Education: CAN'T ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?

• Share

The Americans," Walt Whitman wrote in the 1850s, "are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world, and the most perfect users of words." The line was more hopeful than prophetic. Today, many believe that the American language has lost not only its melody but a lot of its meaning. Schoolchildren and even college students often seem disastrously ignorant of words; they stare, uncomprehending, at simple declarative English. Leon Botstein, president of New York's Bard College, says with glum hyperbole: "The English language is dying, because it is not taught. " Others believe that the language is taught badly and learned badly because American culture is awash with clichés, officialese, political bilge, the surreal boobspeak of advertising ("Mr. Whipple please don't squeeze the cortex") and the sludge of academic writing. It would be no wonder if children exposed to such discourse grew up with at least an unconscious hostility to language itself.

Much of the current concern about language is only a pedant's despair. Some of the preoccupation masks a cynical delight in the absurdities that people are capable of perpetrating with words No one worries very much about the schoolmarm's strictures against am t and "it's me." Connoisseurs savor genuine follies like those of the new priests of thanatology, who describe dying as terminal living," or the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who explained a $61.7 million cut in social services as "advance downward adjustments." But whatever mirth there may be in these and other buffooneries, euphemisms, pomposities tautologies evasions and rococo lies, they are also signals of a new brainlessness in public language that coincides with a frightening ineptitude for reading and writing among the young.

Some linguistic purists wrongly fear slang and neologisms: these are the life signs of a language, its breath on the mirror. The danger now is something that seems new and ominous: an indifference to language, a devaluation that leaves it bloodless and zombie-like. It is as if language had ceased to be important, to be worthy of attention. Television undoubtedly has something to do with that. With its chaotic parade of images TV makes language subordinate, merely a part of the general noise. It has certainly subverted the idea of reading as entertainment. A recent study by A.C. Nielsen Co. found that Americans watch a numbing average of 3.8 hours of TV per day

Part of the devaluation of language results from a feeling that somehow it is no longer effective. Samuel Johnson's society pinned its faith on language; Americans attach theirs to technology. It is not words that put men on the moon, that command technology's powerful surprises. Man does not ascend to heaven by prayer, the aspiration of language, but by the complex rockets and computer codes of NASA.