Strangers to India or a dozen other poor countries, for example, can see within hours that those societies are hobbled by the desire of the brightest students to be clerks and bureaucrats after they receive their degrees, rather than to dirty themselves in commerce...

...In their generation, fewer than ten percent of college age people attended college...

...Nervous as people may be about avoiding the wrong locution, they seem equally anxious about displaying the "wrong" political stance...

...Now everyone has his own special little California vineyard to tell you about, complete with information about the good and bad years...

...In the 1920s, when they were beginning their careers, that one difference described the social gulf between them, although it said nothing about their integrity, intelligence, or ultimate success...

...But it seemed to me that if even part of his argument were true (and the items I checked in the dictionary bore him out), it would suggest an intriguing question...

...Perhaps the most significant fact about such displays is how much they can vary, in their form of expression and their intensity, between one society and another and from one era to the next...

...Consider one of his scores of examples, the word "fulsome...

...There he found that the "original" meaning of the word was just what people like Elizabeth Taylor had in mind...

...But I’m a terrible snob regarding language...

...Implicit in the idea of "hidden barriers" was the need for constant vigilance against the unconscious gesture through which you’d betray your "real" nature...

...Wilde...

...I did not write articles about barbarous formulations or scold people in public for saying "hopefully" or "the media is...

...Yet to those within the society, such habits can be ingrained so deeply that they are barely noticed-or if noticed, are thought to be beyond all possibility of change...

...The damage to the anxious victim is certainly the more obvious: American literature and daily life are full of illustrations of the character who is immobilized by fear that he will send the wrong signal...

...Did he really ask who Annie Hall was...

...In certain large cities, such as (in my experience) Houston and Los Angeles, social standing depends more simply on the amount of money you are thought to be worth...

...This difference is obvious if you lay Strunk and White’s Elements of Style alongside a sample column by John Simon...

...Who are your people...

...And he shows that, as long as linguistic records have been kept, despairing pedants have fumed, to no ultimate effect, about the supposed loss of "beauty" and "precision" in the mother tongue...

...Hardy...

...Hadn’t the same approach worked and on grownups-for William F. Buckley...

...He then provided a perfect illustration of the attitude that created such anxieties, Lord Melbourne’s comment that "the higher and lower classes, there’s some good in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit and pretense and concealment...

...I do not mean to suggest that either the static social grid of the small town or the big cities’ aristocracies of money should be thought an ideal society...

...But he is also a canny character who must have realized that, by deciding to work this beat, he would improve his standing with the high-toned set...

...Two years after the film was released that task was impossible again...

...The real significance of these attitudes is that their realm is far broader than questions of words and wine...

...What we have here goes beyond politics...

...Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"-O...

...Thus, typically they will point out that "decimate" really means "reduce by one-tenth," not "destroy much of," and that the richness of the language is diminished when fools use it loosely, in the second sense...

...Two years before the movie Urban Cowboy was released, it would have been hard to convince urban professionals that they should spend even a minute of their time contemplating the culture of blue-collar Houston, let alone think of mechanical bulls or the Cotton-Eyed Joe as emblems of enviable style...

...More than anything else, this is a tremendous waste of talent...

...Quinn’s evidence against the word police is far richer and more amusing than I amable to suggest here...

...Yet there may be as great a toll exacted from those who spend their time policing "right" and "wrong" behavior...

...The other source of pressure has been the phenomenal geographic mobility of postwar America, which has reduced the status markers that stick so tenaciously to citizens of small towns...

...Usage: ‘I’m anything but a snob in my social relationships...

...But it is a conservative book...

...more knowledge is always valuable, whether about "fulsome" or Pouilly-Fuisse...

...But no one who has traveled widely in this country can fail to see the variations between, say...

...the other was not...

...n e American Heritage Dictionary, John Simon, Wilson Follett, Jacques Barzun, H. W. Fowler, and all the petty nuisances who write letters to the paper whenever they see the word ‘finalize’ or ‘hopefully’ or ‘less’ instead of ‘few.’ They are all linguistic barbarians...

...The antennae must go out...

...What had been in junior high school a desire to show off had become a struggle to avoid humiliation...

...One of my grandfathers was a College Man...

...Most often they render these verdicts in a tone of beleaguered, huffy impatience that would be tolerated in few other kinds of writing...

