The Mutation of Language or Mad Monkey Mangling

May 28 2010

            It all begins and ends with the vernacular word “nukular”.     

I am, I freely admit, a linguistic bigot.  If I hear the word “nukular” emerge from someone’s mouth I immediately assume that this person is an ignorant rube, a redneck, a born again fully saved right wing ignoramus who eats Jimmy Dean sausages for breakfast, lunch and dinner  I don’t know how “nukular” got started but it must have been in some classroom where an unqualified teacher was too lazy to correct his or her students.  From that vernacular “point zero” the usage went viral by word of mouth and spread its load of Bubba toxins to begin poisoning the language.

           

Following the un-word“nukular” comes a whole doomed Titanic full of un-words with tacked on extra syllables.  Today I encountered the putative word “irregardless”.  Why?  Wasn’t it easy enough to say “regardless”?  Or would that imply the speaker might be afflicted with impotency?  There are C-Y’s flying around like clouds of mosquitoes.  Pretty soon the word “tolerance” will morph into “tolerancy” and then our whole language of Englishity will topple from its preeminence as the lingua mundus, the universal language of the planet.  It will be replaced by Mandarin Chinese.  The West will be really fucked because most of us have tin ears and can’t distinguish the subtle tonal elisions of spoken Mandarin.  For the sake of efficiency the written language will be phonetically rendered in Roman script.  Henceforth, when Chinese is used in worldwide commerce, those who are fluent in its use will regard Anglophones as retrograde rubes with a reputation for recalcitrant nostalgia and revised memories of a time when they were a mighty cultural force in the world.

Many years ago I was driving around with a bunch of my high school buddies in a luxurious car owned by a boy named Mark Malzberg.  He was the richest and stupidest kid in the school  We drove first to Hamburger Heaven, but no one was there.  We drove to Steak n’ Shake, but it was also a boring wasteland.  We tried White Castle.  We tried everything we knew in our pathetic repertoire of sixteen-year-old social watering holes.  After an hour or so of pointless meandering, I said to him, “Mark, we’re really getting nowhere fast.”

           

Without missing a beat and in all seriousness, he looked over at me and said,  “Yes we are!” 

He had disagreed with me with unintentional brilliance worthy of Yogi Berra.  I never forgot that beautiful error. 

 

            Later, during my two weeks in college, I dated a girl who was nearly finished earning her degree in medicine.  She was flush with idealism about serving the world and had set her sights on working in Lebanon during its umpteenth civil war.

           

We were in the parking lot of a fast food place, relaxing with burger and fries.  The car was hers.  I got around on a Schwinn Varsity that weighed seventy pounds.  The bike rack for my English Lit class was reached after a climb of forty-two steps.  Most of my other classes were in equally huge buildings with equally remote bike racks.  This could be one explanation as to why my college career lasted two weeks.

Anyway, back to the medical student. With great sincerity she said, “I think I could do good work with the Lebanonians.  I’m looking right now for a course in the language, so I can speak fluent Lebanonian by the time I finish my residency.”

She had just eaten a slice of raw onion that had come with the cheeseburger.  I had been contemplating a tender kiss.  The onion was no deterrent.

           

Then she called the Lebanese “Lebanonians”.

           

My desire for kissy kiss evaporated.  The taste of this incredible faux pas on the lips of an almost-physician was far more of a turn-off than any piece of onion.  I would never date a woman who calls the Lebanese “Lebanonions.”

           

I was then seized with the desire to test her further.

           

“I understand that Saudi Arabia needs good doctors,” I said innocently.  “There’s a famine in Syria and the Arabs are being flooded with starving refugees.”

           

“I don’t think so.” She replied with a frown.  “I’ve heard that Arabonion is a terribly difficult language, with a funny alphabet thrown in.”

           

I couldn’t resist.  “How about Israel?  The Hebronions can use doctors.”
           

“Are you kidding me?” she protested.  “The place is loaded with Jewish doctors!  I don’t know why they all go there, but they do, oh believe me, they do.”

           

This budding romance was now wilted.

           

Returning to the almost-present, we have, as a nation, just survived the presidency of a man who can say, “I wouldn’t misunderestimate those people,” and a thousand other toothy Bubba-isms.  Who needs to speak decent English?  The teachers don’t understand the difference between irrelevance and irrelevancy.  Any kid can grow up to be President whether or not he or she speaks like a moron.

