The inarticulate society

Whatever happened to the once strong, vital, unique American language? It hasn’t been seen in some time. Maybe because it’s been completely covered by the thicket of “you knows” and “whatevers” and various other verbal tics that by now have overwhelmed the poor thing. The way kudzu, given sufficient time and neglect, will completely hide a great oak.

H. L. Mencken, who wrote his authoritative three-volume study The American Language in between his provocative columns for the Baltimore Sun, would be hard put to recognize the once vibrant American vernacular.

In recent years, a tumorous mass of text message techno-lingo has only added another layer to the overgrowth covering a once muscular, colorful, ever alive, ever adaptable language-until you have to wonder if there’s still a language somewhere underneath all of that mass trying to get out. Or has it simply rotted away?

To read some of the alleged prose that crosses an editor’s desk is like trying to follow the “deliberations” of the Arkansas legislature when one of its more verbally challenged members is wrestling with what remains of the English language. (The language usually loses, two falls out of three.)

A whole plague of talking points, PowerPoint presentations, and TED talks now seems to have replaced anything as simple, profound and moving as the spoken word. Someone once said there is nothing so fascinating as listening to an intelligent, well-educated man, or woman,just thinking aloud-without props, audio-visual “aids,” and other substitutes for real thought. Margaret Thatcher could do it in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill at the dinner table. But such speakers grow as rare as they were engaging.

Years ago a less-than-great book with a great title-The Inarticulate Society by Tom Shachtman-offered three reasons for the general decline of American as she is spoke. Or as Mr. Shachtman put it in his own ponderous way, the decline could be traced to “three interlocking cultural courses that influence and exacerbate each other.”

The first was the move away from the written word toward other means of communication-telephone, television and popular music.

But the written word always owed much of its power to the spoken. Even now writers are told to “find a voice.” And one test of good prose remains how it sounds when recited aloud.

Demosthenes was scarcely less eloquent because he was an orator, not a writer. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could hardly be described as inarticulate, yet their most stirring words were delivered not in print but over the radio. If we have grown inarticulate, the fault lies not in our media but in our selves.

The second reason for the decline of American speech, according to Mr. Shachtman, is the absence of good public models; he cited the preppy awkwardness of the first George Bush and the deceptive glibness of Arkansas’ own Bill Clinton. After that, the decline of the language seemed to accelerate: Both of those presidents seemed Ciceros compared to the dyslexic speech of the chief executive who came after them, George W. Bush.

Happily, American presidents do not determine how articulate American society will be. The first of the line, George Washington, was more a man of action than words. And by the 1920s, H. L. Mencken could describe Warren Harding’s rhetorical style as “a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

Tom Shachtman was so obsessed with role models that he objected to having movie villains use good diction, as in the James Bond series, because he didn’t want the impressionable to associate articulate speech with evil.

But hasn’t the model American hero long been the strong, silent type-that is, the inarticulate type-at least since Gary Cooper?

Yup.

So is all this mourning for American articulateness just the usual generational complaint about the younger set?

No, there’s something more to it than that. If you seek evidence of the language’s decline, just listen to some of the conversations around you in public places. Or turn on your television. Almost any comedy from the ’30s-see the Marx Brothers-sounds so much more articulate than its clumsy counterpart in these verbally soggy (and often enough vulgar) times. Those old movies actually have dialogue rather than the simulacrum that passes for it today, when obscenities are used as a substitute for wit.

Looking for culprits to blame for the decline of the language, Author Shachtman rounded up the usual suspects, among them the public schools and the latest wave of immigrants. The standard, unimaginative English taught in school can indeed mummify the language but, at least since colonial times, the dialects of immigrants and the poor have enlivened, not deadened, it.

A mind as absorbent as a child’s may actually profit from being exposed to a variety of accents and idioms. Dialect was once a rich source of American literature. Alas, it seems to have been snuffed out by a combination of (a) political correctness, and (b) an insistence on bland, homogenized, respectable-that is, dead-language. Maybe that’s why there’s no successor to Mark Twain or even S. J. Perelman in sight.

Tom Shachtman was getting warm when he blamed the decline of American eloquence on the “marketing mentality.” Instead of trying to elevate American discourse and thereby risking leadership, political consultants tend to craft their candidates’ words so they’ll reflect public opinion rather than shape it.

The clear and concise Barry Goldwater lost his presidential election-big-and the lesson was not lost on the country’s political hucksters: Never let ’em pin you down. Soon enough the aim of political rhetoric became positioning or triangulation or anything but clarity. The slippery style of Stephen A. Douglas in his historic debates with Abraham Lincoln seems to have won out at last.

These days the successful political leader is told to avoid specifics and traffic in generalities, the vaguer the better. The object of political speech becomes a kind of glib opacity-to make a speech rather than say anything. The occasional, premeditated sound bite may then be thrown in to give the consumer the illusion of solidity, the way gravel may be added to chicken feed.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, that magisterial arbiter of American eloquence, has noted that “leadership often requires telling the citizenry truths it does not want to hear” and that “one test of the maturity of a people is a willingness to act on facts requiring sacrifice.”

Such a definition of leadership might strike modern political operatives as suicidal. They know that the way to win an election is to muffle unpleasant truths and soften hard principles. Besides, clarity is hard work. It’s so much easier to fuzz the message and so write around any inconvenient facts that may disrupt the smooth flow of currently fashionable patter. Just ask any American editorial writer. We’re experts at it.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.