Going Nucular Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Culture at Large

  Plastics!

  Keeping Ahead of the Joneses

  Caucasian Talk Circles

  Near Myths

  Lamenting Some Enforced Chastity

  Stolen Words

  Beating Their Brows

  Prurient Interests

  War Drums

  When Words Fail

  A Name Too Far

  Beleaguered Infidel

  It All Started with Robespierre

  It May Be Banal but It’s Bad News

  Going Nucular

  Appease Porridge Hot

  The Second Casualty

  Naming of Foreign Parts

  The Syntax of Resistance

  A Couple of Words for Nothing Left to Lose

  The Gallic Subject

  Begin the Régime

  We’ll Always Have Kirkuk

  Politics as Usual

  So Sorry

  Some of My Best Friends

  Interested Parties

  Me Too, Too

  Slippery Slopes

  If It’s Orwellian, It’s Probably Not

  Meetings of the Minds

  Lattes, Limousines, and Libs

  Where the Left Commences

  A Fascist in Every Garage

  Class Dismissed

  Special Effects

  Symbols

  A Date to Remember

  Our Nation’s Favorite Song

  The Last Refuge of Scoundrels and Other People

  Pledge Break

  Media Words

  Rush Limbaugh’s Plurals

  The Politics of Polysyndeton

  The Speech That Turns Mere Presidents Into Talk Show Hosts

  I Seeing the News Today, Oh Boy

  Roil Pain

  Business Cycles

  For Love or Money

  The Triumph of Capitalism

  A Good Old-Gentlemanly Vice

  The Vision Thing

  Initiating Mission-Critical Jargon Reduction

  Farewell to the Alero

  100 Percent Solutions

  Tech Talk

  As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation

  I Have Seen the Future, and It Blogs

  Prefixed Out

  The Icebox Goeth

  Watching Our Language

  Deceptively Yours

  The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics

  Letter Perfect

  A Thousand Pictures

  All That You Can Bee

  Like, Wow!

  Lucubratin’ Rhythm

  Ain’t Misbehavin’

  There Are No Postmodernists in a Foxhole

  Adverbially Yours

  Wed the People

  Obscenity Rap

  Propaganda in Drag

  Power to the People

  Geezers, Gerries, and Golden Agers

  Word Index

  Subject Index ]

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise For Going Nucular

  “Smart, subtle, and often very amusing... so delightful and so useful... If we all learned to listen the way Nunberg does, maybe we’d learn to speak and think better, too.”—San Jose Mercury News

  “Nunberg’s approach to language is to keep an humorous detachment from disputes while lending an expert opinion.”—Chicago Tribune

  “Geoffrey Nunberg [is] a man whose ear for every insincere inflection, every fashionable prefix, every fatuous habit of media expression, is so acute that you can’t help feeling a bit verbally naked in his presence.” —Seattle Weekly

  “Although Nunberg ranges over many kinds of words, including shrewd meditations on the teenager’s ‘like’ and the growing vogue of ‘Caucasian instead of ‘white’—his observations on political speech are especially valuable in revealing how words inform our understanding of issues.”—The Washington Post Book World

  “Geoffrey Nunberg has the unusual ability to ferret out those little guys skulking around in our language, using the big important words as a cover, and figure out what they’re up to and what they can tell us about out political and social skills.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “Clearly, Nunberg knows about etymology and usage and a good deal more. . . As a guide, Nunberg is witty, entertaining, informative and unfailingly fascinating.”—The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nunberg. . . is not writing for word buffs or grammatical sticklers; he is a people’s linguist . . . A breezy, insightful book that will provide plenty of material for good dinner-table conversation.”—Times Literary Supplement

  “Even fans who’ve heard (or read it) all before should find some happy surprises the second time around.”—The Boston Globe

  “Amusing. . . full of good scholarship... Language moves. Usually it out-runs professors, but Nunberg has a hold of the beast’s tail.” —Kansas City Star

  “I admire Nunberg’s prowess at making linguistics accessible, interesting and entertaining. . . He has a knack for definitions and an amazing penchant for analyzing cultural trends... His social commentary is incisive and not pedantic. . . Nunberg is not only a linguist but a social historian and critic with a skewed and ironic perception of the world. . . I believe that every reader will find something to like about the book and will learn many fascinating facts... this book is a must for politicians and for all of those whose livelihood depends on using words properly and effectively.”—San Antonio Express-News

  “My pick for the word book of the year is Going Nucular, a collection of sharp essays. . . Nunberg shows how the smallest linguistic coffee bean flavors the political and cultural brew.”—Hartford Courant

  “Geoffrey Nunberg is the best kind of word nerd: He cares what words mean.. . . At a few pages a pop, some of Going Nucular’s essays stop before they’ve gotten every goodie out of the bag. But when gifts like a perfectly-honed attack on the term “9/11” tumble out, why grouse?” —Philadelphia City Paper

