'80s-Babble: Untidy Treasure

By Stefan Kanfer

The rich have always liked to assume the costumes of the poor. Take the American language. It is more than a million words wide, and new terms are constantly added to its infinite variety. Yet as the decade starts, the U.S. vocabulary seems to have shrunk to child size.

Those who thought that song lyrics had reached Rock bottom can still hear the refrain of that disco hit: YMCA ... YMCA... YMCA. The Unicorn Hunters, a society of zealous word watchers based at Lake Superior State College in Michigan, offer a list of current English scourges. Among them: "ballpark figure," "pre-boarding--how can you board a plane before you board it?" and "no problem." Even insult has lost its point: "I couldn't care less" has degenerated to the meaningless "I could care less." Greetings are equally vapid: telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button. Kramer vs. Kramer is advertised as a film that is "absolutely today." Nouns continue to be overrun by the jargonaut: the New York Times demands stronger sourcing, meetings are preambled, situations are impacted. The New York Post recently managed a dazzling double play with its offering: "Stunt man extraordinaire Hal Needham will helm the film, which will also (hopefully) include Roger Moore."

The air is thick with devalued buzz words, including "buzz words." Behavioral science, always a leader in the euphemism derby, has cut some gems and polished some others: psychologists persistently refer to unresponsive women as "preorgasmic," and Masters and Johnson call foreplay a "stimulative approach opportunity," perhaps the most effective sexual turn-off since saltpeter. Therapists speak of "actualizing," to mean the fulfillment of potential. "I hear you" has descended from the aural to the banal; it means a total understanding of the speaker's temperament. "Lifing" is the effort to derive the utmost from every day; "Who are you screaming with?" a glancing allusion to primal therapy, is now a query about any psychological aid the subject is seeking.

According to Joel Homer, who chronicles such excrescences in his forthcoming book, Jargon, these terms can fall into the category of "nonverbal verbalizing ... a speech system in which words are used more as images than conceptual symbols." Nonverbal verbalizing (itself an outstanding piece of jargon) flourishes best in its home, Washington, D.C. There, after the Three Mile Island accident gave more mileage to the term, "China Syndrome," Joseph Hendrie, then chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, concluded: "It would be prudent to consider expeditiously the provision of instrumentation that would provide an unambiguous indication of the level of fluid in the reactor vessel." Translation: we need more accurate measuring devices. A company vice president dismissed the incident as an exaggeration. What had happened, he said, was "a normal aberration." In the same spirit, federal antitrust lawyers refer to "conscious parallelism"--first cousin to price fixing.

In sport, the old sol of solecism, Howard Cosell, finds his work done better by others. A San Francisco Giants star: "With today's victory we are definitely in the momentum-going bracket." Minnesota Twins Pitcher Jerry Koosman: "When the communications gap breaks down, it leads to not knowing the facts any more."

The gap breakdown can be seen in signs on office building doors: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY--NOT TO BE USED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. It can be read in bank offerings of free gifts and in the Indiana advertisement: LAFAYETTE'S MOST UNIQUE

RESTAURANT IS NOW EVEN MORE UNIQUE.

Throughout the nation the ize have it. An article in Cue magazine informs readers how they can have their wrinkles "youthfulized." In Florida a cop, asked whether a perpetrator had become hostile when apprehended, tells a TV interviewer that the man "was already hostilized." And Treasury Secretary G. Wil liam Miller thought that Americans were not conserving gaso line because they were "not sufficiently incentivized."

NBC Commentator Edwin Newman (A Civil Tongue), who keeps track of videosyncrasies, noted the ABC assurance that every night it would cover Iran "as long as the crisis remains crit ical" and that CBS urged viewers to "choose the candidate of your choice." Even computers have learned to commit verbal sins. In The State of the Language, Critic Hugh Kenner attacks such programmer tongues as FORTRAN, in which "vocabulary is 'a " of objects' [and] sentences are 'linear strings.' " Such dark pronunciamentos draw the future in bleak and white. We are, after all, only four years away from George Orwell's 1984, with its ominous slogans and Newspeak: "Doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling . . . WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." Yet that volume also offers an unmarked exit:

1984 imagines a time when "every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."

That seems precisely the opposite of what is occurring in American speech. Even severe grammarians note the constant refreshment of terms. In the past decade Americans have exhausted uptight and far out, situationwise and the bottom line, charisma and stonewalling, nano-nano and dy-no-mite, Koreagate and may the force be with you. Who knows whether current terms have a chance to last the decade -- or even the year?

Palimony, the term for sharing money after an unmarried couple have split, survives the Lee Marvin case; good buddy and 10-4 have become as much a part of the lingo as CB. Petrodollars and multinationals have set down roots; gasohol and meltdowns are not likely to flee from the headlines. But "humongous," the adolescent synonym for large, will never grow up; designer jeans may not last until next Christmas, and quadrophonic and shut tle diplomacy have already gone. Will such references to bosses as ayatullah and imam be as short-lived as Head Honcho and Big Enchilada?

These in like words themselves, are subject to interpretation. Pessimists regard constant change as further evidence of national decline and fall. Neologisms and ungrammatical usage, they argue, are not, as defenders claim, "alternate modes of communicating" any more than kicking over the board is an alternate mode of playing backgammon. But their critique is hardly a signal for despair -- for how else can we complain so richly except with that very speech?

In fact, since its beginning, our native tongue has been maligned and mauled, invaded by foreigners and abused at home.

No one has ever succeeded in making it uniform, and no one ever will. But then, as Henry Thoreau observed more than a century ago, "Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?" As the '80s begin, Americans and their vernacular can be put down as fractious, infuriating, un tidy, overbearing, cacophonous -- but never as standard. The U.S.

vocabulary may be dressed in blue jeans and work shirts, yet it cannot disguise one of the country's truest and most unassailable treasures : the American language. -- Stefan Kanfer

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