Going Nucular Read online

  Within a few decades, the notion of photographing abstract ideas brought to mind the kitschy propaganda photos that the Nazis and Soviets made, with titles like “Sunday Volunteers” or “The Next Generation.” And modernists might allow you to make a film of a novel, but you couldn’t use stills from it as illustrations when the book was reissued.

  So it’s understandable that a lot of modern lexicographers should hold that a photograph can only represent a particular badger, not the idea of badgerhood. And even today no American dictionary uses photographs to illustrate the meanings of words apart from the American Heritage. (I should say that I’m associated with that dictionary, though they keep me pretty far from the art department end of things.)

  Yet contemporary photographers put those austere modernist scruples behind them some time ago. Fabulists like Joel Peter Witkin, surrealists like Sandy Skoglund, narrative photographers like Tina Barney—all of them take the object in front of the lens as standing in for something other than itself. I like to imagine some avant-garde Grand Larousse of the future that’s illustrated with modern photographs like Cindy Sherman’s depictions of herself in the guise of a housewife or a Raphael, or the photographs that Laurie Simmons calls “Food,” “Clothing,” and “Shelter,” where figurines of leggy women wear hot dogs, gloves, and houses on their upper bodies like the dancing cigarette packs in the Old Gold commercials of the fifties.

  But the problem with the way most modern dictionaries are illustrated isn’t just what they imply about photographs, but what they imply about words. They leave you with the impression that words are colorless abstractions at an eternal remove from the concrete realm of the senses. You think of the angels in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, who float in black and white above the streets of Berlin and never make contact with sensory experience. Yet when you hear words like bagel or bullfrog, what comes to mind isn’t a sketchy silhouette. Meanings are part of the world, too, and they have color and texture just like everything else. You can even take pictures of them.

  All That You Can Bee

  Mark Twain held that the ability to spell well was an inborn talent like a photographic memory—“The spelling faculty is born in man, like poetry, music and art. It is a gift; it is a talent.” If that’s true, God seems to have distributed the gift in a scrupulously even-handed way, with no regard for more general intellectual capacities. Or at least that’s what I like to think, being one of the mass of people who are chronically shaky on the difference between -ible and -able.

  Americans have always placed a singular importance on spelling. In fact the spelling bee was the original American game show, and often the only entertainment in town. It was born in colonial times, when the attainment of correct spelling was regarded as a symbol of cultivation. Back then the contests were called “spelling schools” or “spelling matches.” Horace Greeley reminisced fondly about his successes as a spelling prodigy when he was a boy in New Hampshire around 1815—as he put it, spelling was a natural strength for “a child of tenacious memory and no judgment.” And whatever Mark Twain’s reservations about the value of spelling, he prided himself on having been a champion speller as a youth in Missouri: “I always slaughtered both divisions and stood alone with the medal around my neck when the campaign was finished.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, May 14, 2003

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the contests had become an adult pastime, as well. Bret Harte recounted a spelling competition in the California mining camps that ended in a fight with bowie knives when two contestants disagreed over whether “eider-duck” began with an i or an e. That may have been a tall tale, but contemporary letters document the popularity of spelling bees in the camps.

  The phrase “spelling bee” itself entered the language in the 1870s, when the competitions became a popular mass entertainment. (The OED derives that use of bee from the name of the insect, but it’s more likely related to the English dialect word been, which referred to “voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task.”) More than 4,000 people attended one bee at the Philadelphia Academy of Music in 1875, and a disturbance broke out when the audience judged that one contestant had been unfairly eliminated for misspelling receipt.

  After a period of eclipse, the bees were revived again in the 1920s as a way of encouraging the civic virtues of literacy among schoolchildren—one enthusiast described them as “an antidote to jazz and frivolity.” The first national bee was held in 1925, and for the last sixty years the event has been sponsored by Scripps-Howard.

  Jeff Blitz’s Spellbound is an engaging and surprisingly moving documentary that follows the fortunes of eight contestants in the 1999 national bee held in Washington, D.C. Some of the kids are motivated by pure competitive spirit, but for most of them, the bee stands for the struggle to move up and on in American life. Angela is a Texas girl whose father came to America from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant. He still speaks no English, and his trip to Washington to watch his daughter compete in the national seems to seal his life’s accomplishment. Ashley is a black girl from the Washington, D.C., projects who describes herself as a “prayer warrior.” And Neil from San Clemente, California, is the son of a successful Indian immigrant with a boundless faith in the American dream. “In America,” the father says, “If you work hard, you’ll make it.”

  The kids are all bright and winning and incredibly dedicated, and you feel their anguish as they’re eliminated one after the other, in a cruel prototype of Survivor. But while that experience would have been familiar to Greeley or Twain, neither of them would have been likely to prevail in a modern competition. Back in the first decades of the national competition, the contestants were given the sorts of words that an ordinary literate citizen would be expected to know, like promiscuous, intelligible, and fracas . In 1932, Dorothy Greenwald from Des Moines, Iowa, walked away with the laurels when she was able to spell knack. But like a lot of other competitive events, the spelling bee has become a lot more specialized and intense over the course of time. In recent years the winning words in the national bee have included such bower-bird treasures as xanthosis, vivisepulture, euonym, succedaneum , and prospicience.