  “What separates Geoffrey Nunberg’s Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times from a pack of similar volumes is the playful curiosity with which the author regards the English language.” —SF Weekly Magazine

  “[A] feisty, humorous collection. . . Nunberg cracks the codes embedded in many familiar terms used in media, business, technology and politics to reveal unexpected insights about our fractious society.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Among the many linguists who write for a lay audience, no one writes with the engaging style and acuity of Nunberg. . . . Nunberg would be a good addition to anyone’s fantasy dinner party. . . . His insights into language are remarkably astute, enlightening, and—here’s a new one—unpretentious.”—Creative Loafing

  “Nunberg’s knack for simple analog ies. . . make his collection in Going Nucular fun to read... [an] engaging collection.”—Columbus Dispatch

  “Rarely polemical, frequently hysterical, Going Nucular is one of those rare books that can change the way you think, or at least the way you say ‘nuclear.’”—The North Bay Bohemian

  “[Nunberg] manages to take the complicated subject matter of linguistics and make it apply to everyday life in an informative manner.” —Campaigns and Elections

  “Insightful and delicious observations.”—Fifty Plus

  In memory of my father, Jack, a lover of words

  Introduction

  The great early—twentieth-century linguist Antoine Meillet once remarked that every word has its story. That’s easy enough to believe when you scan the rows of books that are stashed in the language section in the back of the bookstore—the perky usage guides, the curmudgeonly diatribes a
bout the sorry state of English, the compilations of curious foreign idioms, the Treasure-Troves of Word-Lore and Rambling Excursions Down the Highways and By-ways of Our Speech. What a bunch! I think of the way Montaigne began his essay “On Vanity,” ridiculing the vast number of books on language in an earlier age: “What could come from prattle, when the stammering and loosening of the tongue could smother the world under such a frightful load of volumes? So many words for the sake of words alone!”

  Speaking as a linguist, I find that dismissal a little unfair—after all, nobody is moved to derision at the thought of thousands of books about flowers, dogs, the Civil War, or any of the other topics that have alcoves consecrated to them at the back of the bookstore. But people do tend to think of a preoccupation with language as vaguely suspect. Words are a little like crossword puzzles—everyone takes a mild interest in them, but it’s a little alarming to discover that someone you know is an aficionado, one of those word-buffs who sprinkle their conversation with curious etymologies and enjoy pointing out the grammatical errors on restaurant menus.

  This isn’t really a book for those buffs. It’s short on the romance of words, and shorter still on complaints about the way the language is going to hell in a handbasket. Ultimately, it isn’t chiefly about language as such—or at least, few of these pieces were written for the sake of words alone. For the most part, they take language as a jumping-off point; the object of the exercise is to see what words can tell us about other things, once we get into the habit of listening to them closely.

  One thing that continues to perplex me after all these years of writing about words is just how hard it is to attend to language and how much of it slips past you, however great an effort you make to listen critically. On the basis of some rough calculations, for example, I figure that I’ve heard or seen the word Caucasian somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 times in my life. But I never gave it a moment’s thought until one day in September of 2003 when I was watching a CNN interview with a California high-school freshman who was trying to start a Caucasian club at her school for “the kids who think they’re Caucasian, white, to break down their heritages and teach them their cultures.” It seemed odd to me that a fifteen-year-old would know the word Caucasian—at least, I had the sense it wasn’t a word that I would have known when I was a teenager. But when I did some counts in newspaper databases, it turned out that Caucasian is several times more common now than it was thirty or forty years ago.

  It was only at that point that I began to realize what a weird word Caucasian is, particularly nowadays. Why should it be more common now, when by all rights it should be as outmoded as Mongoloid and Negroid and the other old-fashioned racial terminology it came in with? What does the word do for us that white doesn’t, and why don’t we just say “European Americans” as a parallel to “Asian Americans,” “African Americans,” and the rest? Why is it that Jews count as Caucasians nowadays (unlike fifty or sixty years ago), whereas Arabs seem to be regarded as non-Caucasians, even if both groups count as white? Is this supposed to be a question of race, or culture, or what?

  Not many people who use the word Caucasian could give a clear answer to those questions—not that California high-school student, not the CNN anchor, and not me, either, though I tried to get at some of this in one of the pieces collected here, “Caucasian Talk Circles.” It reminds you that the function of words isn’t just to communicate ideas but to keep them at a certain remove from consciousness. They’re like those tinned fruitcakes that get passed around Christmas after Christmas without anyone ever opening them or sniffing them to see if they’re still good. Sometimes the most important thing about words is what they enable us to leave unsaid.

  That’s the assumption behind the game I play with myself when I’m writing these pieces. Words usually have something to hide—you have to shake them until the top pops off and some revelation tumbles out, an insight into some attitude that it would be hard to put your finger on by any other means.

  The pieces collected here recount some of the ways that words can betray our changing ideas and sensibilities. Sometimes those shifts show up in the replacement of one word by another. It says something about our changing sense of national purpose that liberty has been losing ground to freedom over the past century. And it says something about our changing understanding of economic forces that Woody Guthrie’s “hard times” turns up in Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics as “the economy.”

