Verbicide (1999)

In the beginning was the word....

HE ENTERED MY OFFICE for advice as a freshman advisee sporting nearly perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record—by all accounts a young man of considerable promise. During a 20-minute conversation about his academic future, however, he displayed a vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words: cool and really. Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair, he could use them interchangeably, as in "really cool" or "cool ... really!" He could also use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he was a student in a subsequent class, I later confirmed that my first impression of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary, and presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of "computer-speak." He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem, not of illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees little reason to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly, student papers, from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs that sound like advertising copy. Whether students are talking or writing, a growing number of them have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary. Excise "uh ... like ... uh" from virtually any teenage conversation, and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon.

In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000 words (Harper's Index 2000). This is a decline in not merely numbers of words but in the capacity to think. It is also a steep decline in the number of things that an adolescent needs to know and to name in order to get by in an increasingly homogenized and urbanized consumer society. This is a national tragedy virtually unnoticed in the media. It is no mere coincidence that in roughly the same half century, by one estimate, the average person has learned to recognize over 1000 corporate logos, but can now recognize fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality (Hawken 1994, 214). That fact says a great deal about why the decline in working vocabulary has gone unnoticed—few are paying attention. The decline is surely not consistent across the full range of language but concentrates in those areas having to do with large issues such as philosophy, religion, public policy, and nature. On the other hand, vocabulary has probably increased in areas having to do with sex, violence, recreation, consumption, and technology. Words like twitter and google have been appropriated or invented to describe entirely new ways to be illiterate and incoherent. As a result we are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most. "That sucks," for example, is a common way for budding young scholars to announce their displeasure about any number of things that range across the spectrum of human experience. But it can also be used to indicate a general displeasure with the entire cosmos. Whatever the target, it is the linguistic equivalent of duct tape, useful for holding disparate thoughts in rough proximity to some vague emotion of dislike.

The problem is not confined to teenagers or young adults. It is part of a national epidemic of incoherence evident in our public discourse, street talk, movies, television, and music. We have all heard popular music that consisted mostly of pre-Neanderthal grunts. We have witnessed "conversation" on TV talk shows that would have embarrassed retarded chimpanzees. We have listened to many politicians of national reputation proudly and heatedly mangle logic and language in less than a paragraph, although they can do it on a larger scale as well. However manifested, it is aided and abetted by academics, including whole departments specializing in various forms of postmodernism and the deconstruction of one thing or another. Not so long ago they propounded ideas that everything was relative, hence largely inconsequential, and that the use of language was an exercise in power, hence to be devalued. They taught, in other words, a pseudointellectual contempt for clarity, careful argument, and felicitous expression. Being scholars of their word, they also wrote without clarity, argument, and felicity. Remove half a dozen arcane words from any number of academic papers written in the past 10 years, and the argument—whatever it was—evaporates. But the situation is not much better elsewhere in the academy, where thought is often fenced in by disciplinary jargon. The fact is that educators have all too often been indifferent trustees of language. This explains, I think, why the academy has been a lame critic of what ails the world, from the preoccupation with self to technology run amuck. We have been unable to speak out against the barbarism engulfing the larger culture because we are part of the process of barbarization that begins with the devaluation of language.

The decline of language, long lamented by commentators such as H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, William Safire, and Edwin Newman, is nothing new. Language is always coming undone. Why? For one thing it is always under assault by those who intend to control others by first seizing the words and metaphors by which people describe their world. The goal is to give partisan aims the appearance of inevitability by diminishing the sense of larger possibilities. In our time, language is under assault by those whose purpose it is to sell one kind of quackery or another: economic, political, religious, or technological. It is under attack because the clarity and felicity of...