I loved this speech because Cooke eloquently describes many of the writing
or speaking sins that I have acquired in my years as a scholar. I
cannot blame my descent into grammatical purgatory on my grade and high
school teachers. They struggled to drag me out of English hell and
when I left high school, I might have had what could pass for civilized
grammar. Rather, my current language has thrived on an overabundant
reliance on the Grammar of Anxiety, "which springs from the chronic fear
of being thought uneducated or banal and coins such things as "more importantly,"
"he invited Mary and I," "when I was first introduced," and "the end result."
I've presented not only the speech but Safire's background on it to give
readers a sense of the book's presentation and completeness.
Idris Hsi
June 11, 1997
From Safire, William (1997), Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in
History, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York, NY. pgs 585-591
(ISBN-0-393-04005-4)
Broadcaster Alistair Cooke Needles the Jargonauts in Assessing the State
of the English Language
"The time to rinse the mind free of verbal cant cannot begin
too early."
Alistair Cooke's Letter from America, which
began in 1946, is the longest-running series in the history of broadcasting
and is regularly heard in more than fifty nations. His precise phrasing,
literate style, and avuncular demeanor is familiar throughout the English-speaking
world, and his training in linguistics leads him to talk occasionally about
the philological tool of his trade.
Born in Manchester, England, he came to America as a correspondent
of The Times and of The Guardian before joining the BBC.
His "letter" -- a weekly essay in conversational style -- did more to explain
the United States to Britons than any other form of communication.
Later as television host of Public Broadcasting's Masterpiece Theater,
he finally became well known to his fellow Americans.
This speech to the English Speaking Union's conference
of scholars was given on November 1, 1979 in San Francisco. Mr. Cooke
delights in noting that it was the only address not printed in the scholarly
compendium.
Note the flow of the speech, as the speaker moves fluidly
from anecdote to example, taking a breath with self-questioning, planting
the "area" theme that he reprises at the conclusion. Sentences are
effectively stylish, as in the bump-to-an-end conclusion of "That shuts
them up, even though I wouldn't know a nucleic acid if it were served to
me chilled, with an olive, in a glass."
William Safire
I apologize for taking out a script.
I am in the habit, myself -- especially after dinner -- of speaking off
the cuff or the top of the head, according to which is more available at
the time. But this is an occasion with a special hazard. I
am facing a pack of linguistic watchdogs who, like the people who review
anthologies, are not going to be impressed by a wealth of accurate knowledge
(even if I had it) so much as by small omissions and single slips.
As when J.B. Sykes put out, after seven years of lonely
labor, his monumental new Concise Oxford Dictionary (a small
monument but an exquisite one) one London reviewer spent little time applauding
the thousands of definitions that are miracles of clarity and exactness.
He took up most of his column protesting the secondary definition given
to a simple four-letter word that, Sykes said, was a slang term of abuse
applied usually to a woman. Not so, said the reviewer, and he went
on and on about Sykes's insensitivity to pejorative usage in general and
this cutting example in particular. I blush, even in this year of
liberation, to pronounce the word. I leave you to rush home, get
out your Sykes, and-- beginning with the letter A -- keep going till you
find it.
I am told that the coming seminars will be addressed by
experts in Legal English and Black English, in everything from the new
Episcopalian liturgy to the new liturgy of copulation. I am honored
to be invited to kick off this series of matches between the structuralists
and the semanticists and the other fashionable combatants. Fifty
years ago, I might have had something special to offer, for it was a time
when I sat at the feet of Dr. Richards trying to fathom the Meaning of
Meaning, start talking like John Bunyan, or Defoe, or Lincoln, or Art Buchwald.
I am thinking rather of the millions of schoolchildren who might yet be
saved. Children to whom a television set is, in a literal sense,
more impressive than any teacher they hear in a classroom. Who is
to train them in the splendid flexibility of English tenses? Who
is going to get them used to saying "because" instead of "in view of the
fact that"? Who is to warn them that "in terms of" is usually a way
of vamping till you're ready to think? Who is to give them warning
signals about the whole Grammar of Anxiety, which springs from the chronic
fear of being thought uneducated or banal and coins such things as "more
importantly," "he invited Mary and I," "when I was first introduced," and
"the end result"? Is anybody, in any high school in this country
or in Britain, doing -- under the lively influence of old Quiller-Couch
and the Fowler brothers -- what was done to me: giving out every so often
a list of vogue words, and buzzwords, and current jargon, which you must
translate into simple English and so need never use? If this had
happened soon enough, and was a standard routine of early education, we
should now have politicians who'd tell us what they have in mind, instead
of which "scenarios" they are in the process of "orchestrating."