  On other occasions, though, people adapt an old word to a new point of view, and then go on as if nothing had happened. That can be the subtlest form of linguistic deception—as Aneurin Bevan once remarked, we have to be especially on guard against the old words that “persist when the reality behind them has changed.” However much we may think of leftist and liberal as the names of immutable political poles, we don’t use the words now the way we did forty years ago. Despite its deliberately archaic ring, chastity doesn’t mean what it once did. And protest has changed its meaning since the 1960s—at least, no one back then would have thought of describing a demonstration in support of the administration’s policies as a “pro-war protest,” the way some conservatives were doing in 2003.

  Or sometimes the action shows up not in cultural keywords like leftist or freedom, but the little words and particles that are particularly dear to linguists. (That’s the difference between language buffs and linguists—when the former talk about the fascination of words they’re thinking about something like antimacassar or serendipity; with the latter, it’s more likely and or the.) What is it about the new forms of broadcast news that leads anchors to speak a tenseless form of the language, as in “The navy using the island since 1940”? Why are right-wing commentators particularly fond of connecting a series of adjectives with and? And why does Rush Limbaugh address his radio listeners in the plural, while NPR announcers use the singular?

  I’m not one of those linguists who think that all language change is the result of ineluctable natural forces, so that we can only fold our arms and dispassionately observe the passing show. If changes in words are often the sign of changes in values and attitudes, then we can deplore the first by way of condemning the second. I feel sure that corporations were better served when they asked their employees to come up with goals rather than missions or vision statements, and I think we do Lou Gehrig more honor by describing him as a hero rather than as a legend. And I reserve enormity for events of appalling horror, though that particular misgiving I usually keep to myself.

  But the urge to fulminate about language can also be an impediment to understanding it. Take the use of like to introduce reported speech—“So she was like, ‘no WAY!’” You can decry that as the sign of an endemic mindlessness and mental laxity among young people nowadays, particularly if your memories of how you talked as an adolescent are conveniently dim. But that comes at a cost of hearing what’s going on with the construction. Say introduces a report of what someone said; like introduces a performance of it—a question of showing rather than telling. It’s a convenient distinction to have available in colloquial speech. The only question is why English should suddenly feel the need of the device, after a thousand years of making do without it. It’s hardly an answer to complain about modern adolescents’ laziness and inarticulateness. In fact, the real laziness here is in the critics who pronounce about the language in the assurance that they’re smarter than it is. The worst offense you can commit against language is to fail to listen to it closely.

  One problem with taking language as a point of departure is that you’re likely to wind up in exotic intellectual territory before you’re through—you start on familiar linguistic grounds and all of a sudden you find yourself in need of some help with Islamic theology, the history of economics, Cold War politics, or the inner workings of search engines. In writing these pieces, I’ve relied heavily on the invaluable and (apart from here) uncredited help of a number of friends and colleagues, including Francesco Antinucci, Mark Aronoff, Khalil Barhoum, Howar
d Bloch, Lisa Brennan, Gordon Chang, Jessica Coope, Ayman Farahat, Linda Georgianna, Carla Hesse, Larry Horn, Arthur Knight, John Lamping, Tom Laqueur, Jonathan Lighter, Larry Masinter, Joe Pickett, Leah Price, John Rickford, Debarati Sanyal, Tony Sarmiento, Hinrich Schuetze, Annie Zaenen, and Arnold Zwicky. And I owe special thanks to Leo Braudy, Rachel Brownstein, Paul Duguid, Bob Newsom, Barbara Nunberg, Scott Parker, and Tom Wasow, people I came back to over and over again for help in clarifying an idea.

  I owe a debt as well to Phyllis Myers, the Fresh Air producer I’ve worked with for many years, and to Terry Gross and Danny Miller, who created and sustained the remarkable program that has been the setting for many of these pieces. (Not many language commentators get a better opening act than that one.) Peter Edidin, my editor at the New York Times Week in Review, has not only helped me to shape the pieces that appeared in the section, but has patiently instructed me in the stylistic intricacies of Times-speak. (In the end, though, I decided to edit the versions of the pieces contained here to eliminate the peculiarities of address that the Times requires—it seemed odd to be referring to the president as “Mr. Bush” on one page and simply as “Bush” on another.) Thanks, too, to my agent, Joe Spieler, and to Clive Priddle, my editor at PublicAffairs.

  Finally, thanks as usual to Sophie Nunberg, who has inspired many of my pieces in her progress from toddlerhood to adolescence, as she and the English language come gradually and sometimes uneasily to terms. And to Michelle Carter I owe loving gratitude not just for her personal support and encouragement, but for reading over many of these pieces and offering me the benefit of her writerly good sense. Whatever the deficiencies of this book, it would have been a lot more pretentious and obscure if I hadn’t had her judgment to draw upon.