           

What would happen if it went the other way?  If people started chopping off extra syllables and started excavating the words as if syllables were valuable ore?  Irrelevance would become Irrelev.  Regardless would become gardless.  Nukular would become Nukew.  It would sound like we were speaking Esperanto or Klingon.  The use of texting devices will accelerate this word surgery until we are speaking in abbreviations.  I’ve already heard it.  I use it myself, though I only use it to speak to my cat, to whom I will say “STFU” when she whines and manipulates me for a treat to which she is apparently addicted. This means “Shut The Fuck Up!”  Being a gentleman, I merely growl “STFU” at the cat and then get the bag of treats from the pantry.

           

I must take a moment to exclude from my rant all the f-zantastic slang that has arisen to fertilize our language.  The source of this River Nile of Slang has generally been African American culture .

           

It occasionally grates on my nerves when I see an Eminem wannabe get into his car and call out to his friends, “That really p-zisses me off, yo!  Somebody should tell that Zima queen and her friends to chill on the za befo they do the be-ho’s.  Strew?”

           

In any case, our language is mutating at speeds too fast to comprehend.  The new tongue can only be learned via total immersion.  It requires hanging with fifteen year old black poet-children with skateboards and pistols.

           

One purpose of slang has been exclusion.  When millions of Africans were kidnapped and shipped westward across the ocean, they became the property of people who suppressed their entire culture.  Slaves were forced to speak the masters’ language.  They devised alternative uses for this language but were actually circumventing it.  They reinvented their culture with slang, Santeria and the Blues.

           

Little has changed from that original motivation.  Slang is still a language of exclusion.  American slang matured in a culture of jazz, blues, segregation and restriction.  In the sixties it spiraled off in another direction, becoming a barrier between adults and their adolescent offspring.  It has since drawn most of its energy from generational alienation.

T

he speed at which language now mutates is exponential.  It seems inevitable that slang will fracture into dialects whose boundaries are age groups. The only means of communication between these boundaries is likely to be a return to conventional English.  It will be the only way a seventh grader can speak to a ninth grader.

                       

Slang is creative.  This other mutation, this hick stuff with words like “conversate” and “orientated” is just irritating.  I may have exaggerated my bigotry (I may just be a snob) but I’m not here to function as the Language Police.  English is a living language that has been changing for more than a thousand years.  It has probably changed more in the last decade than it has in the nine hundred ninety years before this time.  There are now many occupations for which there existed no word or term twenty years ago.  What was a “webmaster” in 1975?  What was a Twitter?  Software?  HTML?

             

We live styles of life and make our income from a plethora of jobs that did not exist a few years ago.  There was a time when a family of blacksmiths stayed a family of blacksmiths for five or six centuries.  Now it’s difficult to find a blacksmith.  Soon it may be difficult to find a family.

           

I am unable to appreciate hip hop because I can’t follow the words.  They’re too fast!.  There’s something about the speed at which people think, listen and speak that has accelerated.  I’m amazed when I see a Hip Hop performance and can do little more than latch onto the spoken rhythm, to hear the rapper’s words as a form of percussion.  Yet I see in the audience people mouthing the words along with the performer, speaking and comprehending and I wonder what I’m missing.  I can’t help being a member of my age group.  Words have always been precious to me and I feel excluded and lost.  Hmmm.  I feel excluded.  Uh oh.  That’s not good.  Maybe I’m seen as a member of some kind of over-class from which certain realities must be hidden.  Am I now too old to be culturally relevant?

Am I “out of it”?

           

I never thought I would become a victim of slang.  If you catch me in a zifflenook it might just be a Rangoon boof alarm.  Aight?  

Writer's Stampede

The Writer’s Stampede

            Where did all these writers come from?  It seems that everyone has a book to promote and is searching for an agent, thinking about self-publishing, attending workshops and jumping through endless hoops to garner attention with a book project.

            Literary agents report receiving from four hundred to a thousand query letters each week.  Agents have become something like gods, they have the power to bestow bliss, rapture and burning hope in the hearts of writers.

            All this is happening in an age when it is thought that no one reads books any more, that video games and other distractions have turned our children into withdrawn illiterates.

