Going Nucular Read online

  I know that none of this is going to stanch the urge to use these words. They may annoy or puzzle most of the people who read them, but then when you see somebody using a word like lucubration or lambent, you can be pretty sure that it wasn’t stuck in for the reader’s benefit in the first place. And sometimes you have to forgive a writer for indulging a love of big words, particularly when they’re as delectable a mouthful as lucubration is—and even if, unlike Dr. Johnson, they’re not flogging a dictionary on the side. But let’s face it: That isn’t communication, it’s gargling.

  Ain’t Misbehavin’

  Exactly forty years ago the New Yorker ran a cartoon by Alan Dunn that showed a receptionist at the Merriam-Webster company saying to a visitor: “Sorry, Dr. Gove ain’t in.” You’d have to have a pretty long memory to get that reference today. But at the time, most New Yorker readers would have known that the Dr. Gove in question was Philip Gove, the editor of Merriam-Webster’s massive Third New International Dictionary, which had been published a few months earlier.

  By any standard, Webster’s Third was a monumental work of scholarship. But it stirred up a storm of controversy over what people considered its “permissive” approach to usage. More than anything else, what outraged the critics was that the dictionary declined to label ain’t as colloquial or substandard, noting that even cultivated people often used the word in speech as a contraction of “am not” and “is not.”

  That was all it took to open the floodgates. The New York Times described the dictionary as a bolshevik document, and the Chicago Daily News took it as the symptom of “a general decay in values.” A columnist for the Toronto Telegram called the dictionary’s acceptance of ain’t a shameful business—“It is one of the ugliest words in the English language, and I want no part of it.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, September 18, 2002

  Those fulminations sound a little over the top today, but then, this was thirty years before the phrase “lighten up” entered the language. Nowadays nobody blinks when dictionaries list words like yadda-yadda—in fact there’s probably nothing a new dictionary could include that could cause a major national scandal, certainly not to the point of inspiring a cartoon in the New Yorker. Yet ain’t is no closer to being standard English than it was then. In the upstairs-downstairs world of language, ain’t is still required to use the servants’ entrance.

  There has always been something odd about the stigma attached to ain’t. The word has been around since the seventeenth century, and for a long time nobody thought it was worse than any other contraction. Writers from Swift to Tennyson used it in their letters and speech in a completely unselfconscious way, and so did a number of Jane Austen characters. It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that critics started to condemn the word, and made the avoidance of ain’t the emblem of middle-class linguistic fastidiousness. The English upper class hung on to it for a while longer—Winston Churchill regularly used it in conversation, and Dorothy Sayers was always putting it into the mouth of her aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. But by the time Webster’s Third appeared, not even nobs were using the word in earnest.

  It’s hard to see what makes ain’t more objectionable than any other contraction, particularly when it’s short for “am not.” The aversion to “ain’t I” is so strong that people have invented the absurdly ungrammatical “aren’t I” as an alternative. (“Aren’t I? I sure are.”) That’s a pretty desperate expedient just to avoid using ain’t, and grammarians from H. W. Fowler to William Safire have urged that it’s time for “ain’t I” be accepted as standard English.

  Even with dictionaries and grammarians pleading for its rehabilitation, it isn’t likely that ain’t will be allowed into the drawing room of the language any time soon. I suspect that this isn’t just because educated people disapprove of ain’t in other people’s speech, but because they find it so useful in their own.

  Educated speakers have always used ain’t when they feel like a little linguistic slumming. But in recent years I’m hearing them use it more and more in a different way, when they want to suggest that a fact is just obvious on the face of things. A while ago a friend sent me an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted a dean at a prestigious Eastern university: “Any junior scholar who pays attention to teaching at the expense of research ain’t going to get tenure.” That ain’t was a nice touch, I thought. It made it clear that the dean’s conclusion wasn’t based on expert knowledge or some recent committee report—it was something that should be clear to anyone with an ounce of sense.

  That’s the message that ain’t conveys in all those common expressions like “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” or “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—ain’t tells you that you’re dealing with a nittygritty verity that you don’t need a college education to understand. The language is full of sayings that use ain’t like that, and they’d lose their proletarian pizzazz if you tried to put them in standard English: “It is not necessarily so,” “You have not seen anything yet,” “Hit them where they aren’t,” “That is not hay,” “Is that not a shame?”

  But educated people couldn’t keep using ain’t that way if the word weren’t considered a mark of uneducated speech. And it turns out that educated people use the word an awful lot. There are more than four million Web pages containing ain’t, virtually all of them put there by authors who know full well that the word isn’t supposed to be standard English. It gives you a sense of why everyone has such an interest in keeping ain’t from becoming a respectable linguistic citizen—what would we use to do our dirty work?

  There Are No Postmodernists in a Foxhole

  Like a lot of my favorite stories, this one has a pronoun in a featured role. It began with an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted Harvard President Lawrence Summers saying, “I regret any faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are not respected.”

