Going Nucular Read online

  The New York Times, February 22, 2005

  But our anti-semantic postures can make it hard to come clean about our semantic preoccupations. That may be why opponents of gay marriage often appeal to slippery slope arguments, as if altering the meaning of the M-word will threaten “the institution of marriage” itself. That phrase doesn’t simply evoke other bulwarks of the social order that we describe as institutions, like the free press and Dick Clark. It also blurs the distinction between the concept of marriage and its actuality. For opponents, broadening the definition of marriage is like opening an exclusive hotel to package tours, with the risk that the traditional clientele will no longer feel like checking in. It amounts to “taking the rights and protection of marriage and handing them out willy-nilly,” as Representative J. D. Hayworth, Republican of Arizona, recently put it (though “willy-willy” probably comes closer to what he had in mind).

  Listening to arguments like those can make you sympathize with legislators in Massachusetts and elsewhere who are trying to find a way to confer the rights without the title, even if “civil union” ultimately comes down to marriage with an asterisk. Whether their reservations are personal or political, they’re not pretending that nothing more than “mere semantics” is at stake.

  In the end, though, the meaning of marriage will be determined by the way ordinary people use the word, not the edicts of courts or legislatures. And popular usage can be surprisingly adaptable—as attitudes evolve, it has few qualms about modifying the traditional definitions of words, however sanctified they seem at the time.

  Take couple. The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary still defines the word as “A man and woman united by love or marriage.” And the phrase “homosexual couple” didn’t appear in The New York Times in 1967, with “gay couple” making its Times debut in the following year in a well-intended Sunday Magazine article called “Civil Rights and the Homosexual.” (The writer urged tolerance of homosexuality “either as an emotional disorder or an unalterable sexual deviation,” but stressed that “scholars of homosexual culture cannot foresee any equivalent of marriage for homosexuals.”) Yet just a few decades later, reservations about referring to “gay couples” seem as quaint as that phrase “the homosexual,” which reduced a group to a uniform anthropological type.

  The meaning of family has been changing, too. The third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1992, defines the word as “a fundamental social group typically consisting of a man and woman and their offspring.” But when the fourth edition came out in 2000, the last part of the definition was altered to “typically consisting of one or two parents and their children.” The new wording is descriptive, not prescriptive. Families today don’t strike us as “atypical” simply because they don’t conform to the domestic configuration of Father Knows Best.

  The definition of marriage is becoming more inclusive, as well. A new Canadian edition of the OED defines the word as “the legal or religious union of two people.” (While the editors of the OED are at it, you hope they’ll revisit their definition of couple—and for that matter, of love in the romantic sense, which currently runs, “That feeling of attachment which is based upon difference of sex.”)

  True, the resistance to changing the meaning of marriage runs deeper than with other words. But usage rarely stands on principle. As more same-sex couples are married in religious or civil ceremonies, sentences like “Jane and June have been married for 15 years” are bound to become part of the linguistic wallpaper of the media in the same way “gay couple” has. Whom God has joined together, People magazine is not about to put asunder.

  At that point, we can talk about a genuine change in semantics—though there certainly won’t be anything “mere” about it. And sooner or later, the legal forms will inevitably follow suit. As William Hazlitt wrote in 1830: “Laws and institutions are positive things” (that is to say, formally established arrangements) “while opinions and sentiments are variable; and it is in conforming the stubbornness and perversity of the former to the freedom and boldness of the latter, that the harmony and beauty of the social order consists.”

  Obscenity Rap

  Every age swears differently from the last one—it’s as if we have to up the ante every generation or so. As Jonathan Swift wrote:

  . . . now-a-days Men change their Oaths

  As often as they change their Cloaths.

  Hence the problems faced by the writers of historical fictions nowadays. If you have your characters use historically accurate swearwords, they’re apt to sound no more offensive than your grandmother in a mild snit. The only way to convey the potency of the characters’ oaths is to have them use modern swearwords, even if they’re anachronistic.

  That’s the approach taken by the HBO series Deadwood, set in a South Dakota mining camp in the 1870s. As a lot of people have noted, the show is positively swilling in obscenity—the characters use fuck and fucking with a frequency that would make Tony Soprano blush.

  But fuck wasn’t actually a swearword back then. It was indecent, of course, but people only used it for the sexual act itself. Whereas swearwords are the ones that become detached from their literal meanings and float free as mere intensifiers. Swearing isn’t using fucking when you’re referring to sex, it’s using it when you’re talking about the weather.

  Fresh Air commentary, June 20, 2004

  In fact when you look up fuck in Jonathan Lighter’s magisterial Dictionary of American Slang, you discover that the all-purpose insult fuck you was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century creation, and go fuck yourself isn’t attested until 1920. Fucked up and Don’t fuck with me didn’t show up till around the time of the Second World War. And while people may have been emphasizing nouns with fucking from the 1890s, it wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that you heard things like “She fucking well better tell me” or “Get the fuck out of here,” both Deadwood favorites.