I have an English friend, the chairman of an advertising
firm, who had the luck to go, forty-some years ago, to an English elementary
school. Otherwise, he might be considered (as an advertising man)
a kind of genius. For he is proof against genteelisms, circumlocutions,
and general pomp. A few months ago, he sent a memo to his copywriters.
It said:
On their way across the Atlantic are one or two pernicious
buzzwords. The latest have been invented by dramatic critics, but
you might be tempted to pick them up and apply them to some product or
fashion model. An actor is now said to give a "resonant" performance.
The movie critics have just discovered that the chief virtue of every sympathetic
actress is that she is "vulnerable." I also caught one of you last
week using the most meaningless word in the language -- "meaningful."
Wake up, beware!
What is the point of sending promising students (what in American we call
"very bright" students) running after courses in creative writing when
they haven't learned to walk with simple adverbs and prepositions?
There is surely no point whatever in setting up a course in the works of
S.J. Perelman (which, since he has died, they will soon be doing) for any
student who has not acquired considerable sophistication in sensing the
emotional tone -- what you might call the secret public attitude -- of
various vocabularies from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles to Time, from
Thackeray to Erica Jong.
We are back with the impressionable child, who sits before
the tube for several hours a day and gradually ceases to know that the
words "early" and "late" are going from the language: Americans are
either "ahead of schedule" or "behind schedule." No child today has
heard of toothpaste. My grandson, at the age of three, babbled for
his dentrifice. Long before he gets false teeth (or "dentures") he'll
want some personal notepaper, but he'll have to ask for "personalized"
notepaper. At the moment, his teacher tells us, he cannot be said
to love football: he is "football-oriented." No American girl
with cracked lips is told how to moisten them. She is handed a "moisturizer"
by a mother who, no doubt, thinks of herself as nothing so square as a
good parent but as a "supportive" or "caring" one, but doesn't care enough
to stop her child imbibing from the telly, at a fearful daily rate, words,
locutions, solecisms, and absurdities beyond the wit or attention of its
teachers ever to correct. Children listen to the evening weather
reports. They must be now inured to the fact (which may astonish
some of our English visitors) that in the United States there is no longer
any thunder, any rain, hail or snow, and no clouds. There is only
"thunderstorm activity" and "precipitation activity" and "cloud cover."
A television weatherman told me the other evening that precipitation activity
was spreading down from the Illinois area through the Kentucky and Tennessee
areas into the Mississippi area. Poor Jack Teagarden! If he
were alive today, he would have to sing "Stars Fell on the Alabama Area."
"Area" is my all-time nonfavorite: a cloudy word that
has blanketed, and hence obliterated, the differences between neighborhood,
district, part of town, region, state, field (of study), topic, theme.
Airplanes used to stop at the gate. Now they "make a complete stop
at the gate area." From which you proceed to the baggage claim area,
and on into the New york or Dallas or San Francisco area. I once
asked a skittish and amiable stewardess -- or "in-flight hostess" -- "How
is it possible to be approaching the San Francisco area without approaching
San Francisco?" She looked alarmed. "Search me," she said.
My theory is simple, if revolutionary. There is an area of the United
States that was named Illinois. There's another called New York,
and yet another called Boston. However much they expand, that is
what they should be called. When the time comes, I should be happy
if they chiseled on my gravestone: "He killed off area."
I used to think that Americans were much better informed
than Britons about medicine. Because they used, with enviable flipness,
exact medical terms like deviated septum or congested sinuses, whereas
Britons tended to go round grumbling about their catarrh (cattarh in my
day covered everything from pneumonia to a brain tumor). I remember
becoming so ashamed of my lumpish ignorance of such things that I stopped
talking about my lumbago (or rheumatics) and learned to toss of words like
sacroiliac and slipped disk (even after an orthopedic surgeon asked me
what I meant by it). It took some years for me to discover that the
ordinary American, the layman, was no more knowledgeable than his British
counterpart. he simply yielded to the national love of Latin and
Greek (especially if he knew no Latin or Greek). Thus, I was enormously
impressed when I heard someone say, at a cocktail party, that he'd suffered
a lesion of -- or to -- his clavicle. I tiptoed off to the dictionary
to learn about this exotic affliction. What d'you think? He'd
hurt his collarbone!
