The Instrument (part one)

Part two of How to Sit Down

Welcome to episode two. Thanks for joining/liking/commenting. The response has been heartwarming. And please forgive me if my substack etiquette is wanting; I haven’t spent much time here yet.

The English language is a magnificent instrument. It has become the language of empire and the lingua franca of a large percentage of the world not just because of Anglo-Saxon rapacity, but because of the relative simplicity of its grammar and syntax and its wide range of registers. The latter is most directly attributable to its merger of two language families following the Norman conquest. The familiar example is that in medieval England animals had Anglo-Saxon names if they were on the hoof (pig, calf, steer) and Latin ones if they were on the table (pork, veal, beef). Somehow, though, rather than becoming a two-tier class-based tongue, it blended the two strains, and furthermore invited loan words to pitch their tents. The result was a riotous democracy of words, most deeply enjoyed by the Elizabethans, who reveled in having two keyboards to play. The defining example is Shakespeare’s “The multitudinous seas incarnadine/ making the green one red.” You see the decorator’s pointed brush tracing arabesques in the first line, the house painter’s roller laying down two broad stripes in the second.

The spoken language today is, by and large, the dog’s breakfast. Close-knit urban neighborhoods might still maintain a tradition of inventive speech, and there may still be isolated mountain communities that take their everyday parlance from the Wycliffe Bible, but a great many people still seem to aspire to the condition of cop talk. That phenomenon, as old as television, is a direct obeisance to the class division of 1066. Latinate words are the mark of authority, and they make you sound smart even if you deploy them as if you were doing surgery with a cold chisel. They also cover your ass, enveloping ambiguities in a nonspecific mandarin haze. Using complex language in everyday life, meanwhile, might make your friend group suspect you of being a cop, in other words a professor, if not a fairy.

More troubling and contemporary is the flat, gray, uninflected demotic that is standard in online writing. That is language that has severed its connection to the ear. It is meant for instant consumption and instant erasure, empty of flourishes because it wants to be inclusive and well-lit and free of greasy subtext. A related phenomenon is the growth of “Eurozone literature,” in which idiom is suppressed in favor of pure content so that the novel can be published simultaneously in nineteen languages. That is an aspect of the protracted birth pains of globalization. Of course you need simplified English to communicate with your gaming pals in Harare and Minsk, but the danger is that it will at length pervade the whole language, turning interestingly eccentric linguistic neighborhoods into block after block of concrete condo midrises.

By contrast, take a look at the American language at its peak, between the world wars, the first decade or two of radio and sound films. Most Americans were literate, if not passionately so, but they turned their attention to those new technologies, which came at them through their ears. They heard radio announcers talking as fast as tobacco auctioneers, radio personalities machine-gunning gags. You had to be fully awake to catch it all, and the national level of alertness rose by degrees. Howard Hawks, preparing His Girl Friday, instructed the screenwriters to append dummy sentences to the start and end of speeches, so that the characters, rattling off wisecracks, could all step on one another’s lines and be understood. The urban wiseguy, long a local type, went national, and every wayside with one saloon soon featured an assortment of characters in hand-painted neckties with percussive lines of patter. Saying anything straight was proof you were a flatfoot, otherwise you’d be finding new ways to say it. Hawks, working with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, had them come up with “different ways of saying things.”

“I’d say, ‘How do you say this—you’ve got a line, “Oh, you’re just in love.”’ One of them came up with ‘Oh, you’re just broken out in monkey bites.’ […] I call it three- cushion [dialogue]. Because you hit it over here and over here and go over here to get the meaning. You don’t state it right out.” (Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks)

Slang, once heard mainly in poolrooms and at the racetrack, now entered the parlor through the front door. Radio personalities made up their own slang terms, which sometimes infiltrated everyday speech. But slang is a folk art, so its poet was Anon., some nameless person in a bus station or a bowling alley whose coinage could never be attributed. Its golden treasury is The American Thesaurus of Slang by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark (1942), nearly 1200 pages long (I’m bringing a copy to my desert island). Although American slang isn’t quite as comprehensive as French argot—which allows for entire conversations in which not one word is intelligible to the uninitiated—the book records slang for every profession and walk of life, and every situation in which humans huddle together protectively. The richest fields, naturally, are the most fraught. Death is the big jump, the blow-off, the call, the croak act, the debt of nature, the deep end, the fold-up, the great out, the kick-off, the last muster, the one-way ticket, the pale horse, the stiff racket, the wind-up. All common short words, selected and matched for maximum sonic and metaphoric impact. Whoever made them up was a poet, but they’d laugh if you told them that.

The best slang comes from the most vulnerable, those farthest from mainstream society, those who have the most to hide and to express, often simultaneously. The humor is dark, curt, and brisk. At the same time it swings. Nothing about it is gray. It is plain speech, but it has been designed to pop. Freshness is crucial to the game, because success leads to overuse, appropriation by advertising, cliché status, at length embarrassment. Slang is, of course, still percolating in the English-speaking world, although perhaps not among your set. Depending on your social and professional milieu, the people around you may well be trading quips in jargon, which is the name we give to slang with an advanced degree, which is generally unfunny and likely has been ratified by a committee. It is cliquish but bloodless, like top-down military speech. It has mightily infiltrated everyday language over the last few decades—check the universally accepted current use of “reference” as a verb, which is ugly and unnecessary (“cite” has been around a lot longer, and it’s two syllables thinner) and beyond question originated in some faculty memo on citation protocols. The dead hand of jargon, the pale horse of internet English—shun them. Your job is to keep the language alive, ornery, and jumping.