            Then along came J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter and the world changed.

            Ask any agent or publisher what the odds are of selling a book.  Conventional wisdom holds that selling a book to a publisher is impossible.  The odds are astronomical.  Self publishing is one way of getting a book to the public but the writer must SELL the book.  It’s one thing to place a work in the digital marketplace, get an ISBN number and register the book with Amazon.  It’s another thing to SELL the book.  The effort required to promote a book is staggering.

It requires spending twenty eight hours a day on Twitter, Facebook, Bonghook, Bookface,

Yourspace, Myspace, Crawlspace plus traveling to at least ten writing seminars a month.

            Certain genres have congealed as dominant in this scurry towards publication.  YA, or Young Adult, is by far the big market.  Add Vampires, horror,

the supernatural and you have the Infinite Candy Mountain of book projects.

            Park your dragon in the rear and get your ticket validated.

            I’m a writer.  Just another writer.  I’ve made a few sales.  I generate a little income but I haven’t sold any of my book-length projects.

            I’ve queried agents hundreds of times since I began writing fiction in the late seventies.  I signed to a major agent for two years after selling my first story to Playboy Magazine.  Then I proceeded to screw up, to write poorly, and my window of opportunity passed. 

            I continued to write and got better.  I devoted thousands of hours to my novels and they got better, and better, and still better.

            I’m still querying agents by the hundreds and receiving form letter rejections. "Not what we're looking for."  "Good luck with your writing career." "Burn your manuscripts and take up knitting."  Stuff like that.

            I believe in my writing with passionate intensity. 

            I feel as if I’ve just walked into Disneyland on a day when a major publisher has announced that it will randomly chose one writer in the park and offer a three book contract with a half million dollar advance.

The crowd is suffocating, stifling.

            I feel lost, overwhelmed.

            I don’t have a vampire in any of my books.  I have  good writing.  It is muscular, powerful, original, funny and compelling.

            All I can do is continue writing and querying agents, entering contests, hanging around internet writer’s blogs and endlessly revising the books t hat I love as I love my own children.

The Future

The World Is Broken

       orld Is Broken

            I ‘m not sure when I snapped. One day I realized that every morning when I woke up I would glance at the news and see an article, a headline, some event that would stretch my credibility to the breaking point.  I knew that, like Chicken Little, our sky was falling and nobody knew what to do about it. 

            I stopped consuming the news.  I couldn’t take any more. 

            Then the oil “spill” in the Gulf of Mexico occurred and I realized this: we have broken the world and we can’t fix it.  We, homo sapiens, have committed such atrocities upon nature that we have impaired the planet’s ability to sustain our human population.  As we destroy ourselves, we’re taking a lot of other species with us.  Polar bears, cheetahs, mountain gorillas, humpbacked whales, they’ll be gone too.  I will miss them terribly.  My heart is already broken.

            I see Earth as a complex and self-regulating organism.  I am mostly in agreement with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.

            In the long run, Earth will repair itself.  Its powers of regeneration are almost infinite.  The problem is that what’s good for Gaia is not necessarily good for human beings.  Gaia may need a couple centuries of Shake, Rattle and Roll before the ecosystems are healthy, before the ocean is repopulated with aquatic creatures, before the life that dwells on this planet is capable of flourishing. 

            How do human beings fit into this scenario?  I think we’ll still be here.  There will be a relatively small population of people, perhaps a few hundred million, dwelling on this planet.  The sprawling infestations of some ten or twelve billion people will have died off.  That includes you, me, and maybe our grandchildren and great grandchildren.  We are on the brink of an era of earthquake, flood, storm and eruption.  Rising sea levels will push people into terrible wars over resources and real estate.

            It’s very sad that Gaia needs to teach us such a harsh lesson but we have been very inattentive students.  The rules were simple enough: be reverent towards life.  Be kind to other creatures while accepting the ubiquity of predator/prey relationships.  Take only what we need to sustain ourselves.  Develop non violent technologies, that is, make life-enhancing tools that do no harm to the biosphere.  That’s all it takes. 

            Do I sound crazy?  How can I be sane?  I am witnessing psychotic behavior on a global scale. 