It used to be -- and I'd like to think it's still so in
some English-speaking countries -- that when you had a pain and went to
the doctor, a friend would say: "What did he do for you?" And you'd
say: "He gave me a pill." No longer, not in this country. You
are given "medication" and are not being treated: you are undergoing "therapy"
(treatment in Greek). Chemotherapy, which means no more than treatment
by a chemical, is now so exclusively applied to cancer that it seems cruel
to remark that almost everything you put in your mouth, from an aspirin
to a hamburger, is a chemical.
Another medical word that is very popular in America,
and has been, I should guess, for a couple decades, is the magic word:
virus. All suffering people drop it to explain everything from a
sniffle to a drowsiness. I used to drop it myself till a doctor present
said thoughtfully, "I don't think it's a virus. I doubt it
has protein coat." That's a stopper if ever I heard one. I
looked that up too, and I'm ready anytime for any pedant who fixes me with
his Ancient Mariner eye and says, "Do you know exactly what a virus is?"
I reply at once, "Sure thing. Any of numerous kinds of very simple
organisms smaller than bacteria, mainly of nucleic acid in protein coat,
existing only in living cells and able to cause diseases." That
shuts them up, even though I wouldn't know a nucleic acid if it were served
to me chilled, with an olive, in a glass.
Some years ago, when I was traveling all over the country
filming my television series America, one of the young women on
the crew, a shrewd, modest English girl, who had not been here before,
said, "They are a marvelous, warm people, and their slang is so racy.
But why is it that in print, or in public, the rule seems to be: Never
say in two syllables what you can say in five? Where did it all start?"
Well, there are two "its" here: the obsessive love of
Latinism; and the disastrous decline in the teaching of elementary grammar
and plain speaking. I suspect that the early warning signal of a
coming influx of polysyllables was the decision (I think in Goethe's time)
by the University of Gottingen to begin and maintain a close relation with
Harvard. It was enough, after the liberal revolution of 1848, and
more than enough in the later trek of German exiles, to guarantee invading
hordes of sociologists and psychiatrists. It has become a badge,
almost a sworn oath, of their trade that it is better to be overwrought
than oversimple; that Anglo-Saxon English is a naive tool for examining
human behavior either in the individual or in the mass; that the love of
a man for a maid is not to be undertaken lightly, but gravely, writhingly,
humorlessly, pedantically, as a perilous adventure in "interpersonal relationships."
As for the decline in teaching grammar, in some schools
the deliberate abandoning of it, I believe it started when John Dewey conceived
the beguiling theory that all knowledge can be "fun," if not orgasmic.
The application of this theory far and wide by slap-happy people who thought
of themselves as "progressives" led in the fullness of time to a masterpiece
of wishful thinking that I saw enshrined in a newspaper ad at the end of
last March. It said: "You Can Learn French by the fifteenth of May
-- with no effort on your part!" I thought of Charles Darwin,
going down to various seashores on and off for over forty years with a
broken teacup (he had no grant from a national science foundation) and
scooping up sand and algae and brooding over them. At the end of
which time, after considerable effort on his part, he published The
Origin of Species. But then, Darwin was a Victorian, and he held
to the Victorian prejudice that any knowledge that goes much below the
surface takes time and tedium to acquire -- however "bright" the student.
Some years ago, I was saying much of this -- as it applied
to the jargon of medicine -- to the assembled staff of the Mayo Clinic.
I mused that perhaps, after all, an appetite for jargon might be imbibed
with the mother's milk: a matter of genes. I was rash enough to conclude,
"Maybe you can no more cure a naturally pompous person than you can reflower
a virgin." My lecture was reprinted in the Mayo Clinic Bulletin,
which goes to the far corners of the earth. One of the first letters
I received was from the University of Tokyo's department of gynecology.
It said: "But, Mr. Cooke, we do it!"
If they can do it, maybe our high school teachers can
make it unnecessary, by encouraging and training the child's instinct for
directness and simplicity before the hymen, so to speak, of its innocence
is broken. At any rate, I'm convinced that it is in the high schools
at the latest that the old custom should be revived: the teaching, first,
of grammar and idiom; and then, of cautionary courses in current jargon.
The time to rinse the mind free of verbal cant cannot begin too early.
I trust that "the development of this basic linguistic
concept mandates no further elaboration at this point in time." Or,
as Chaucer more aptly put it. "There is no more to saye." Except,
thank you and -- "Have a nice day in the San Francisco area."
