TEXT A On the day after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Representative Charles A. Eaton, Republican of
New Jersey, made his case in the House for why the nation should enter the
Second World War. "Mr. Speaker," his speech began, "yesterday
against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a
trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once
and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and
slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every
land.” Last year, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas,
made the case for war in Iraq this way: "And if we don’t go at Iraq, that our
effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation," he
said. "We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there
remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists,
you say to those countries: we are serious about terrorism, we’re serious about
you not supporting terrorism on your own soil. The linguist and
cultural critic John McWhorter cites these excerpts in his new book. They not
only are typical of speeches made in Congress on both occasions, he argues, but
also provide a vivid illustration of just how much the language of public
discourse has deteriorated. Riddled with sentence fragments,
run-ons and colloquialisms like "go at," Senator Brownback’s speech is still
intelligible, but in Mr. McWhorter’s view, it is emblematic of a creeping
casualness that is largely to the nation’s detriment. "We in
America now are an anomaly," Mr. McWhorter said over lunch at a restaurant in
Midtown Manhattan this week. "We have very little sense of English as something
to be dressed up. It’s just this thing that comes out of our mouths. We just
talk. " Mr. McWhorter, 38, a professor of linguistics at the
University of California at Berkeley, is hardly the first to complain about
Americans’ brazen disregard for their native tongue. But unlike many others, he
says, the problem is not an epidemic of bad grammar. As a
linguist, he says, he knows that grammatical rules are arbitrary and that in
casual conversation people have never abided by them. Rather, he argues, the
fault lies with the collapse of the distinction between the written and the
oral. Where formal, well-honed English was once de rigueur in public life, he
argues, it has all but disappeared, supplanted by the indifferent cadences of
speech and ultimately impairing our ability to think. This bleak
assessment notwithstanding, Mr. McWhorter, an intense, confident and--perhaps
not surprisingly--loquacious man is not a curmudgeon or a fuddy-duddy. Nor, for
that matter, a nerd, despite a resume that bristles with intellectual
precociousness. Self-taught in 12 languages--including Russian,
Swedish, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew, which he initially took up as a
Philadelphia preschooler when he was 4--he is a respected expert in Creole
languages. A college graduate at 19 and a tenured professor at
33, he has published seven previous books, including the controversial, best
seller, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America", in which he accused
middle-class blacks of embracing anti-intellectualism and a cult of victimology.
An African-American who is an outspoken critic of affirmative action, welfare
and reparations, he has aroused the ire of many liberals and earned a reputation
as a conservative. The following adjectives can be applied to John McWhorter EXCEPT______.