...Quinn is identified as a poet and a food columnist for Philadelphia magazine and the Soho News...

...Quinn first shows that many of the arguments about "original" meaning rest on the flimsiest and most arbitrary notions of what certain words "really" mean...

...noon’ originally meant ‘three o’clock in the afternoon.’ But it is perfectly obvious that if we keep ‘decimate’ to its original and mathematically correct meaning, we’ll all but exclude it from our vocabularies...

...Language Barriers by James Fallows One of the few books that have ever really changed my mind is American Tongue and Cheek, a small volume by Jim Quinn.* Its subject is "proper" English usage, and it hit me in my prejudices and insecurities...

...In the case of the budget, it does not encourage new thoughts about, say, making the Federal Reserve subject to political control-unless that becomes certified as a fashionable "new idea," like the flat rate tax...

...Bronte...

...Penguin, $4.95...

...It defends our language against ignorant corrections, self-proclaimed experts, and pointless logic chopping...

...My original interest in words was driven by a need for social prophylaxis, or self-protection...

...But Quinn makes his judgments after offering arguments, not just displaying attitudes, and that is what distinguishes him from the authorities he attacks...

...With the proliferation ofthe word expertsand the popularity of their works, we are seeing the latest crest in the timeless pattern of conspicuous consumption...

...Even Advertising Age devotes column after column to proper-usage tips...

...and, in general, providing indications that, even hefore you went to college, you came from the right kind of stock...

...The prescriptions of the word experts, if faithfully applied, can shield an utterance from ridicule, but can do nothing to ensure that it contains a thought of worth...

...My brother, who made the same socialjourney, put his fingeron the problem: it was fear of revealing oneself (normally I’d say "revealing yourself‘) as Comer Pyle...

...Do you go to church...

...1250) till Elizabethan times (last OED citation is 1583...

...But probably because the first syllable was ignorantly associated with the word ‘foul’-because both ‘foul’ and the first syllable of ‘fulsome’ were once pronounced alike-‘fulsome’ began to pick up other meanings...

...It is no longer in good taste to comment on a man’s "breeding," but it is fine to pick apart his words...

...But, Quinn says, "Oddly enough, it is the older meaning,‘ disgusting or offensive to good taste,’ that is the fruit of ignorance...

...When outsiders view a foreign society, it often is obvious to them that certain habits of thought make a tremendous difference in how successfully that society meets its challenges...

...It defends the traditional use of English...

...It should please all our many purists that after 700 years of wayward use, and compulsive fiddling, ‘fulsome’ is finally returning to its original and etymologically correct meaning, that is, if our purists knew anything about language history or etymology...

...it is every man for himself...

...These are perilous waters we are entering...

...According to them, whatever people said was proper usage...

...Without knowing where I had gone wrong, I would telegraph my lack of background and sophistication...

...With the possible exception of Thorstein Veblen, who said that at a certain pastoral stage in human history people had been free of such "invidious" urges, most people would concede that the striving, comparative impulse is a normal ingredient in the human makeup...

...So it may be with our ingrained habit of turning political ideas into one more badge of the "right" taste...

...Part of this attitude was natural to my line of work-a writer is supposed to know about grammarbut that was not my only motivation...

...Milton...

...We are talking, of course, about the period before Susan Sontag’s famous comparison between the Reader’s Digest and The Nation at New York’s Town Hall...

...To decimate’did originally mean ‘to reduce by a tenth...

...We drove very slow for the last two stages of the road"-W...

...The idea of politics as a contest of manners and attitudes has by now become almost a joke-the joke is that when you’ve seen what kind of car somebody drives you know what opinions he’s likely to hold...

...instead, they find the correct usage a ‘favorite criteri[on] of illiteracy,’ ‘the fruit of ignorance.’ " Quinn also argues that flexibility and change have been the glory, not the shame, of the language, and that inveighing against them is as pointless as giving speeches about a river’s changing course...

...gross and satiating’( 1410-1 770...

...For example, Jonathan Swift-who is one of the few distinguished writers Quinn can find on the purists’ side-waged a lonely twilight struggle against that hideous neologism, "mob," exactly the kind of direct, muscular, Anglo-Saxon-sounding word (though of Latin origin) that most language experts would now endorse...

...What was going on here...

...This might be all to the good if the apparent motive behind it were that of instruction...