  That inevitably changes the significance of the exercise. God may have given some people a gift for spelling, but He almost certainly didn’t intend that it should extend to getting succedaneum right. At this level, in fact, the competition isn’t really about the capriciousness of English spelling. It has more to do with the indistinctness of English pronunciation, which merges p’s and b’s and t’s and d’s, and which reduces every unstressed vowel to a blurry “uh.” That isn’t much of an impediment when the word is one you already recognize, like intelligible or fracas. But it makes it impossible to pin down the spelling of an unfamiliar word, particularly when its derivation is obscure. In fact I often had the feeling that the pronouncer was making an effort to keep the pronunciations as uninformative and ambiguous as possible.

  You can sense the contestants’ perplexity as the pronouncer feeds them words like apocope, hellebore, clavecin, and alegar—items that most people can happily live their lives without ever encountering. Occasionally the kids’ faces brighten when they recognize a word that happens to be on their cram lists, but usually they’re reduced to mere guessing. I felt a special sympathy for the kid who was eliminated when he blew opsimath, a word for someone who begins learning late in life. “O-B-S-O . . . ,” he started, not recognizing opsi- as the Greek root for “late”—as anyone would know who sees the connection to that other household word opsigamy.

  Yet even if spelling ability isn’t a very good indicator of intellectual capacity, you have no doubt that most of the kids profiled in Spellbound will succeed in later life. America still rewards dedication and hard work, just as it did in Horace Greeley’s day. And the modern spelling bee rewards something else: You have to have an instinct for understanding indistinct commands to perform arbitrary and often pointless acts, and somehow figure
out what’s expected of you. In today’s America, that’s another talent that serves you well.

  Like, Wow!

  I had been thinking about the word like, so I was listening for it in all the press interviews with students after the school shootings near San Diego last week. Understandably, most of them were struggling to put their thoughts in words, and their speech was punctuated by ums and ers and you knows. But of the dozen students that I listened to, not one used the word like. Nobody said, “Like, they were yelling at us to leave the building” or “I was like, ‘let’s get out of here.’”

  There’s no question that all these kids use like that way in their ordinary conversation—you’d be hard-pressed to find a dozen adolescents in the whole country who don’t. But whatever critics and teachers may think, like is more than just an unconscious tic or a filler that people stick in while they’re vamping for time. It’s a word with a point of view, and speakers can shut it down when that isn’t what they want to convey.

  Like a lot of modern sensibilities, that point of view and that use of like originated with the hipsters of the fifties. In their mouths, it wasn’t a sign of inarticulateness, the way people would come to think of it later. Nobody ever accused the hipsters of being at a loss for words, even if it wasn’t always easy to know what they meant. But the word contributed to the sense of a language that didn’t actually mean anything so much as it evoked, the way a jazz riff does. It turned everything the hipsters said into a kind of extended simile, as if to say, “I, like, gotta use words when I talk to you.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, March 20, 2001

  Mainstream Americans didn’t learn that kind of talk from the hipsters themselves. They got it from TV and radio programs that diffused the lingo in a diluted form. DJ’s like Wolfman Jack and Philadelphia’s Hy Lit lifted their patter from the comic Lord Buckley, who also originated the hipster shtick that Steve Allen worked over in his bopster fairy tales. Sid Caesar had a bopster character called Progress Hornsby, and Lenny Bruce did a much more dead-on routine in the persona of jazz musician Shorty Peterstein. And probably most influentially, at least in the culture at large, there was Maynard G. Krebs, the goateed beatnik wannabe that Bob Denver played on the late-fifties TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Krebs was given to saying things on the order of “Like, wow! That is, like, really, like, cool!”

  To a lot of adults in those days, that was pretty much the way all teenagers were starting to sound. In short measure, critics were making like the symptom of an alarming decline in communication skills among the nation’s young people. That single word seemed to embody all the pernicious influences at work in the culture—lax standards, television, poor manners, and a spreading mindlessness. And it’s true that the teenagers who picked up on like seemed to use it indiscriminately. But there was method in it—one way or another, like lays a certain distance between speakers and their words. Sometimes it can soften a request, as in “Could I, like, borrow your sweater?” Sometimes it communicates disaffection: “Whaddawe suppose to, like, read this?” Or you can use it to nod ironically at the banality of your words, as in, “Do you suppose we could, like, talk about it?” That’s one use of the word that just about everybody has picked up on; I even use it in e-mail.

  However like is used, though, you can still hear faint echoes of the hipster, at least in the sense that the word suggests the expressive limits of description. That might explain why young people in the eighties started to use the word as what linguists call a quotative marker, as in “I was like, ‘That is so uncool.’” The construction first came to national attention in 1982, when Moon Unit Zappa used it in her song Valley Girl, and it was quickly stereotyped as adolescent female speech, though in fact boys probably use it as much as girls do. Not surprisingly, that use of the word set in motion another wave of denunciations from critics who wondered why teenagers couldn’t say “I said” instead of “I was like.” But those aren’t the same. What follows “I said” is a report of people’s words; what follows “I was like” is a performance of their actions. That’s why “I was like” is as apt to be followed by a noise or gesture as by a sentence. Say is for telling, like is for showing.

