Little did J.D. Salinger know what he would wreak. Excerpts from a delightful essay by Clark Whelton in City Journal:
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff
I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century…
In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.” Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s….All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”)…
Via Arts & Letters Daily. The estimable Theodore Dalrymple writes frequently for City Journal.
Just listen to the ramblings of your average politician these days if you’re looking for an example of the concept of vagueness.
As for university professors criticizing education standards, these are the people who teach the teachers in the first place. They needn’t look far to assign blame. The modern university is a veritable manufacturing plant for vagueness.
The estimable Theodore Dalrymple is a treasure, roughly, despite their completely different professional specialties, the British equivalent of Thomas Sowell.
Dude!
I dug Dalrymple before Dalrymple was cool.
That might be sorta, like interesting, maybe, if I was, like, interested in it, a little bit. 😉
I know, eh?!!!
If you think the average teen is vague, try reading some papers written in the arts and humanities the last 20 years or so. Most salient feature is the use of “scapegoat” as a verb.
Mm, ya right, whatever, like I’m so – duh, and he’s like all nu-uh no waaaaaay we talk like that lol.
Not just kids, but academics as well, although they are far better at appearing to be profound while being every bit as uncommunicative as the she who talks with squirrels.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/observer_v4a.pdf
A dialect of English know as “valley girl” started it, I think- “Like -totally like he like said like blah blah and like I said like “whatever”.
Ouch it hurt to type that, let alone hear it.
In five years time all the Leftists and a large minority of new conservative bloggers(example-paul in calgary) are going to be writing just like “new” has been these past couple of years.
People here have been complaining about the declining quality of trolls?
This is why their quality has been declining.
Vagueness, chuckleheaded thinking, poor observance of writing form; they all contribute to the new fad of intellectual fade.
(example-john begley- and who does he get support from with the vague chuckleheaded excuse that “language evolves”?-Louise)
It isn’t evolution, it is devolution.
I just think that you should, um, stop, like, scapegoating students, Phantom, okay? As one who studies Quran, you exhibit rampant political and cultural ignorance! You’re just using sweeping political and cultural generalizations. Please do the research before repeating things without researching them first. I’m very much a graduate student in English and you have no right to be so totally racist!!! If you feel that you are ready to try to address these questions in a more sophisticated way you should contact university department.
I know, right?
My generation had it’s own lingo,and there were a few who were almost incomprehensible with their,”like..cool..far out, groovy…ripoff …heavy..man” type of speech.
I was glad when that era ended if for nothing more than that we could start speaking English again,but then came the “valley girl” and it was back to “like…….you know….”
Sometimes one of these kids will corner me on a jobsite to tell me all about their weekend adventures. Usually by the time they’re finished,I have no idea what in hell they did,so I do as my daughter directed,”just smile and nod.”
We have nearly all the books Dalrymple’s written. He’s a keeper, you know!
From my understanding, and I could be wrong, a good vocabulary comes from reading. Lots of reading. Kids don’t read anymore. When I was younger we were always trading books and asking each other for reading suggestions. Always reading at least 2 books at a time. I rarely see anybody reading a book nowadays.
Plus there is a trend where kids want to sound stupid. It’s a trend that keeps coming around. Alexi Sale did a bit on it once where he was amazed at the people starting to use a Cockney accent. Intentionally sounding uneducated and stupid. It boggles the mind. Now we have the rap talk.
Al Capone took elecution lessons to lose his accent because he didn’t want people to think he was stupid.
Over twenty years ago, I read an excerpt from an architectural piece. It described a building as “conceptualistic innuendo, pyramided on spatial forbearance, and betokening a tactile, luminous, cosmological volumentality”. It stuck with me because it sounds erudite, learned, and impressive.
There’s just one problem – it doesn’t actually mean anything. (It is also stunningly ineffective as a pick-up line.) It’s not as primitive as the “Like, you know..” style, but it’s equally vapid.
But the man who wrote that probably has a string of degrees and letters after his name. Is it surprising that our young people are are incapable of expressing thoughts, with teachers such as him?
Orwell predicted this in Nineteeneightyfour; his appendix on “Newspeak” mentioned that in order to prevent thoughtcrime, it was necessary to reduce the number of words in the English vocabulary. If you don’t have the words, how can you form subversive thoughts? Doubleplusgood!
towtally Mamaba. Like, towtally.
