Linguistic Liberties

NOT LONG AGO, when I was back home in the nether-parts of Virginia, I attended a soiree with all of my old high school friends--or at least those who had recently been paroled.

After filling me in at great length about which of my classmates had been married, knocked up, gelded, shot or exiled since our last meeting, they asked me how things were going with the snobs up at Hartford.

Never known for my reticence, I had been talking for quite some time before I noticed that something was wrong; my friends' jaws were hanging much lower than usual, and their eyes were almost fully open.

"You talk funny, man," one spoke up, scratching his head and squinting at me in dull distrust. "Like one of them beach faggots."

"Yeah," grunted in another. "Just like one of 'em. I seen one on CHiP's, and you's just like you was him."

I was about to protest or make some pointed remarks about their speech and grammar when I was hit by the sickening realization that they were right. In trying to overcome my own redneck accent, I had gone overboard.

I had fallen victim to Coolspeak.

WHAT IS COOLSPEAK? Well, it's basically Orwellian Newspeak with a touch of fashion. In 1984, the function of Newspeak is to reduce the human vocabulary to the point where abstract ideas and emotions could not be verbally conveyed. Although there are probably very, very few people in California who have even heard of 1984, the inhabitants of our West Coast have done a better job of destroying the power of our language than the Ministry of Truth could have dreamed of. Take, for instance, this deep and moving conversation I heard on the shuttle bus:

"Marcie! What up?"

"Oh, hey Darcey, you like mean you haven't heard?"

"Like, no?"

"Oh, well like my parents were driving up in Vermont, and there was like this really heavy thunderstorm, and there was like this, you know huge truck full of chickens coming the other way, and like WHAM!"

"Oh, wow, hey, that really like...sucks."

"Yeah, I was like seriously bumming, but then like I found out that my dad had this like giant insurance policy, so I was pretty psyched. I mean, I've been wanting to get a new CD player, and..."

"Cool."

Two things really bother me about such language. One of these is the abuse of the word "like," which with the exception of similes and expressions of mild affection, should not be used. It seems to me that people use it when they can't like, you know, think of any like adjectives.

The other thing which irks me is that Coolspeak is so damned inappropriate here. Maybe Nerdspeak or Snobspeak, or even Paranoidspeak but not Coolspeak. Only about 10 people here are authentic blondes, and very few of them have either a tan or a surfboard. Consequently, when I see some pale, hairy organism loping out of the Science Center and telling some equally unfortunate companion about his "tubular" new vector conversion program, I am overcome by irony and grief.

You can hardly blame our poor friend, however, for he is only trying to fit in with the other dudes who like to chill out in the Computer Room. Perhaps nothing in the world feeds and thrives on itself as well as Coolspeak. When one of your friends introduces some new expression, no matter how stupid, into his vocabulary, one either picks it up or falls behind.

ANOTHER PROBLEM which needs to be fought here is obsecenity abuse. I'm not saying anything against obscenity itself, only using it excessively or incorrectly.

It is a question of proper upbringing. Many people here--having been raised in some kind of hyper-austere, Ingmar Bergmann-style family where even thinking about the lower functions was a mortal sin--find it hard to deal with the decadent freedom of Harvard life. Unsure how to act, they try to behave they way they think everyone else does, and, invariably, they overshoot the mark. The result is otherwise innocuous-looking people leaning over at the dinner table and asking you to "pass the fucking salt."

I wouldn't have that much of a problem with this if these poor individuals would research their vocabularies a little more carefully. Cursing effectively and economically requires a lot of skill and subtlety, more than these people can muster. The most common mistake is thinking that one word is just as good as another, or that bigger is better. This leads to such improbable insults as "Shit off!" or "Hell you, assbutt."

Far short of actually offending anyone, such exclamations produce in their targets a deep, sudden pang of embarassment and sympathy, as if they had just dodged a punch from a man with no arms.

What can be done to help these people? I think our friends down at the QRR office might have a few pointers. We could establish a diagnostic obscenity test (DOT) for all incoming freshmen, one which stresses proper context and conjugation, and provide remedial courses for those who fail it.

I know all of this is sort of trivial, but it's heartfelt nonetheless. I've always believed that if you're going to talk like a surfer, you have to surf, and if you're going to talk dirty, you have to talk dirty right. Besides, I like always get really pissed out when I hear people talk like that.