  The sentence was tailor-made to bundle puristic panties, particularly given the context and speaker—and in fact a few weeks later, the Chronicle ran an extensive diatribe from a professor of English who took exception to Summers’ grammar. According to the writer, Summers should have said “I regret any faculty member’s leaving,” not “any faculty member leaving.” And the antecedent “any faculty member” required the pronouns “he or she,” not “they.” (Modern academics are particularly attached to the “he or she” construction, which enables them to sound politically correct and pedantic in the same breath.)

  The writer went on to chide President Summers for contributing to the general decline of precision in language—all the more distressing in someone who has presented himself as a crusader for scholarly rigor. Indeed, he said, the woeful state of the language is evident to anyone who listens to National Public Radio for fifteen minutes or reads a single section of The New York Times. That’s what happens when students are taught that writing is a form of pure self-expression, the letter-writer claimed, so that students “need never accept correction; for if it is their precious little selves they are expressing, the language of expression is answerable only to the internal judgment of those same selves.” We’ve come to the point, the writer said, where composition teachers have a horror of acting as language police and grammar itself is regarded as a form of reactionary tyranny.

  Fresh Air Commentary, August 20, 2002

  The response went on in this vein for a full 1,750 words, and concluded with an insistence that all college composition courses should henceforth teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. In short, it was an utterly routine grammatical harangue, distinguished only by the speciousness of the occasion for it. For example, that business about having to use the possessive “any member’s leaving” instead of “any member leaving” is one of those mindless superstitions that have been passed on to generations of schoolchildren at the end of Sister Petra’s ruler. As the linguist Geoff Pullum pointed out in a letter to the Chronicle, if you really believed the
construction was incorrect, you’d have to take the matter up with Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and most of the other great figures of English literature. As for the plural pronoun they, bear in mind that Summers’s words were quoted from a spoken interview, and that everybody uses the plural that way in their informal speech.

  In fact the only thing that made this disquisition notable is that its author was the redoubtable Stanley Fish, the literary theorist and self-styled champion of postmodern thought. As it happens, in fact, Fish’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education appeared about the same time as another extended public pronouncement of his, this one in the July issue of Harper’s magazine, where Fish offered a rejoinder to the attacks on postmodernism from the cultural right.

  That anti-postmodernist jihad has been waged with particular ferocity since September 11, 2001, as the right invokes the terrorist attacks in an effort to score a decisive victory in the culture wars. The first salvo was fired just ten days after the attacks by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times’s culture pages. According to Rothstein, postmodernists would be unable to condemn the attacks in an unqualified way, since they reject universal values and ideals. In fact, he said, postmodernism leads to establishing a moral symmetry between the terrorist and his opponent. And U.S. News & World Report commentator John Leo warned that our campus cultures have been captured by “the postmodern conviction that there are no truths or moral norms worth defending.” The result of that, he says, is an anything-goes morality and a “drumbeat of rule-breaking” that drowns out traditional values.

  Now you don’t have to be a devotee of academic fashion to see that this is all claptrap. In his Harper’s article, Fish rightly pointed out that the “postmodernism” that the conservatives are attacking is a caricature of what he and others have actually argued. Listening to cultural conservatives talk about “postmodernists” nowadays, you’re reminded of how the Church used to talk about the Masons.

  Distortions aside, though, the attacks on postmodern doctrine are bizarre on the face of things. Granted, a lot of modern academic theorizing is flaky and pretentious—though anyone who thinks this is a new development ought to take a look at what Dwight Macdonald was saying about academic writing forty years ago. If conservative critics seriously believe that the moral order of America is threatened by its literature professors, they should get back on their meds. It isn’t simply that the enterprises of philosophy and literary study have always been inconsequential in American life, and even in the American academy. More to the point, there’s no group more deeply invested in traditional standards and cultural hierarchy than academic humanists are, whatever theory they drive to work.

  When you read Fish’s linguistic screed in the Chronicle of Higher Education it becomes immediately clear just how absurd the whole campaign against postmodernism has been. “No norms worth defending”? “Drumbeats of rule-breaking”? “One standard is as good as another”? Not on Stanley Fish’s watch! When it comes to the crunch, Fish has ideas about standards that are every bit as conventional—and in the main, as unconsidered—as anything the cultural right could wish for. And most of his fellow-travelers will readily endorse those values, even if they might not pursue the point quite so splenetically. Not to worry: The future of the Republic is in safe hands.

  Adverbially Yours

  The other day I was listening to a colleague describe a piece of software he’d built that produces automatic summaries of newspaper articles. It picks out the most topical sentences, then it shortens them by stripping off their excess verbiage. “Like what?” I asked. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “we leave out the adverbs.” I pointed out that there are some adverbs that make a useful contribution to the meaning of a sentence. Words like never and not come to mind—you wouldn’t want an automatic summarizer to come back with a precis of a presidential press conference that read, “I had sexual relations with that woman.”

