There's a dirty little secret in America today: all too many of our young people, whatever their biological age may be, can't speak.
Sure, they can Facebook, text message, Twitter, but they can't speak.
First, vocal cords. Why do so many attractive, intelligent young women mutilate their vocal cords when they utter a word? They grind their voices like fingernails scraping a blackboard. They uptalk as if sentences had no end or conclusion. (A theory: by vibrating their vocal cords to lower the sound they produce, young ladies want to "masculinize" their voices, thereby taking revenge on rampant sexism).
Young men, in contrast, prefer to mumble. Whoever said the sexes, always in a battle, were ever the same?
Then there's "like." Have you ever been on public transportation with young people "speaking" over their cell phones? One in every three/four words is "like."
Maybe it doesn't drive you nuts -- if you're hard of hearing.
Another favorite: "Whatever."
Do these linguistic tics reflect young people's understandable, instinctively negative reaction to the uber-precision of a high-strung, non-stop "communicating" technological society with a "standard" American English sadly inherited, some would say, from not yet fully dead white males?
So much of everything, in the USA "homeland" these days, is timed, measured, "messaged" even when we cross streets. You've got eight seconds before a car will kill you, the electronic sign tells the pedestrian. Rush, rush, rush (ok, safety first).
Buy sugar-free Coke Now! Now! Now!
No wonder the young among us use language to slow things down, by being comfortably vague when they -- we -- "speak."
After writing your supposedly tightly-worded resume, don't you just want to say "like," which has no meaning at all? Like, you know what I mean? You don't know what I mean, but that's, like, ok. Like.
Or is it that young people learned how to "speak" by looking at essentially non-verbal cartoons on TV, with absent parents with whom they could not "talk," as they -- the parents -- were "at work"? Again, perhaps.
Or are we just being democratic -- speak, baby speak, whatever that "speak" may be?
Another possible reason: Rhetoric -- it's been around since at least Aristotle -- has been essentially abolished from college curricula.
Instead, we idolize "power-point" presentations that minimize the use of language and, in some university foreign policy programs, organize "public diplomacy" courses that overlook, in perhaps too many cases, the importance of classical rhetoric in shaping human discourse.
(How can a future diplomat ever learn a foreign language -- essential in carrying out public diplomacy -- if he/she cannot even speak his/her own language beyond "like" and "whatever" -- or, more generally, beyond the American contemporary way of "speaking" among the young?)
True, speaking "proper" English is a convention. Chaucer isn't today's "conventional" English. Jefferson, as I discovered from reading, with much pleasure, his manuscripts, makes no distinction between "its" and "it's." No one in her right mind would want language to stand still. What makes language human is its ability to evolve -- let's hope for the better.
But isn't the magic and poetry of well articulated (I hate the word "articulate," do you have a better one?) face-to-face language disappearing in our time, here in America -- the America of the so-called "web 2.0 communications revolution" -- in a tsunami of "likes" and "whatevers"?
Now, after all the preaching, I want to make you feel comfortable. Report from the forthcoming Evening News:
How, like, ironic, or, whatever, like distressing. Like, you know what I mean. Whatever.
Like, whatever, forget about it.
I like like, Big like Brother. Like, abolish language Big Brother, like is, like, the best way to newspeak, how we, like, "speak " -- whatever.
About Winston -- after his, like, treatment at the Ministry of Truth -- we know about him from, like, the updated version of 1984 we, like, just, like, just got, whatever -- glad you, Win, like, feel better.
Like, Win, turn on, like, your cell phone: Speak to say nothing. Say nothing to speak.
Like, like "like." Or else.
This, like, is the six o'clock evening news. And now a word from our sponsor, the producer of "Like" products -- products you like whatever they, like, are.
P.S. From Newspeak Dictionary: "duckspeak - (To quack like a duck). To speak without thinking. Can be either good or bad, depending on who is speaking, and whether or not they are on your side."
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John, keep up the good work.
All that counts in America is how much money you can make. America began as a largely mercantile enterprise, so that the public has this mindset can't be a surprise. The ability to perpetrate a hustle takes precedence in this country over intellectual content. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book about it. And the election of G.W. Bush was the nadir of that phenomenon.
