Reee-tarded: The Hex Upon our Tongues

So there I was, minding my own damn business, when two women flounced into the restaurant and threw themselves down at the table just behind me. To be honest, they didn't look particularly compelling; but I was alone, and therefore I eavesdropped.

"O.M.G," declared the first one. "That event was reeee-tarded. REEE-TARDED."

I sat up in my seat, astonished. Wait - is the word 'retarded' hyphenated? Have I been mispronouncing it all these years?

"I know," shrieked her companion. "I mean, they must have spent an obscene amount of money on it. OB-SCEEEENE."

"Yeah, well, you're gonna fuh-reak out when you hear, like, exactly how much."

I gave a sneaky glance over my shoulder at the conversants. Their tailored suits and Blackberries provided clues that these creatures were professionals of some sort. When one of them took a call from work and talked about third quarter profit margins, my bafflement only grew. Someone actually hired them to manage money?

This has been a long-standing irritation of mine with women in my generation. We have enough challenges as it is, without this self-inflicted downgrade of our images with this re-tarded mode of pronunciation.

Let's face it: it sounds intensely stupid.

STOO-PED.

Not to mention dreadfully unchic.

Now, lest I sound too preachy on the subject, I'll confess that I too am a recovering offender. For someone as unrepentantly word-nerdy as me (I get daily emails from Dictionary.com), I have not proved immune to the wretched Sweet-Valley-High inflections and vocabulary that has plagued my contemporaries. I sprinkle my lower-grade conversations with 'likes' and 'you knows' and 'goes' instead of 'said' -- that sort of thing. Ironically, I think I particularly picked up this modus communicatus at my pious, elite little college in the Berkshires. It wasn't until I went to England to study that I realized how ghastly I sounded.

Today's women are more educated than ever before -- so we do we sound so unbelievably dumb? Our mothers waged the war of women's lib to garner us the right to make ourselves into emblems of verbal stupidity?

Like, omigod -- yay us!

Why do we do it?

While puzzling over this question, I was reminded of Mag Wildwood, one of Truman Capote's characters in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the novella, Capote dished up a pronounced stutter for Miss Wildwood. "It was the master stroke, that stutter," says the narrator. "For it contrived to make her banalities sound somehow original."

So, maybe our puerile intonations are like Mag's stutter: a way for women to make their conversations seem more emphatic, more original? This is all just misguided enthusiasm, a way to stand out amidst the throngs?

No, no -- that can't be it. There's nothing originality-inspiring about this tongue. It's a mass plague that operates on a subconscious level. I personally can't speculate with accuracy on its origins; I just know that it needs to go the way of dinosaurs and polio.

Ah, well -- at least we can console ourselves in this respect: generationally speaking, we aren't alone. Our mothers' generation had its widespread, irritating modes of expression too. I recently saw some footage of Ali McGraw in the 60s or 70s, on some talk show. The host leaned in toward Ms. McGraw, and said imploringly:

"So, do you have some news for us?"

"Yeah," said Ali McGraw, sort of out of the side of her mouth. "I'm gonna have a baby."

I cringed. It was that familiar, rebellious female twang that emanated from our TVs during our childhoods. All of the attractive girls in Woody Allen's 1970s films speak like that, all of John Ritter's girlfriends on Three's Company, and so on and so forth. Their speech was rife with casual 'gonnas' and 'yeahs' and all sorts of lazily contemptuous verbal backlashes against the quasi-British inunciation of their mothers.

But at least the Katherine Hepburn-like verbal affectations of the 1950s attempted to be erudite.

Ladies: listen to yourselves, for God's sake. There is simply nothing timeless or classic or fetching about fashioning your vernacular after a bad eighties So-Cal movie. Let's shave out the 'likes' and the egregious hyphenation.

It's easier than losing weight, and we'll be doing a great thing for modern womanhood.

 

 

 

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