            If you’re not depressed, there must be something wrong with you.

recurring literary contests

Chuck Sambuchino's blog is a great resource for writers.
http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/

In Memoriam:John Coltrane From CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN

July 19, 1967

          “This ain’t no shortcut, Zoot”. Tyrone was leaning out the passenger side window, trying to see roadsigns.  “I thought you were born and bred in this area, I thought  you know the backroads of Missouri like you know the chord changes to ‘Round Midnight’.

          Zoot was concentrating on his driving.  A rain was slamming into the windshield so fiercely that the wipers were inadequate to push it aside.  He slowed the Continental to ten miles an hour as its tires geysered water in big fans to either side of the road. 

          “Close the goddam window,” Zoot said testily, “I know where I am.  I just didn’t see the Steelville Road, must have passed bout five miles back.”  He slung the vehicle into a slow turn, so that he was facing in the opposite direction.  A bolt of lightning slashed into the ground nearby and the clap of thunder brought Aaron awake in the backseat.

          “Holy Shit!” he said, blinking.  “That was loud!  We in Lawrence yet?”

photo by Art Rosch

          The trio had played a gig in Champagne the previous night, for the university crowd.  Somewhat injudiciously, Zoot had booked another campus gig the next night at the University of Kansas.  They had packed up their stuff after the gig, got into the car and started driving.  Sleeping and driving in turns, they had crossed Illinois and had encountered a furious traffic jam near East St. Louis.  Zoot turned north and crossed the Missippi at Alton, then looped south towards Jefferson City.  A ‘short cut’, he called it. 

          At one oclock in the afternoon it was dark as twilight.  The rain stopped, suddenly, the wind died down.  Tyrone rolled the window up until it was just an open crack at the top.  He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke towards the crack. 

          “We need a PissnGas,” Aaron announced.  He pointed at the gauge.  “You’re almost on empty and I’m almost on full.” 

          “There’s one at the Steelville turnoff, if I can find it.”  Zoot was unusually moody and terse.  He felt stupid booking two gigs so far apart on succeeding nights, but he had a lot of people to support and the money was good.  After all these years, he had learned how to pace himself, but now and then one of his wives called or one of his kids needed school money and he was forced to push himself and his musicians. 

          Aaron leaned forward and put his face near Zoot’s shoulder.  “You’re kinda gloomy, man.  What’s goin’ on?”

          Zoot steered with one hand and rubbed his left-side bursitis with the other.  “I don ‘t know.  It ain’t the weather and it ain’t really the drive, we done this a hundred times.  Somethin’ spooky in the air, I can feel it.”

          “Yeah?  Well what is that thing?”  Tyrone was pointing across a landscape of ripening soybeans, toward the lowering sky in the southwest.

          Zoot braked suddenly and stopped in the middle of the narrow deserted back road.

          “That,” he said emphatically, “Is about to become a twister, it ain’t quite touched the ground yet.”  Transfixed, the three musicians watched the sky writhe as it made jagged blades of dark moisture.  The blades seemed to fence with one another, dancing around a central core of towering black cloud.  Its beauty was at once staggering, menacing and inspiring.  After a few moments, the dueling blades were sucked into this central darkness and they became a single stabbing dagger that connected with the earth.  A skirt of debris rose from its intersection and surrounded its lower trunk with the red-green fields of soybean plants. 

          Zoot gunned the car and started racing down the road as fast as he dared.  The twister reached out towards them.  It felt personal, malevolent. 

          It knows we’re here, Aaron thought.  It wants us.

          The road was narrow but straight. Zoot was able to get up to about fifty but the deep puddles in the ruts and potholes slowed the car down as it bounced, shimmied and slid. 

          “Motherfucker’s getting closer,” Tyrone said.  His voice was loud but indistinct in the sudden roaring of wind. 

          Zoot looked for some protective feature in the landscape.  He knew he had only seconds.  They came to a wooden bridge fording a small creek.  It was a deep notch in the otherwise flat terrain.

          Zoot stopped the car and opened the door.  “Come on!”  He bailed out and headed for the side of the bridge, finding a path down towards the creek bed.  Aaron and Tyrone followed, clothes flapping, hats flying. 

          “Down this way!”  Zoot instructed, “get away from the bridge!”