Read the Story of English. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Revised-Robert-McCrum/dp/0140154051
Our system of public education has been designed to avoid having the masses effectively trained in public speaking, writing, and persuasion. Elite private schools, on the other hand, do emphasize public speaking, writing, and persuasion.
It would be dangerous to the ruling elites to have the masses well-educated so that they could lead people and persuade people. It's much safer to keep them in their place and ignorant and unable to effectively communicate.
That is why reading, math and science are always emphasized when politicians talk about reforming education or improving education. Because that is not threatening to the corporate elite and political campaign contributors. If politicians started talking about teaching public school children to be effective communicators and leaders instead of readers and technicians, eyebrows would be raised.
It's not by accident that young people can't effectively communicate. They are just products of our education system.
William F. Buckley and Conrad Black sounded very erudite as elite prep school products, but their political and economic ideas were so transparently inane and class biased as to reach almost satirical levels of lameness. George Will falls into the same trap. It's all effete style over substance and anyone with a whit of intelligence can see through it in a nanosecond.
youth has ALWAYS adopted their own vernacular: "twenty-three skiddoo"; "way to go, daddy-o"; "groovy"; "gag me with a spoon, fer shure"; "totally!"; "mad skillz" etc.
sub cultures have always invented "inspeak" so they could separate themselves from the mainstream. this is NOTHING NEW.
WHAT IS NEW, HOWEVER, is the mainstream media usage, and the adult population EMULATING WHAT CHILDREN SAY.
in the 21st c. American cultural idolization of youth, it has become common for adults to act like children. People are no longer maturing beyond the cognitive level of a pre-teen. The media supports this. They've learned that youth is the most profitable market, so they shower them with attention to develop them as new consumers. Adults, stressed over aging and becoming "uncool", now emulate young people.
Adult women carry "hello kitty" bags and wear the same juvenile fashions as young girls. or Adult men are consumed with video games well into their 20's and 30's.
but the MEDIA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS, with their endless barrage of blather and the talking head's adoption of it.
The things news commentators say on tv today would make Cronkite roll in his grave. There is no journalistic integrity anymore. No spell checking, no proof reading for proper grammar, and no revisions for changing slang to appropriate words.
Taking cheap shots at our youth for the failures in our educational system are nothing new. Every generation blames the next, instead of reforming what is needed.
I wonder, in the last eight years 2000 to 2008, did you ever hear the leader of this nation speak?
Hope you see my point as well...
I watch many new movies and inevitably dialogue will come up that I can't understand a single
word being spoken by at least one of the actors. I can't relate the sounds to anything that has happened in the movie. I turn to an older movie on another channel and suddenly I can understand every word! I have no trouble 'hearing', just comprehending what the actor is saying. This seems to have begun within the last 5 or so years.
Oh, and I can understand Brando even if I've never seen the movie!
(For anyone who doesn't understand my irritation with this phrase, there isn't such a thing as a "nother". The words are "an" "other", or combined, "another". It is inappropriate to insert the word "whole" between the "a" and "n".)(If you can't live without the word whole, which is implied, it would be better to say, "that's a whole other story," for example, or " that's another story, entirely" which would leave out the word whole but has the same meaning.)
My apologies for preaching. It's a hot button for me.
Sloppy just breeds more sloppy! I'm losing my patience.
We were just a hip bunch of happening cats and chicks having a gas. What's your bag?
And now "like" drives me as mad as "funky" did my father.
Can you dig it? I can't anymore - I grew up. And so will they.
“One in every three/four words is "like."”
A vast improvement I would say. Since in my day, every other word was an Anglo Saxon expletive.
“No wonder the young among us use language to slow things down, by being comfortably vague when they -- we -- "speak."
Yes. Whatever happened to good old “err”?
"like," which has no meaning at all?”
Strange. I was interpreting it to mean “let me elucidate”.
“who is speaking”
After a life listening to politicians, and others, who speak volumes while taking great pains to say absolutely nothing. I much prefer the honesty of the young.