The Way We Talk Now - Hardcover

Nunberg, Geoffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618116028 ISBN 13: 9780618116027

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Synopsis

An assortment of NPR broadcasts and articles by a noted linguist explores the mysteries of modern-day culture as revealed by the words, phrases, metaphors, and grammar used.

About this title

About the Author

Geoffrey Nunberg is a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a consulting professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. He is also chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He has published many articles in the scholarly and popular press and made numerous radio broadcasts on language and linguistics, the cultural implications of digital technologies, and language policy issues. For this work, he was given the 2001 Language, Linguistics, and the Public Interest Award by the Linguistic Society of America.

Reviews

Stanford linguistics professor Nunberg is well-placed to critique netiquette, computer grammar checkers and "The Software We Deserve" via his computer language research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In these engaging, often humorous essays, he takes digs at "emoticons" ("a string of punctuation marks suggesting a facial expression laid on its side," and, moreover, a word that "deserves to die horribly in a head-on collision with infotainment"), suggesting that Kafka might have used a "frownie" and Austen a "winkie." But many of his subjects are nontechnological, concerning everyday culture and speech. While disapproving of some contemporary grammatical lapses, Nunberg admits that some words only exist for spelling bees and tolerates certain slang. Regarding the oft-aired contention in the Ebonics debate that schools must teach the language of Shakespeare and James Baldwin, Nunberg argues somewhat sardonically that, in fact, inner-city kids must learn "to speak like kids in middle-class suburbs, so they can grow up to become competent speakers of the brutalist clatter of the American political and business worlds." During the presidential election debates, Nunberg discerned from Gore's disinclination to contract verbs that he wasn't "gonna" beat the more homespun Bush. Pondering how current language trends might sound in 50 years, he worries that his daughter Sophie will meet the dowdy fate that once awaited women named Ethel or Mildred, and disdains the trendy vocabulary borrowed from California Esalen Institute-type movements (e.g., "proactive," "prequel," "rockumentary"). Nunberg never fails to reveal some bit of history embedded in language, and, despite his occasionally stuffy responses to contemporary jargon, his acuity and fixation on funny pop-phenomena keep the book fresh.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Compiling humorous commentaries about language in the United States, Nunberg, a language and computer technology researcher and a consulting linguistics professor at Stanford, here offers essays prepared for National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Some of the many topics covered are the long-lasting linguistic impact of movies, software that checks grammar, and word histories. Likewise, politics is one of six categories in which the essays are chronologically organized. Some readers will enjoy a review of 1990s events through reading the essays in their published order, while others can skip around owing to the essays' short length and approachable tones. Another collection about language that targets a similar audience of general readers is Verbatim: From the Bawdy to the Sublime, the Best Writing on Language for Word Lovers, Grammar Mavens, and Armchair Linguists (Harcourt, 2001), edited by Erin McKean. Recommended for large public libraries and libraries in communities with a strong National Public Radio audience. Marianne Orme, Des Plaines, IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

As a Cigarette Should {1997}

The year was 1954. The top-rated TV show was I Love Lucy, sponsored by
Philip Morris, and close behind was Your Hit Parade, sponsored by
Lucky Strikes, whose ''Be Happy, Go Lucky'' jingle had won TV Guide's
award for commercial of the year. And Otto Pritchard, a Pittsburgh
carpenter with lung cancer, filed the first liability suit against a
tobacco company.

In that year R. J. Reynolds introduced the new brand Winston, which
unlike other filter cigarettes stressed taste rather than health.
Reynolds ran a singing commercial with the tagline ''Winston tastes
good like a cigarette should.'' Like instead of as-as grammatical sins
go it was pretty venial, but the purists went to the mattresses over
it. One critic called it ''belligerent illiteracy''; another suggested
that the writer who came up with the ad should be jailed. The Winston
people were delighted with all the free publicity. They capitalized on
the controversy in a new campaign that featured the slogan ''What do
you want, good grammar or good taste?'' Soon after that Tareyton got
in on the act with a campaign headed ''Us Tareyton smokers would
rather fight than switch,'' and the whole dance went round again over
pronouns.

It was a curious episode. It certainly wasn't the first time
advertisers had stooped to using popular usage to make a point. Fifty
years earlier, the sides of barns all over the country were plastered
with endorsements for Red Man chewing tobacco by the great
Philadelphia second baseman Nap Lajoie: ''Lajoie chews Red Man, ask
him if he don't.'' But no critic ever deigned to notice this sort of
thing until the 50s, that golden age of American paranoia, when
Madison Avenue vied with Moscow as the insidious corruptor of American
mores. That was when he martini-sipping ad man in the gray flannel
suit became the new archetype of the American smoothie -the character
played by Tony Randall in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and by Gig
Young in just about everything else.

Maybe that's why the grammarians' criticisms of the advertisements
echoed with charges of class treason, the sense that the Winston
copywriters were probably Yalies who knew perfectly well when to use
as and when to use like. As Jacques Barzun put it, '' The language has
less to fear from the crude vulgarism of the untaught than the blithe
irresponsibility of the taught.''

In retrospect, it's all pretty ironic. Those cigarette ads do indeed
sound a little sinister to us now, and of course they came back to
haunt the companies that produced them. But the worst thing critics
could find to say about them at the time was not that they were
selling cigarettes, but only that they were doing it ungrammatically.

The advertisers are still playing fast and loose with the language,
but it's unlikely that the Winston episode will ever repeat itself. In
recent months, for example, the Toyota people have been running a
campaign that stresses how well their products fit in with consumers'
day-to-day needs. ''Toyota, everyday'' is the slogan. You'd think that
by spelling everyday like that they'd worry about suggesting that
their products are banal and ordinary. But the ad agency thought the
one-word version looked zippier, and when they talked to consumer
focus groups, it turned out that no one was particularly troubled by
the misspelling: people said they were used to seeing mistakes in
advertising, and besides, it made the company seem folksier.

Indeed, folksy is all you see in advertising nowadays. You think of
those in-flight infomercials where guys in jeans and Doc Martens are
touting the latest cool stuff from Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. Not
long ago, in fact, Microsoft went to the ad agency that had done all
those Gen-X ads for Nike and asked for an ad series that would make
them sound cool. It bothered some people, like the Los Angeles Times
columnist Gary Chapman; he took to task all these multinationals who
appropriate a style and language that originates with inner-city kids
who will wind up being the losers in the information age. It was a
perfect reversal of the attacks that critics leveled at the Winston
people back in the 50s. The advertisers are still taxed for their
linguistic condescension, but now their crime is the betrayal not of
their own class but of the people whose language they're ripping off.
Well, of course. Advertisers are no less shameless now than they were
back in the days of the singing commercial. What's surprising is only
that people can still get indignant about it. Shocked, shocked! to
find that there is advertising going on.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618116028
• ISBN 13: 9780618116027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256