  The same holds for most of the other obscene words that you hear on Deadwood. Back in the 19th century, people used asshole to refer to a bodily orifice, but it was only in the 1920s that anybody thought to apply the words to a despicable person. And it was around the same time that the new word “motherfucker” was coined with roughly the same meaning.

  True, it isn’t always easy to tell exactly when these uses of obscene words came into general use—they’re not the sorts of items you run into in Henry James. But actually there are plenty of nineteenth-century examples of fuck being used in a literal way in letters, pornographic novels, and slang dictionaries, and other swearwords show up pretty frequently as well. And if fuck and the rest had been used in an extended way as swearwords, it’s a safe bet those uses would have showed up in the same kinds of sources.

  The swearwords those Deadwood characters would actually have used had religious overtones rather than sexual or scatological ones. They would have peppered their speech with goddamn, Jesus, and particularly hell, a word that nineteenth-century Americans were famous for using with a dazzling virtuosity—“a hell of a drink,” “What in hell did that mean?,” “hell to pay,” “The hell you will,” “hell-bent,” “Hell, yes,” “like a bat out of hell,” “hell’s bells,” and countless others.

  Back then, those oaths were strong enough to spawn a whole vocabulary of the substitutes that H. L. Mencken called “denaturized profanities”—darn, doggone, dadburned, tarnation, goldarn, gee-whiz , all-fired, and the like. (It’s only in the 1920s that you start running into substitutes for fucking like freaking or effing—another sign that it wasn’t used as a swearword before then.) But if you put words like goldarn into the mouths of the characters on Deadwood , they’d all wind up sounding like Yosemite Sam.

  One reason for the shift is that old-fashioned blasphemy didn’t have the same illicit thrill for a secular age. When I was a kid I was always a little puzzled about the commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain. Not that I didn’t know better than to say goddamn at the dinner table.
But when people listed the Ten Commandments, it was hard to see why the profanity rap should get a higher billing than murder, theft, or perjury.

  That change in attitudes is what drove World War I dough-boys into the bedroom and bathroom looking for new boundaries to trespass. That shift was more than a simple change of fashion. The old profanity was a matter of irreverance—using respectable words in disrespectful contexts. The new obscenity is the opposite of that. It’s a kind of linguistic slumming, where we bring unclean words into the rooms at the front of the house. The taboo against profanity comes from on high; the taboo against obscenity comes from within.

  The shift had a lot to do with the great leveling of swearing over the past century. The Victorians liked to think of swearing as a vice endemic to men of the lower orders—one swore “like a trooper,” or “like a sailor.” Nowadays swearing isn’t a mark of any particular class or gender; the words are dirty little secrets we can all draw on when we find ourselves in an angry or aggressive mood. You don’t find many people nowadays who will tell you that they never swear—and if they do, they’re most likely bragging about their even temper, not their gentility or their piety.

  The new rituals of swearing have altered the hypocrisy that surrounds the practice, too. Time was that swearwords were completely absent from public discourse, and genteel people could go through their lives pretending they didn’t exist. Nowadays, it’s more a question of maintaining an official sanctimony in designated public forums.

  You can use fuck in The New Yorker but not in The New York Times. Bill Maher can say fuck on HBO but not on ABC, and Jon Stewart can say it on the Comedy Channel, but with the understanding it will be bleeped. Steven Sondheim can use shit in a song when Sweeney Todd plays in theaters (though actually that one is an anachronism, too), but public radio shows are apt to have qualms about playing the song over the air, particularly in the current climate. As one public radio producer put it recently, ”This isn’t just about seven words anymore.”

  Of course we have to draw a line somewhere, if swearing is going to have any transgressive force at all. The wonder is that people can still defend distinctions like those with a keen moral fervor, even in an age when more than 90 percent of Americans pay for some form of subscription TV. The Victorians would have had a hard time understanding how our sense of outrage about swearing could fluctuate according to where we are on the dial.

  Propaganda in Drag

  Nobody blinks an eye these days when advertisers ape news-show formats in TV infomercials. So the Department of Health and Human Services must have been surprised when the General Accounting Office announced in February of 2004 that they’d be investigating the department’s use of the same techniques to promote the Bush Administration’s prescription-drug bill. The department sent out a video news release to extol the virtues of the bill, complete with fake reporters and a shot of President Bush receiving a standing ovation as he signed the bill.

  On Comedy Central’s Daily Show, one of John Stewart’s mock-correspondents described that kind of bogus newscast as “infoganda,” and worried that it might drive genuine fake news-casts like Stewart’s off the air. And in The New York Times, Frank Rich extended infoganda to the range of ploys the administration has used to spin news coverage, from the manipulation of the Jessica Lynch story, the “Mission Accomplished” photo op aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the editorial direction it offered to Showtime’s docudrama D.C, 9/11 to the TV blitz by Condoleezza Rice and others aimed at discrediting Richard Clarke.