  It’s no wonder like has become one of the linguistic emblems of the age. No other word embodies so many of the sensibilities that have been converging in the language since the hipsters first made their appearance—the ironizing, the mistrust of description, and particularly, the way we look to drama and simulation to do the work that used to be done by narrative. As Raymond Williams once observed, “We have never as a society acted so much or watched so many others acting.” In fact the average person hears more drama in any given week than an Elizabethan would have seen in an entire lifetime, back in what we think of as the Golden Age of drama. The dramatization isn’t limited to movies and TV sitcoms. It spills over to the cheerful exchanges of the happy talk news shows and the radio ads that can only make their point in little dialogues: “And that’s not all, Stan—I learned that I can pay off my new storm windows in easy installments.”

  In the midst of all that theatricality, it’s silly to get all huffy when the language comes up with a new construction that sets the scene for our dramatizings. Anyway, language doesn’t fix our mindset nearly as tyrannically as people like to think it does. When those kids down in San Diego County were faced with talking about the school shootings, they had no use for like and the distance it would have interposed between them and their words. They know as well as anybody that there are times when you have to throw yourself back on narrative to make sense of things.

  Lucubratin’ Rhythm

  I picked up a copy of Commentary a while ago, and there was Norman Podhoretz deploring the national obsession with sexual harassment, a concern that he tracked to what he called “the arcane lucubrations of marginal academics.” That word lucubration seems to be a favorite of waspish critics who want to deflate the pretensions of artists, intellectuals, and other people they consider self-important. John Simon used it to describe Wallace Shawn’s plays, James Kirkpatrick used it of the editorials in the New York Times, and the literary critic Joseph Epstein complained about “the opaque lucubrations of structuralists, semioticists and deconstructionists.”

  The wonder is that the word is still around. It originally comes from the Latin for “work by lamp light,” and refers to laborious study, or more generally to any writing that’s learned or pretentious. I first looked up the word a number of years ago, when I ran into it in one of Dr. Johnson’s essays—that’s the nice thing about recondite words like lucubrate: You can have precise memories of your first encounters with them. But it was clearly a rare and mock-pompous word even back in the eighteenth century. And by all rights, it should have disappeared when English gave up trying to refashion itself as a dialect of Latin. It should have gone the way of clancular, cubiculary, deuteroscopy, and other latinate mouthfuls that Johnson included in his Dictionary.

  Fresh Air Commentary, March 7, 2001

  For some reason, though, lucubration has managed to cling to life in the penumbra of the English vocabulary, maybe because it smacks of the very pedantry it usually describes. I’ve never actually written the word before now; I’ve always thought of it as one of those items that you’re better off just taking a quiet pride in knowing. But I can understand the urge to stick it in. It’s a fine-sounding string of syllables: You have the feeling that whatever lucubrate denotes, it’s probably a very good name for it. And as a word like that gets increasingly rarefied, it naturally tends to slip from its moorings and drift off on a plane of pure sound-symbolism. Carried away on the assonance of those u’s, people start to use lucubration to mean all sorts of things. Sometimes it seems to mean just “ramblings” or “banalities,” and sometimes it seems to mean something like “rummaging around.”

  Even the redoubtable William F. Buckley used lucubrate incorrectly as a transitive verb when he described the defense attorneys in the O. J. Simpson trial as “lucubratin
g a defense thesis.” I expect that Buckley meant something like “dreaming up” or “conjuring.” But you can be sure that Dr. Johnson would never have used the verb with a direct object—you could lucubrate on a defense, but that would have a different meaning. And there was an even more startling malapropism in a review of a Tom Wolfe novel that Norman Mailer published in the New York Review of Books. It contained the sentence.

  No one will ever be the same after reading [Wolfe’s] set piece on the massive copulation of a prize stallion with a thoroughbred mare (after she has been readied for this momentous event by the lucubrations produced in her by the mouth and nose of a third horse, Sad Sam!).

  I don’t know exactly what Mailer imagined was going on in the mare, but it presumably wasn’t scholarly musings. Probably he was misled by the resemblance to lubrication and lubricious. But it’s notable that the gaffe eluded the editors as well.

  When William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, and the editors of the New York Review of Books have all lost their grip on the meaning of a word, maybe we should think about putting it out to pasture. And while we’re at it, there are other Johnsonian holdovers that we might want to give notice to, like lambent, etiolated, tergiversation , rebarbative, and jejune. (Jejune in particular is almost always a bad idea.)

  Of course the second you propose dropping a word like lucubration, the Friends of the English Language will be up in arms to remind you of our obligation to preserve all the fine distinctions and shades of meaning that have been handed down to us. But those were gone long ago. It isn’t just that most people don’t have any context for a word like lucubration, but that whatever nuances it might have had once are washed out now by the pure resplendence of its syllables. When a word starts to sound that elegant, nobody can hear what it’s saying anymore.