CAN'T ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?

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 cliches, 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.

The indifference to language is also a result of Viet Nam and Watergate. An accumulation of lies inevitably corrupts the language in which the lies are told. After an American bombing raid in Cambodia, a U.S. Air Force colonel complained to reporters: You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing It's not bombing! It's air support." The classic of the war, of course came from the American officer who explained: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." In Nixon's White House, concealing information became "containment" I was wrong" or "I lied" became "I misspoke myself." And so on. Abuse of power is usually attended by abuse of language Viet Nam and Watergate, along with later revelations about the FBI and CIA, have encouraged a cynical, almost conspiratorial view that public words are intended to conceal, not to transmit the truth.

Recently an informal group of linguistic vigilantes has risen up to ridicule American abuses and to warn, in terms alternately playful and despairing, that a culture so heedless of its language is headed toward a state of corrupt, Orwellian gibberish These writers have found a responsive audience; people obsessed with good English almost enjoy the feeling that they belong to an embattled cult. NBC Commentator Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking, a catalogue of ugly Americanisms and verbal atrocities, was 26 weeks on the bestseller lists. A Pulitzer prizewinning writer, Jean Stafford, has been conducting a crusade of sorts against what she sees as the encroaching barbarism of inexact and fraudulent language.

Works by other writers in the past few months have reflected this fascination with language, but have delved deeper into the mysterious origins of words. In After Babel, Critic George Sterner uses the problems of translation to discuss the diversity human tongues and the linguistic theories that account for them. (Unlike many of the critics, he finds American English now in a state of acquisitive brilliance but also of instability ") Novelist Walker Percy, in a book of essays called The Message in the Bottle, splendidly analyzes the sheer strangeness of language as a phenomenon--an exchange of mental fire that obeys no physical laws but has its origins in some miraculous gift of comprehension and self-awareness, a gift as spontaneous and awesome as Helen Keller's discovering the physical fact of water and the word for water at the same moment. Such reflections reach back to the edges of silence, to a cabalistic cherishing of words--the beginning of speech being the event that marked the first step in the hominids' progress toward Shakespeare. But most of the debate about language now occurs at the opposite end of history, in today's atmosphere of verbal saturation.

America's vocabularies, both public and private, are being corrupted in part by a curious style of bombast intended to invest even the most banal ideas with importance. Discussing his institution's money troubles, a university president promises: "We will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy and pry important budgetary considerations and control out of our fiscal and administrative procedures." This is a W.C. Fields newspeak, the earnestly pseudoprecise diction beloved of bureaucrats, who imagine that its blind impregnability will give their ideas some authoritative heft. In fact, it only confirms the Confucian maxim: "If language is incorrect, then what is said is not meant. If what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone."

Police prose is a burlesque of the administrative: "I apprehended the alleged perpetrator." (In a bar, the cop would say, "I collared this creep.") Eventually, all officialese takes on a mindless life of its own, the words combining and recombining according to some notion in the bureaucratic inner ear of how public language ought to sound, regardless (or irregardless, as they say) of what it means. This is an aerosol English, released by pushing a button. Writer Jimmy Breslin describes what is perhaps the ultimate in this prose: a policeman, testifying in a homicide case, refers to "the alleged victim."

A television weatherman solemnly predicts "rain tonight in some official areas." A restaurant advertises itself as "a great tradition since 1973." Wardens call solitary confinement cells "adjustment centers" or, worse, "meditation rooms." A letter from Dartmouth College describes a report on higher education financing as "containing arresting conclusions of almost watershed quality." Howard Cosell, a sports commentator with a gift for yahoo erudition, says of a quarterback: "I am impressed by the continuity of his physical presence."

All professions have their jargon, but the language of academics, especially those in the social sciences, seems to lead farther and farther into forests of meaninglessness. An article in the Journal of Educational Psychology declared: "Both the black and white teachers studied emitted few reinforcements and those emitted tended to be traditional (distant reinforcers), although most teachers stated a preference for proximity reinforcers (material rewards and close personal contact)." It is Humpty Dumpty's gospel: "Impenetrability, that's what I say!"

Feminism--which gave America the sledgehammer phrase "male chauvinist pig"--may eventually succeed in neutralizing gender in language, but the linguistic changes it has proposed often have a tinny, doctrinaire sound. Novelist Anne Roiphe, an otherwise intelligent writer, recently referred in all seriousness to her daughter's playing "cowpersons and Indians" --history amended for ideology. A letter to the editor of Ms suggested that the gender suffixes be eliminated and be replaced by "peep"--thus, cowpeep, policepeep, chairpeep and presumably even peepslaughter. (It cannot be helped that manhole would become peephole.) In a letter to the director of the Center for Women in Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, the president of the National Organization for Women wrote: "What we are about is moving from androcentric values S: and behaviors to androgynous or better yet (for consciousness-raising) gyandrous health care and societal values. In the pro-I cess, the health occupations must be desexigrated ..."

It takes no schoolmaster's prissiness to recognize that in various major and minor ways, the American language is being brutalized. The National Council of Churches speaks of education/conscientization programs," and an overwrought prelate writes of "the worship explosion." Gurus practice a kind of Kahlil Gibran-speak--soft, aching, moonshine words with a nimbus of profundity about them. The use of words as hand grenades ("Off the pig!" and "Burn, baby, burn") has diminished since the '60s. But many people have retreated into a laid-back doze of speech ("Ya know ... like ... that's heavy ...") that is incapable of bearing Many meaning weightier than a sigh.

Many of the stupidities committed with language are ludicrous rather than sinister. A California executive tells a business meeting: "When you see all these other people getting the ax, it makes you gun-shy." Incredulous becomes incredible. Almost everyone misuses the word hopefully ("Hopefully the language will improve"). Decimate has come to mean total destruction rather than a reduction by one-tenth. To which everyone responds: "I could care less."