          The three men slapped through muddy creek bed and found a big rock thirty feet from the bridge.  They crouched under it like little children hanging onto a mother’s skirts. Looking up, Aaron saw the base of the twister lashing back and froth, saw the sky whirling, saw leaves and limbs circling.  The wind howled and he put his face into his arms and held the rock.  His breath was sucked from his body.  He had a moment of panic as he struggled for air.

          The wooden frame of the bridge exploded in the din and boards went up into the sky, disappearing into blackness.  The air came rushing back into Aaron's lungs, and his breath returned.  He heard voices in the wind, evil genies laughing, mocking, capricious in their power.

          The twister went down the road and across the fields and disappeared back into the sky.

          The musicians climbed back to the road, fearing for the Continental and their musical instruments.

          The car was in the exact center of the road, pointed in the opposite direction in which it had been parked.  Gingerly, Zoot opened the door.  Nothing seemed to have changed.  Tyrone’s cigarette butt still rested at the lip of the ashtray.  The organist reached in and took the cigarette reverently, drew a puff and blew smoke into the still air.  Aaron’s copy of Downbeat Magazine was still open to the record reviews.  On the road, piles of junk lay everywhere, clods of earth, wooden beams, uprooted plants.  Trees were cracked a third the way up their trunks, all of their branches laying on the ground, pointing northeast.

          Zoot shook his arms and hands as if to disperse some unwelcome insect.  “Man, I thought that twister was after me, personally.”

          His voice shook.

          “So did I,” Aaron agreed.  His throat was dry.  His heart was pounding.

          Tyrone nodded.  He wa so thrilled to be alive he was hopping from foot to foot.  “It was saying ‘Tyrone, I’m comin’ to git you’.  I thought I’d open my eyes and be in Oz, with a bunch of little people dancin’ round my feet.”

          Zoot walked to the now topless bridge.  He looked at the steel superstructure, bounced around on it.  “Looks okay.  I ain’t going back forty miles to get across this creek.”

       The men got into the car and Zoot steered it carefully onto, and across, the bridge.    “Still need a Pissngas?”  Zoot inquired mockingly. 

   Aaron checked his clothing.  A stain of liquid went from his crotch all the way down his right leg.
           “Get out and change those pants", said Zoot., "we about fifteen minutes from the Steelville turnoff.”

          Aaron got a fresh pair of slacks from the trunk and went behind a bush.  He changed pants.  His bladder still felt full.  He wasn't embarrassed about pissing his pants.  As he emptied his bladder He heard the sound of his own stream against a world that had gone supernally silent.  There was no wind, no bird song.  The sky was a weird shade of pink.  As soon as he was finished the rain began to fall again.  The drops were huge, heavy, laden with silt.  
          Aaron left the stained pants under a layer of sticks and dirt.  Covering his head, he raced back to the car.

          After driving for ten minutes in silence, a black and white road sign appeared.  The warped rectangle shape of the state of Missouri enclosed a number four.  Fifteen yards past this sign there was a green board with white letters and an arrow pointing to the right. Steelville, eight miles, it indicated.  At this one-sided intersection was a little gas station and a tiny grocery store skirted by a wooden plank walkway.   Zoot pulled into the station. He gestured to Aaron to stay in the car and lay low.  This part of Missouri still had the taint of old rebellion.  Zoot asked a black attendant to fill the tank, and Tyrone jumped through the rain towards the store, looking for another pack of cigarettes.  Aaron watched the Schlitz Beer sign flicker, rolled the window down to smell the storm -soaked earth.  He knew this country, too.  He had come here for vacations with his family.  They had gone to Bagnell Dam, Lake of the Ozarks, Wildwood Resort.  In a childhood with a paucity of happy memories, this country meant peace, relief, respite, jumping from a pier into the lake, riding horses, mom on her best behavior, dad relaxed and having fun. 

          Zoot chatted with the station attendant about the twister,  informed him that the Willens Creek Bridge was no longer covered.

          “Be damned,” the man said, “twister blew the top the bridge away?  No shit?”

          “No shit, almost blew us away too, turned this here Lincoln Continental hundred eighty degrees backward.”  Zoot’s dialects always reflected his circumstances.  He pronounced “this here” as “thissheer”. 