...The same is still true in England, where only five percent of the college-age population attends college, with a further crucial distinction separating the products of Oxford and Cambridge from those who attend the newer, "Redbrick" schools...

...These kind of knaves 1 know"-W...

...For the few who had one, a college degree automatically indicated a certain level of wealth and social standing...

...These include using the right kind of1anguage;displayinga mastery of artistic, geographic, and culinary allusions...

...In that uneasy moment when the judgment’s not yet in-should The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas be considered "tacky" or "fun"-it is perilous to state your views too clearly...

...Strictly Speaking, Shallow Thinking Perhaps because of these two changes, there seems to be significantly more effort devoted to "invidious" display than a generation ago...

...These efforts took on a different edge as I prepared to go east to college...

...Do you take part in the PTA...

...It seems to me that several aspects of our recent social history have increased the pressure toward the kind of invidious display represented by the word snobs...

...part in most of our souls that revels in besting others, whether on a ball field or with a dictionary...

...The father indicated his status by the jewels that covered his fingers and the Doberman pinschers that surrounded his house...

...I mourned the desecration of the old prayer book ("We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table . . .") in the Episcopal church...

...Boston and Tucsonin the importance and firmness of class differences...

...What the people on Quinn’s list have in common is a heroic struggle to defend the language against " ugliness , " "barbarisms , " "imprecision," and, in a more general way, change...

...One has been the dramatic democratization of higher education since World War II...

...Brooks’s argument was that the means for such a comparison had changed, even though the motivations had not...

...Where did you go to college...

...After curling up in the evening with 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary: I could impress my friends, or at least get their attention, by saying, "We’ve got a paucity of school spirit...

...Why invest such a disproportionate amount of energy and emotion in a cause with such feeble scholarly foundations and so little practical effect...

...Yet the other side of this freedom and anonymity is the need to send out signals of status quickly...

...I tried to be discreet about my beliefs...

...Then I read Jim Quinn’s quirky book...

...Shakespeare...

...Will the nuclear freeze prove to be a sound, responsible idea-or will those who endorse it soon look like softheaded simpletons...

...Russell Baker has indicated the far greater richness and complexity of New York society by saying that dinner conversation there begins with three questions, not just one: What do you do...

...But when he offered his children for admiration, their adornment was their advanced graduate degrees...

...But since the 196Os, roughly half of all college-age people in this country have gone to college...

...The message of one is "You can learn to write better...

...Did she really bring up an insight from the Reader’s Digest...

...James Fallows s Washington editor of the Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Even in my "Increase Your Word Power"days I knew this was a howler...

...in manuscripts and explain to the eager young the evils of stringing noun phrases together as if they were adjectives...

...Joke or not, it comes close to the truth: how many Volvo station wagons have you seen with bumper stickers reading"Nuclearp1ants are built better than Jane Fonda...

...The purpose of the first is to convey an idea about composition...

...This is a book against all those prescriptive style manuals...

...He quotes the otherwise admirable Red Smith on the bothersome misuse of "fulsome": "Let’s cling to old established meanings...

...It starts by ridiculing General Alexander Haig for his prose and ends by celebrating him, in moderation, for his supposed moderation...

...Whole societies may adjust their values in the same direction, from displays equivalent to the pinkie ring (Le., the Cadillacs with the tail fins of the late 1950s) to those equivalent to the graduate degree (Le., a BMW, a place in Aspen, children in the right schools...

...only snobs and pedants would dare take a "prescriptive" attitude toward language...

...Among my neighbors when 1 was a child was a family widely assumed to be part of the leadership of the Southern California Mafia...

...Wordly Possessions In another useful book published two year sago, Showing Off in America, John Brooks attempted to update Thorstein Veblen’s anatomy of ostentatious display...

...of the second, to terrorize anyone who thinks his prose might ever be subjected to examination under Simon’s loupe...

...It also places him on the losing side of today’s trends...

...Or they will say that "unique" means "the only one," not "one of a few," and therefore it is barbarous to describe something as "one of the most unique...

...I feared that, amid the children of Andover and the nation’s assorted Country Day schools, I would reveal myself as a bumpkin by saying the wrong thing...

...What Quinn shows is that, inmost of their crusades, the experts are flat, plain wrong...

...If the language experts were simultaneously so self-righteous and so wrong, how could they stay in business...