If the state of reading and writing among the young is any indication, the use of language is going to get worse. Says Travis Trittschuh, professor of English at Detroit's Wayne State University: "Writing is not the most important way of communicating in the '70s. Students see multimillionaires who speak haltingly and write abominably, and they realize that writing no longer has prestige."

Michael Shugrue, dean of the college at Richmond College of the City University of New York, says that the role of college English teachers has shifted from introducing students to great literature to introducing "growing numbers of young adults to literacy, to reading and writing and even speaking." It is not only the minorities, the poor, the Spanish-speaking young who are having trouble; the same pattern is evident among the white middle class.

Examples can be found across the nation:

> Last year the Association of American Publishers' guide to reading textbooks, a guide intended for college freshmen, had to be rewritten for a ninth-grade reading level.

> The City University of New York spent $15 million last year on remedial English courses. Many of the students enrolling under an open-admissions policy are reading below the ninth-grade level.

> In 1957, the average verbal score on the national Scholastic Aptitude Tests was 473 (on a scale from 200 to 800). In 1973, the average was down 33 points, to 440.

> More than one-third of the students who want to become journalism majors in their junior year at the University of Wisconsin did not meet minimum admissions standards in grammar, spelling, punctuation and word usage. At the University of North Carolina's journalism school, 39% of the students flunked the basic spelling test.

The problem is compounded when racial sensitivities are involved. Should teachers try to enforce the prescriptive rule of standard American English on black children who have learned a dialect at home that is quite different, that is "incorrect" by the standard rules? Ghetto students are often faced with the choice of accepting the teacher's standards or retaining those of family and friends. Says William Smith, associate professor at Boston University's School of Education: "If a child is told the way he speaks is ignorant, he has only two options: ridicule or silence."

The problem is that the language learned at home and in the streets can be crippling in America if the black child--or the Puerto Rican raised on Spanish, the Jewish child raised on Yiddish--does not also learn the standard English that is the currency of opportunity. J. Mitchell Morse, a professor of English at Temple University, writes vehemently: "To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive ... Black English, the shuffling speech of slavery, serves the purposes of white racism." Of course, there is angry argument over whether black dialect is "the shuffling speech of slavery."

Too much may have been made of the "linguistic separatism" that supposedly divides blacks and whites. As with some other black-white questions, it can be as much a matter of economic class as of race. Rural poor whites have trouble with standard English just as some poor blacks do. Says Jean Stafford: "I feel about black English as I do about Yiddish. Theirs is a lingua franca that they are free to use among one another, but if they are not making themselves understood to those outside their group, then they can expect nothing but misinterpretation. There has to be an official language, an acceptable language."

Some argue that the decline in English standards results from the increase of mass education and from open-admissions programs--although to argue against ever widening opportunity of education is to confront one of the most cherished goals of the American ideal. In any case, teachers all along the line must play a frantic kind of catchup. Colleges blame high school teachers for sending them students who cannot read or write properly; high school teachers blame the schools below; and, with reason, nearly everybody blames the families from which the children come.

In too many American schools, teachers are overworked and overwhelmed. They are lucky if they can give ten minutes to correcting a student's paper. Some teachers doggedly diagram sentences in the hope that the structure of language will sink in and provide a foundation. Others forget about structures and trust that reading literature will ensure, perhaps by osmosis, a better grasp of the language -- although the definition of literature now has often descended from Shakespeare and Conrad to Woody Allen and Kurt Vonnegut.

There are those who consider the current breast-beating over language too pessimistic. Marshall McLuhan believes it to be "ab solute nonsense" -- but then McLuhan is the man who once said:

"Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates an absence of thought." By McLuhan's analysis: "In the radio age, the parameters of the classroom can no longer contain the English language. The sophistication outside the classroom exceeds that of the classroom."

Says Harry Levin, professor of comparative literature at Harvard: "Language changes. The more it is used, the more it is abused. English was a very permissive language to begin with. Shakespeare, for example, had the advantage of writing when there were no grammars." Some believe that the current outrage over abused English reflects snobberies of class and power. Says Columbia University Sociologist Herbert Gans: "Language is a power tool. I'm not sure if it isn't just the elite who have had power who are worrying over the loss of influence."

But the fact that language is an instrument of power -- whatever the current doubts about its effectiveness -- should make Americans more attentive to it, not less. To a great extent, a people's language is its civilization, the collective storage system of a tribe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knows something of the totalitarian uses of language, has said that he studies the words in his Russian dictionary "as if they were precious stones, each so precious that I would not exchange one for another." Another Russian exile, Vladimir Nabokov, has the same curator's love of words.

It may be that in an energetic, profligate culture like America's, language seems as disposable as ballpoint pens or beer cans. That throwaway mentality may account for some of the negligence. The argument is not between changes, linguistic innovation, new combinations on the one hand, and priggish correctness on the other. It is between meaning and meaninglessness. When language is reduced, so is civilization. George Orwell understood that "the smaller the area of choice [of words], the smaller the temptation to take thought."

In a magnificent tirade in Anthony Burgess's novel The Clockwork Testament or Enderby 's End, the poet Enderby rails at his dullard "creative writing" class: "All that's going to save your immortal soul, maaaaaan, if you have one, is words . . . Sooner or later you're all going to jail . . . All you'll have is language, the great conserver . . . Compose in your head. The time will come when you won't even be allowed a stub of pencil and the back of an envelope." There is perhaps too much doomsday in that advice, but anyone watching the world now may want to think hypothetically of stashing away in his survival kit, along with the dried foods and bottled water, a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

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