  As it happens, infoganda has been kicking around for a while—it first appeared in the press during the Gulf War of 1991 as a description of the reports and footage that the Pentagon was furnishing to journalists. But the word may very well have been independently coined on several occasions. It’s a natural for this sort of thing—it fits the pattern of those spliced-together portmanteau words like infotainment and docudrama. Names like those are the linguistic version of Junkyard Wars—there’s nothing new under the sun, apart from what you can cobble together from the stuff that’s lying around the shop.

  Fresh Air commentary, April 2, 2004

  What’s curious about infoganda is that anyone would feel the need for a new word to describe those government-produced news videos. There was a time when that territory would have been adequately covered by propaganda, a genre that has always worked best in drag.

  Propaganda was originally coined by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century as the name of the Vatican committee charged with propagating the faith, but it didn’t become part of the everyday vocabulary until the time of the First World War, when the British and Germans began to use the new techniques of mass advertising and public relations to rouse popular support for their cause. Looking back on the period a few decades later, the journalist Will Irwin observed: “Before 1914, ‘propaganda’ belonged only to literate vocabularies and possessed a reputable, dignified meaning. . . Two years later the word had come into the vocabulary of peasants and ditchdiggers and had begun to acquire its miasmic aura.”

  Americans got into this game when the country entered the war in 1917. President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information, modeled on the British Department of Information. It became known as the Creel Committee after its chairman, the journalist George Creel. The committee churned out posters, pamphlets and press releases, and enlisted 75,000 people to serve as “four minute men,” who gave short prepared speeches and lantern-slide shows at theaters and public gatherings, urging people to enlist or buy liberty bonds.

  Most of that material was pretty purple stuff, laced with phrases like “bombs or bondage” and “If you don’t come across, the Kaiser will.” But Creel denied that the committee was trafficking in propaganda, a word he associated with “deceit and corruption.” “Our effort,” he said, “was educational and informative throughout. No other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts.”

  As time went on, public wariness turned propaganda into an orphan word that no one would own up to—in 1939, a poll showed 40 percent of Americans blamed propaganda for the US entry into the First World War. In that environment, propagandists took greater pains to disguise their product. In 1938, one New York editor objected to the deluge of phony press releases from the “news services” that had been set up by foreign governments to win favorable coverage. He warned that they threatened to break down the line of demarcation between news and propaganda, particularly if papers began to rely on them to fill their pages.

  But of course that was exactly the point of the exercise. By then it was clear that propaganda was most effective when it masqueraded as objective news. In 1941, when FDR wanted to drum up support for extending the draft and increasing American aid to the British war effort, he established an Office of Facts and Figures, headed by Archibald MacLeish. Some isolationist senators accused the administration of trying to set up a centralized propaganda bureau, but New York’s mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who had been an advocate of the program, reassured the public that “the office is not a propaganda agency. . . We don’t believe in this country in artificially stimulated, high-pressure, doctored nonsense.” Even so, in a private memo to Roosevelt, LaGuardia admitted that the agency’s goal was to provide the public with what he called “sugar coated, colored, ornamental matter, otherwise known as ‘bunk.’”

  By 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures had been absorbed into the Office of War Information, which was also encouraging Hollywood to make movies that roused patriotic sentiments. In the words of the agency’s director, the journalist Elmer Davis: “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most men’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture.”

  Ultimately, the American propagandists’ greatest victory was to discredit the word propaganda itself. By the time of the Cold War, propaganda only referred to what the other side said—and said crudely, at that. The word conjured up the bombast and strident language of the Soviet
s, not the soft-sell productions of our side. Propaganda programs were the ones with the Red Army Chorus in the background, not Stan Kenton.

  So it isn’t surprising that the use of propaganda continued to decline with détente, the end of the Vietnam war, and then the fall of Communism. Over the past five years, the word has been only a tenth as common in the press as it was in its Cold War heyday. That may be why people felt the need to coin infoganda to describe the fake news shows and contrived photo ops that are designed to blend seamlessly into the media background.

  Still, while there may be nothing new about these techniques, the current administration has exploited them more deftly than anyone since Roosevelt’s day. And they’ve found a fertile ground for their plantings in the modern media setting, which already blurs the lines between journalism and advocacy and reality and fiction.

  As a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said in defending the fake news spot about the prescription drug bill, “Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools.” It’s hard to argue with that. In a world of infomercials, advertorials, and docudramas, what’s one more imposture?

  Power to the People

  “Shop like a populist,” wrote a columnist in the St. Petersburg Times not long ago, recommending a local store that specializes in “quirky collectibles” like old soap boxes and bowling pins.

  That’s what the pop of populist has come to, a century after the disappearance of the Populists, or People’s Party, who were a powerful political force in the 1890s. The original Populists advocated restrictions on corporate power, the direct election of United States senators, an eight-hour day, and a graduated income tax—proposals that led critics to call them “wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatics.”