Annals of American Decline – The lower case list
The major fault lines of American decline are familiar to most of us: The Crisis of public education, Police violence, Structural racism, Income inequality, the Lack of health insurance, the anachronisms of the Electoral college, the outsized role of Money in politics, Climate change denial, and so on. These are the “upper case” issues. But the picture is not complete without the small, seemingly less important shifts in people’s behaviors, the way we shop, eat, sleep, dress, speak, raise our kids, read, drive, etc. These “lower case” shifts are all of a piece with the bigger issues, they are just so every-day that they’ve become less noticeable.
2. The way we speak now.
Here’s a meaningless way to begin the answer to a question: “Yeah, no….” Yet we speak like this a lot of the time. Talk show host to interviewee: “Are the Trump poll numbers to be trusted?” Interviewee: “Yeah, no, …I think they are very reliable, we’ve learned a lot since 2016…” Apparently “yeah no” means “yes.” But using the word “yes,” (sorry, I should say “utilizing”) is too clear, too succinct. We prefer to obfuscate a bit, perhaps just for fun, perhaps because we aren’t sure about what we think ( “Yeah, no….”) Or perhaps the non-sensical nature of communication and the world we live in encourages it.
Straightforward speech is gone. While we may still strive for it in writing (another subject) we strive, like, against it, you know, I mean, when speaking??? Why add, for example, a verbal question mark to a declarative sentence? What is the point of the rising inflection (aka “upspeak”) at the end of the sentence“I went to the store??” Did you perhaps not go to the store but you say you did? Did you go to the store, but you are not sure you did? Is it a way to reach out to the other person who you suspect is not listening because you sound like an idiot?
For at least a decade we’ve been using (sorry, utilizing) another tic when asked a question: our answers begin with the word “So, …” During Elizabeth Warren’s 2019-20 campaign, she answered virtually every question asked her by beginning with “So,….” There are many uses of the word “so,” but none really fits here. Does “so” at the beginning of a sentence mean “thus,”“therefore,” “then,” or “indeed…”? Not quite. It would seem to mean (in Elizabeth Warren’s case) something like “I’ve heard your question; I’ve got my answer ready and here it comes.” Of course, she could start by just answering the question. Maybe it’s a placeholder, an emphasis, or, yeah no, simply a meaningless tic.
Much speech today costs us dignity and civility; speech that diminishes us, degrades the encounter between people and sometimes contains a hint of insult. An example is the growing use of the word “grab,” as in the millions of service station signs advertising “grab and go,” or in the invitation “Ya wanna grab some dinner?” Grab is an unfriendly word – it conveys selfishness and rapaciousness. Another degrading usage is the elongated “Yeeaahh” at the start of an answer (this is different than the “yeah” of “yeah no”). We hear prominent people in the media using this “Yeeaahh,” to begin a sentence. It is crude and undignified, a verbal equivalent of putting your elbows on the table or burping in public. Such usages cross the line between private and public behavior.
As does the phrase we have all been asked in a restaurant: “ya still workin’ on that?” I admit I would be equally bothered if a server had said “Sir, may I assume that you have not yet finished your meal?” But somewhere between the two there has to be a polite way of asking permission to clear your dishes away. Here again the speaker has forgotten where he or she is. To remember the difference between a restaurant and a cow barn takes consciousness, and that takes mental work. As in the way we dress and think, so in the way we speak - sloppy and lazy.
Language changes of course, often for no reason except fad and fashion. But spoken language has usually moved in the direction of short cuts, a kind of efficiency. We’re often impatient, we want to speed things up, including speech. We’ve done it for centuries; we’ve dropped the “g” in “going,” conflated “give and me” to “gimme” or made“whadya” out of “what are you…” Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in the early 1920s contains scores of such examples: “Let ‘em look out for ‘emselves,” “A reg’lar charmer,” “guess I must’ve,” “Well, jus’soon,” (just as soon), “Like t’ speak t’ you ‘bout some repairs,” “I love you..course I do.” These shifts in the language were in aid of speed and efficiency, time savers in a world of busy people with much to say, or so they thought. One could argue about whether these changes improved the spoken language, but the linguistic structures behind these phrasings remained intact as did their meaning.
Today’s new usages do not improve the language; they do not make it more expressive or better at conveying meaning. Instead they often slow down communication, or at best gratuitously substitute an inappropriate word for one that worked better, with the result being impoverishment. Instead of saying “John said…” or “Mary was saying,” people now say “John goes” or “Mary goes,” and to make it even more muddled, we add “like,” as in “like, Mary goes…..”
Finally, something has happened to the way girls and young women speak. Besides the rising inflection (“upspeak”), more common among females than males, there is the spread of “valley girl” speak along with the raspy, creaky rattle of the “vocal fry.” These are speech habits of females (and of course some males) under the age of 50.
Today we use nonsense words and nonsense tones. We take words with familiar meanings like “so,” “like” and “go” and render them meaningless shells that have no discernible function. “Like, ya know, I mean, like he goes like yeah no, so I go seriously? And he goes, totally???“ What can such ways of speaking convey except a descent into empty-headedness?