          Hurriedly finishing the transaction to get out of the rain, the attendant took Zoot’s money and rushed back into the shelter of the store. 

          A moment later, Tyrone came walking out, holding a newspaper limply in his hand.  His mouth was hanging open, his eyes had a staring and shocked quality, as if he had just survived a terrible battle.  He opened the passenger’s side , threw the newspaper towards Aaron in the back seat and slumped abruptly on the plush leather, one leg hanging out the door. 

          “You look like you just got terrible news,” Zoot observed with concern.

          Tyrone nodded and pointed towards the newspaper. 

          “Coltrane’s dead,” he said mournfully.  “It’s in the paper.  He died yesterday.”

          There was a stunned silence.   Aaron felt as if he had just taken the first plunge on a roller coaster ride, his stomach went up through his chest.

          “No,” Zoot said.  “No.” 

          Tyrone had the paper folded out to the entertainment section.  It was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  There was a big article about Barbara Streisand, a review of the new James Bond movie,  a review of the Led Zeppelin Concert at Kiel Auditorium.  Down in the far right corner of the page was a two paragraph squib. It said, "Jazz Musician John Coltrane Dies."  There was sketchy information about the jazz giant succumbing suddenly to liver cancer.

          Aaron put his face in the paper and squeezed himself with it, crumbling it around his cheeks.  “He was forty years old!”  He wailed.  “Forty years old!  What is happening?  Why are jazz musicians dying?  Why Coltrane, of all people, Trane? “

          Desperately, he clawed at Zoot’s shoulder.  “We’re all professional jazz musicians, Zoot.  Is this my future?  Is this Tyrone’s?  Are you going to die on us, too?  Why can’t we survive?  What are we doing to ourselves?”

          Zoot stared straight ahead, seeing nothing.   He reached across his shoulder and patted Aaron’s hand, squeezing it. 

          “You’re just beginning to see what it’s like,” the old musician said.  “It’s dangerous to be a genius.  That’s why I stay in this chitlin circuit groove, play the college campuses, keep my mid-stream profile.  And this is hard enough.  You think Coltrane could be inspired every night?  You think he could get up there and reach down into his guts and deliver a brilliant set five nights a week, be a genius?”

          A core of bitter reflection stained Zoot’s voice.  These were thoughts he generally kept to himself.  As he spoke, his anger grew and his voice scraped with frustration and old pain.

          “You have to use something, like Bird, like Lester, you have to use something to get to that place where you even feel like playing at all, let alone be great.  Then you raise the standard, people turn out and expect to be transformed, to hear an oracular performance, night after night.  I smoke my weed, that’s how I do it.  And I don’t ask too much of myself.  That’s why I’m sixty three and still playing.  I know how much I can give.  Men like Coltrane, they don’t know moderation, they can’t know moderation, they have to keep pushing the limits or the critics jump on their ass, the fickle fans get restless, the talk on the street starts goin’ ‘round, ‘Trane’s lost it, Bird’s lost it, Jackie’s lost it, Prez’s lost it, Bud’s lost it! You have a couple bad nights and all these assholes can’t play a note go talking, he’s lost it, lost it, getting’ tired, man, runnin’ out of steam, his great days are behind him, what a shame, used to be a great musician.”

          Zoot paused for a moment, looking at his sidemen, at his disciples in the mystic art of music.  Then he spat a long gobbet out the window and said, with a lengthy and contemptuous drawl, “Sheee-it!  Son of a fucking bitch!”

          He turned backward to look at Aaron.  Cobra-like, he shifted his body, glancing at Tyrone beside him.  He was seething, indignant.   “That’s why geniuses die.  They have to die!  Ain’t no choice!  Once they get a reputation as a genius, they have to be a geniuse every night.  They use it up!  Then they’re gone!”

          He turned on the engine and drove about a hundred yards down the road.  He pulled onto the shoulder and scrunched the emergency brake with his foot.  He put his large hands in front of his face, then leaned into them and began to weep. 

          It was contagious.  These three friends, of different ages, races, different backgrounds, were not afraid to show their feelings to one another.  The three jazz musicians, on their way to a gig, taking a short cut through the back roads of Missouri, pulled onto the side of the country lane and wept for John Coltrane. 

Book Cover of "Confessions Of An Honest Man"

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