...and finally‘ gross or excessive, offensive to good taste like flattery’ ( I663 to the present...

...Jim Quinn alludes to one explanation, which is that word-prissiness is one of today’s few socially acceptable forms of snobbery...

...They will say that hoi polloi needed no article before it in the original Greek, and therefore it is a sign of ignorance to say in English "the hoi polloi...

...In a stable, small-town environment, your position depends not merely on the impression you make at the moment, but on the long trail of impressions left by your family and by yourself over the years...

...It may well be so, as the experts tirelessly preach, that our use of language reflects the underlying nature of our thought...

...In general, he said that the change was from the naked displays of wealth represented by the mansions along Fifth Avenue and in Newport in Veblen’s day to a display of imputed wealth, represented most frequently and conveniently by education...

...But the great majority of the wine or word experts seem intent not on teaching but on ridiculing the unlettered and in preying on the insecurities of those who desperately hope to prove themselves well-lettered...

...Where are your children in school...

...In the summer before I enrolled at Harvard, I pored over Fowler’s English Usage and the "Watch Your Language" works of Theodore Bernstein...

...What a wonderful word...

...That threat was made explicit in chapter titles such as "Behavior That Gives Us Away" and passages like the following: "A now famous Hollywood actor still reveals his lower white-collar origins every time he sits down...

...Fashion in politics will give us sentiments like "I hate to say it, but Reagan’s really right about the budget" in 1981,and"Idon’tknowwhat the Republicans could have been thinking of when they came up with this economic disaster" one year later...

...But unlike many of those experts, Quinn took a look at the Oxford English Dictionary, which provides a history of the connotations of each word...

...Consider first, that Great and Bright infers not excellence"-J...

...It would be difficult to argue that the well educated children of postwar affluence are proportionately more intelligent than their grandparents were...

...This is a familiar pattern within generations of one family...

...In my summer jobs as mail-handler, I was sometimes chewed out by the foreman because I would pause while unloading a mail sack to take the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" test in the Reader’s Digest...

...The element of insecurity is crucial to these transactions, and is what gives them their most noxious effects...

...Those fears subsided but never fully wentaway...

...He pulls up his trousers to preserve the crease...

...In the meantime, the word picked up and lost other meanings: ‘fat, overgrown’( 1340-1678...

...He says: "We do not usually think of liberals as defenders of inherited wealth and the life values that can be acquired only by people who never had to work their way up in the world, but here is a sample liberal [Ben Lucien Burman] describing his liberal attitudes for the Harper’s Dictionary of’ Cont temporary...

...Compare his standing in intellectual circles with that of Patrick J. Buchanan-"Safire’s politicsare atrocious, of course, but I wouldn’t miss his columns on the language...

...Packard also argued that the real victims of this anxiety were neither the truly privileged nor the down-and-out, but the "people in-between, members of the semi-upper and limited-success classes...

...If Edwin Newman had been in the proper-language business back then, I would have read his booksas well...

...Or compare William Buckley’s standing with Jesse Helms’s...

...But among the things they have learned, after sitting through the survey courses on Ptolemy and Plato and rubbing shoulders with those whose families winter in Gstaad, is what the signals are of an "educated"-which in this sense means "well-bred"-man or woman...

...In its most agonizing form, this is the familiar cocktail-party display put on by a couple, one of whom lives in dread that the other will embarrass them both through a gaffe that reveals bad taste...

...Most of the language experts’ indictments begin with the assertion that, in ignorant hands, the "original" and "precise" meaning of a word has been lost or blurred...

...The purpose of such display, in Veblen’s view, was almost always "invidious" or "predatory," by which he meant that the displayer was inviting others to enter a comparison in which they would come up short...

...Wine snobbery was once the province of the few, and word snobbery was confined (at least in towns like the one where I grew up) to the retired English teacher who clipped columns from Saturday Review...

...It is hard to offer honest praise, or criticism, of anything from a movie to an auto when the real subject of the conversation is not the thing itself but the taste it reveals...

...In the case of the general, it does not encourage an examination of his career as a military bureaucrat, which was a more important key to his performance than his idiosyncratic prose...

...something in its social organization greatly increases the importance of symbols of status, thereby severely sapping the energy that people have for pursuits other than those of assessing their relative standing on the social pyramid...

...Even politics has felt the effect of "invidious display...