  Even so, I took his point. I recall hearing my eighth-grade English teacher say that the most beautiful sentence in English is “Jesus wept,” because it doesn’t say “Jesus wept bitterly.” At the time I didn’t realize that this was just his opinion—I thought it was some widely accepted judgment. But it’s true a lot of sentences are improved when you take the adverbs out. Graham Greene once said that if he opened a novel and someone answered tenderly, he closed it immediately. And once the whole of English literature is living online, maybe somebody will do us a favor by setting loose a virus that erases all the instances of tenderly and bitterly, not to mention plaintively, affectingly, and buoyantly . As an editor friend of mine used to say, “Don’t romance me, just pour the drink.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, June 4, 2001

  Adverbs tend to show people at their worst—posturing, embellishing, apologizing, or just being mealy-mouthed. Adverbs may be a relatively small proportion of the English vocabulary, but they account for about half the words on my personal enemies list. There are the lily-gilders like significantly and aggressively . Corporate publicists try to get at least one of these into every press release, almost always in a split infinitive: “We continue to aggressively reduce our cost base”; “We aim to significantly accelerate our delivery of products.” Intensifiers like that always strike me as sad tokens of the anxiety that won’t let people leave well enough alone.

  Then there are the rain-check adverbs like arguably, which give us license to make extravagant claims on credit. Sports writers love arguably. If you read through one month’s worth of Sports Illustrated recently, you would have learned that Simon Gagne is arguably the Philadelphia Flyers’s best forward, that the Mets’ Glendon Rusch is arguably the league’s best number five starting pitcher, and that Mookie Wilson’s tenth-inning appearance in game six of the 1986 World Series was arguably the greatest at-bat in Series history. Now I’ll grant you that’s one of the pleasures of talking sports, having endless arguments about superlatives that nobody can ever resolve. But there’s no excuse when Time magazine claims in its election coverage last fall that “Education is arguably the nation’s biggest problem.” That may be true, but then you could say the same thing about health care, the environment, violence, or drugs. Maybe we could just say that education is a big national problem, and save the argument for deciding who’s the best set-up man in the National League.

  As long as we’re driving arguably into the sea, perhaps we could also lose quite possibly. This one is a favorite of advertisers, who use it to drape their hyperbole with affected diffidence. “Quite possibly, the world’s perfect food”; “Quite possibly the finest motorcoach ever built.” It manages to be unctuous, grandiose, and suspicious at the same time, like a snooty butler who has been pocketing the silverware.

  Adverbs do have their partisans; Henry James said that he adored them. And there are some that have gotten a bad rap through no fault of their own, like hopefully. Usage critics are always jumping on this one, but it does journeyman work for us. I recently heard a TV reporter talking about floods in Iowa. He said, “Hopefully, the waters will soon subside.” I didn’t see how else he could have put that. “I hope the waters will subside”? Well, but who cares what he hopes? “One hopes?” or “It is to be hoped . . . ”? Maybe a little stiff for cable news. Let’s hang on to hopefully—it’s a credit to its syntactic category.

  But for the most part, when you see an adverb rounding the corner you have reasonable cause to stop and frisk. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how songs with adverbs as their titles are usually sodden with lyrical bathos. “The evening breeze caressed the trees, tenderly.” Or Stephen Stills’s “Helplessly Hoping ,” the quintessential example of rock-lyric overreaching. And then there’s Suddenly, an adverbial anthem that was a modest hit for Ray Peterson in 1960:

  Suddenly, I fell so suddenly.

  Oh, and desperately, I wanted you so desperately,

  And if you’ll be true to me, I’ll love you tenderly.

  But there are some great adverb songs, too, like B
illie Holiday’s Carelessly and Brook Benton’s Endlessly. Whatever its shortcomings as a suffix, -ly is a great syllable to croon.

  Wed the People

  In an interview last December, Howard Dean explained that Vermont had chosen to allow same-sex couples to enter into “civil unions” rather than “marriages” because “marriage is very important to a lot of people who are pretty religious.” That led George Will to complain that Dean was reducing the debate over the public meaning of marriage to “merely a semantic quibble.”

  It’s odd the way you always see semantic flanked by words like merely and quibble, even from writers who live by language. It’s the posture of people who like to pretend they don’t have the time or patience to bandy words.

  But the dispute over marriage is as purely semantic as they come, particularly in a society as obsessed with words as ours is. We may like to pretend that we’re a people with no patience for quibbling over “mere semantics,” but not even the medievals of Pierre Abélard’s age spent as much time as we do chewing over the nuances of names, symbols, labels, and titles. Hence our predilection for formulas like “the A-word,” “the B-word” and so on, as every issue is reduced to a single controversial expression, from abortion, AIDS, and amnesty to Zionism and zoning.

  What people have taken to calling “the M-word” is more charged than most, because it’s what linguists and philosophers call a performative notion. Like christening a boat or adjourning a meeting, marriage is a state of affairs that can be brought about merely by pronouncing certain words in an appropriate setting—words that have traditionally conferred not just solemn rights and obligations, but permission to canoodle, too.