Say, can we say “groovy” again yet? I always liked groovy ever since I met this freaky girl from California in the ’70s. She was trying to collect my tender young scalp for the Unification Church. Groovy, every third word. Seemed pretty exotic to the kid me in SteelTown.
Double plus groovy, baby. ~:D
Dalrymple does rock. His essays have delighted me for years.
My dear, late father was a bit of a grammar martinet. When some one used the phrase “You know” in conversation with him he would respond “No- I don’t know”.
I spent many happy family dinners listening to nieces and grandchildren prattling on interrupted by a loud “No- I don’t know”.
I spent years reading to my children and teaching them proper diction. It has paid off. When I went to school we even had a diction course. Mind you that was in England and a long time ago.
“You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.”
Unfortunately he’s got it exactly backwards. We know that the average IQ has been rising by about 3 points every decade over multiple generations. This improvement seems to be entirely due to an increase in the capacity for abstract thinking amongst the general populace. Whatever opinion you may have formed thanks to your broad generalization about speech-patterns, blaming it on a decrease in abstract thinking skills is rather misguided.
The unbearable lightness of vagueness.
Ugh…I know exactly what he means.
This kind of talk really irritates me to no end.
“…and then I’m like….and then she’s like….and then he’s like….and then I’m like”
Anytime I hear “like” used that way, I’d LIKE to hit them over the head with a f**king shovel.
Alex – “We know that the average IQ has been rising by about 3 points every decade over multiple generations.”
Stats or it didn’t happen.
Alex,
Perhaps. But there is no doubt that people who learn to speak well can express their increased abstract thinking skills better.
Conflating clear speech with IQ may be wrong but do you not think that well spoken people do a better job of communicating their ideas?
I think that using pat phrases such as “like”, “you know” or as is more common swear words, indicates laziness in thinking. They may have a higher IQ but who cares? Nobody wants to listen to them.
I’d read this article a few weeks ago in the National Post.
Alex, I don’t know where you got your information from but students poised to go into university talk and write this way. They are not fit to enter places of higher learning because they cannot communicate. It sickens me that adults are also this impaired. If IQ points are going up, I have a bridge to sell you.
wnmc:
“Perhaps. But there is no doubt that people who learn to speak well can express their increased abstract thinking skills better”
Oh, absolutely. I’m not trying to downplay the importance of a well-developed vocabulary; just pointing out that we’ve seen an increase in abstract-thinking ability rather than a decrease. Therefore, if the vocabulary of the average person is indeed declining, there would be an inverse correlation between the two, and likely no causative link.
Osu:
“Alex, I don’t know where you got your information from but students poised to go into university talk and write this way.”
The college enrollment rate has roughly doubled in the last 5 decades. Even with an average 15 point increase in IQ over that time, it seems obvious that the increase in students would have resulted in a decrease in overall quality amongst the applicants. It would be nice to see some real statistics before coming to a conclusion, but there’s no real mystery here.
No one who is normal wants to be seen as some smart snob. So the language reverts to its lowest common denominator.
The words mean less than the gestures.
Also because thinking has become more in line with relativism paired with intuitive thought. Makes logic almost an after thought. Just read Greek to see the difference. Its probably the most complicated logically constructed language man has spoken.
This trend is also part of the Cultures trend towards syphilizing it population by making them infantile. For more control of course & our good.
JMO
“Even with an average 15 point increase in IQ over that time…”
Again…
KevinB, Churchill said:
“Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all.”
I always think of that quote when I hear flummery like that architecture quote.
Catcher In The Rye is the biggest piece of crap I have ever read other that Moby Dick. Who likes that garbage?
Seriously, no wonder kids have no interest in literature if they are forced to read such crap in school. Make the little delinquents read A Confederacy Of Dunces or anything by Hemingway and perhaps they will have respect for the English language.
Now you may grade and correct my rant. Thank you.
Mamba, u r towtally mean for mocking poor Alex. Poor dude, like he’s just “duh?” and u’re all “reeeow!” and I’m like “woa!”
y’know?
Trent – you’re wrong about Moby Dick.
The South Park episode about Catcher in the Rye is brilliant (they almost always nail it). The boys are enormously excited to be reading Salinger’s book because they’ve been told that it was banned all over the place and it inspired Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon (“The king of the hippies!”) and Hinckley to shoot Reagan and some other psycho to do something, and it’s full of swearing, and… and they’re very, very disappointed. “It’s just some stupid teenager whining about how lame he is!”
Phantom – and I’m all like OMG LOL ALEX SUX FR REEL I PWND HIM!!!!!!!
you totally PWND him. I’m going like “awesome PWNage babe!!” But so mean! Like pffft! rowww!
Alex dude, gonna leave a scar man.
Trent – you’re right about Catcher in the Rye, it’s the worst book I’ve ever read. Actually I use that term loosely as I only made it about one third of the way through. I kept hoping that Caulfield jerk would just kill himself and save us all the misery, but sadly he did not.
I’m beginning to think that the devolution of language referred to must be limited to large cities. I used to see it in Vancouver, but assumed it was secondary to ingestion of large quantities of cannabinoids as many of the speakers of such dialects showed up in my office reeking of cannabis.
After moving to the interior of BC, I no longer hear people speak in this manner aside from some high school students but they seem to grow out of it. So, I’m not sure if we’re dealing with a pharmacologic modulation of language or a social effect on language. The overuse of “like” is interesting as in the 1960’s, a common zero information content phrase I’d find myself using was “like wow man that’s really groovy” but there were reasons for that.
Even more aggravating than ‘like, you know, and I’m like‘, I find ‘and I go…, then he goes…, etc‘.
I mean like, totally weird.
“conceptualistic innuendo, pyramided on spatial forbearance, and betokening a tactile, luminous, cosmological volumentality”
That’s poetry, man.
Yeah, well, yannow – whatever.
Moby Dick is an indisputable member of the canon(i can quote whole paras…word after word all mellifuously conjuring up scenes that are absolutely vivid in my mind’s eye! )…..but as far as ‘style’ goes i agree that comparisons ARE odious so you really are allowed to pick and choose your reading…imagine that!!!!….and yes langwidge certainly evolves devolves changes…at the moment i’m rereading jane austen….i find an enormity of what at first blush appears stilted awkward usage…but after a chapter or two it flows as easily as my own lower case emissions.
dalrymple?….i like him very much indeed but am surprised at the uncharitable comments he made toward the EDL….i shall therefore temper my affection and regard.
and as for you OZ?…be a good boy and get stuffed and then blow smoke up your OWN basic fundament….i’ll even assist you…
“demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles”
I just got an ache in my head.
What chew talken bout Willis?????
nowam sayn?
Speaking in terms of Hip Hop and my school expirience, slang is used as a form of code. We used to use a mix of Jamacian Patwa and Hip Hop slang to speak infront of teachers, cops, girl friends and anyone else.
Also, ‘context’ is very important to using slang. Some words can mean more than one thing.
If u don’t know u betta ax somebody.
Alex, one out of seven college students drops out. The remainder are usually Chinese whose money is more valued than their complete mangling of the English language. The standards have been lowered to such a degree that we should worry who gets in.
Tour some schools. Test students’ ability to communicate with you. Potential NASA or street-sweeper material. You tell me.
“Alex, one out of seven college students drops out. The remainder are usually Chinese whose money is more valued than their complete mangling of the English language.”
Eh? So 15% of students drop out, and the 85% who don’t drop out are “usually” Chinese?
You’ll forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical. Last time I visited the U of T campus, it was still mostly white. Quite a few brown people, too. Even some of dem knee-grows. Asians (of ALL types, let alone Chinese) seemed to be a minority.
“The standards have been lowered to such a degree that we should worry who gets in.”
So we agree – your observation that the vocabulary of the average college applicant seems to have decreased over time can be attributed to the greater pool of applicants who are accepted. I’m not sure why this is of concern, other than that it tends to lower the overall value of a college education. Supply and demand, and all that.
“I didnt say ‘no’,know what Im saying, all I was saying was was “know” in “know what Im saying ?,know what Im saying?”-Jrock from TPB
“I dont know what the f”K he’s saying” Ricky
Alex, it’s clear you never let natural light touch you or you would see the world is not what you think it is.
Look like Larry and Curly just got their Moe.
Do grow up, Alex.