Nobody Said That Then!

 
 The Gratuitous Proliferation of Verbal Anachronisms

In this age of movies when "everything" is obsessively thought of down to the last detail to make the reel seem as real as possible, it is a surprise that less attention is paid to the script and the usage of slang or expressions proper to their history.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in The New Yorker, demonstrates that in TV shows and movies we watch—especially of the periodic genre—for all the perfection designers strive for in production, set, and wardrobe, the same amount of effort isn't being invested in ensuring the accuracy of the dialogue. 

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More than ever before, the makers of movies and television shows set in the historical past take care to get period details right. What we see on the screen tends to have been conscientiously researched. Medieval peasants, Civil War-era soldiers and politicians, and Old West cowboys and Indians no longer wear obviously machine-sewn clothes made of obviously synthetic fabrics. Houses and streets contain furnishings and vehicles actually in use in the era portrayed. There is some recognition of the fact that, in days of yore, men wore hats year-round, often got dirty, and didn’t necessarily shave every day. We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.

I’ve been watching episodes of “Masters of Sex,” a dramatic series about William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the famous midcentury sex researchers. It’s a good show, every bit as entertaining and clever as Emily Nussbaum says it is. But what drives me nuts about it—and about a good many other high-end cable period pieces, such as “Deadwood” and “Downton Abbey”—is the gratuitous proliferation of verbal anachronisms.

A few examples from “Masters of Sex,” which is set in St. Louis in the early nineteen-fifties: 

“I’m going to pass on the bacon.” People played a lot of bridge back then, but “pass on,” as a metaphor for skipping or refusing something, was not yet in use. 

“This is way more than you owe me.” No. No way. No one used “way” this way in 1953, not even Valley Girls. (Valley Girls had not yet been invented.) “This is much more than you owe me” would be way more authentic. 

“If this place were a meritocracy, they’d be throwing money at you.” The word “meritocracy” was coined in 1958. It would not make its way to flyover country for several more years after that. 

“Breaking news.” You might have heard this phrase in the newsroom of the New York World-Telegram, circa 1953, but it filtered down to the general public decades later, especially via cable-news chyrons. In the fifties, the closest civilian equivalent would have been “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.” 

“Trust me, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Nobody said “Trust me” back then. Everybody said “Believe me.” 

 “Heavy!” As an interjection exclaiming that some idea or experience is portentously important (as opposed to simply denoting an object that weighs a lot), “Heavy!” is post-1965 hippie slang. It would not have been used in this sense a decade earlier, any more than “Bummer!” would then have been used to denote a bad experience or, indeed, anything at all except a hobo. 

“If the Reds nuke us…” As a (usually derogatory) term for Communists or the Soviet Union, “Reds” passes period muster. “Nuke,” especially as a verb, does not. 

“I’m so sick of Establishment thinking.” The late, great British journalist Henry Fairlie repurposed “Establishment” as a noun and adjective, referring to the adepts and/or ideas of a self-perpetuating, dominant élite, in a 1955 essay for The Spectator. The roughly parallel nineteen-fifties bugaboo was “conformism.” 

 “It’s a game-changing offer.” William Safire, the late Times columnist and conductor of the paper’s “On Language” department, nailed down the etymology of this one in 2008. “Game-changer” made its début in 1982, in the sports sections of newspapers, referring to decisive plays in particular games, not to changes in the rules or methods of play. The term made its metaphorical way into business jargon during the nineties and came to rest in politics after the turn of the century. “In early 2003,” Safire wrote, 

White House officials began telling journalists “nuclear weapons are a game-changer” and to transform Iraq would be “a geopolitical game-changer.” By June of the next year, President Bush made it official, with definition attached: “A free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East is going to be a game-changer, an agent of change.” 

Game-changing, you see, does not always change the game for the better. 

“The board was blindsided.” This extremely useful football term, referring to the sacking of a quarterback from out of his field of vision, did not enter the language as a metaphor for unpleasant surprises until the nineteen-seventies. 

 “I knew that on Day One.” Another dismal excrescence of the seventies. When Eisenhower was President, a person would say “from the start,” or “from the beginning,” or “I always knew that.” 

“I’m trying to get my head around it.” More hippie slang. It’s just possible that someone might have said, “I’m trying to get my mind around it,” but even that would be a stretch. 

I suppose you are more likely to notice (and to be irritated by) anachronisms like these if you are of a sufficiently advanced age to have been alive and sentient during the period covered by “Masters of Sex.” But some fraction of younger people—those who listened attentively to the talk of their parents and their parents’ friends, those who have read fifties novels and watched fifties movies—may notice, too. Anyway, Hollywood, why do you bother getting the visual details right if you’re going to ignore the aural ones? 

Are there no production designers for language? There ought to be.

First appeared in The New Yorker, February 10, 2014

In Defense of the Humanities

I've always loved school. Even when the other kids kept saying their favorite subject was recess and it was cool to say the same thing, I always said English every time the question came up. Even now after I graduated, the question is still being asked, but in a different form: "What course did you take?" I never bat an eyelid and immediately answer English. Most people look astonished, the kind that almost borders on disappointment. I can tell they want to ask why, and I'm always thankful they never do. I wouldn't want to explain anyway—they've made up their mind that I could have chosen a more practical profession.

English majors aren't the only ones who go through this I'm sure. I know friends who took sociology, philosophy, other humanities courses who are just as lost as me in a world that is losing its appetite for the arts. This is made obvious in the kind of jobs available for us in the market, in the "innovated" curricula now being developed in universities aimed to make the humanities more suitable to those jobs. The ironic thing is that in trying to tailor the humanities in the economic fabric, universities have made it less human. 

When I taught English for a semester in university, I had to teach it as an English for Specific Purposes (ESP). This means that the lessons have to be specialized according to the nature of the block. If it was an economics or business block, I'd have to make them read articles about economics or business. If I was going to teach them about adverbs, I'd have to give them examples like "The shareholders tastefully selected the new CEO of the corporation." Adverb: tastefully. I tried this route and found my students staring at me with blank expressions, as if pleading to hand it to them simpler. This fragmentation of English to cater to different specializations is doing its job of fragmenting quite well. Perhaps I'm being sarcastic, but university isn't called university without good reason.

The  growing consciousness in America, which has seeped into the minds of everyone else through Facebook, Twitter, 9gag, and other social media platforms, is that when you have a degree in a humanities field, you are likely to find yourself serving large fries to McDonalds customers after you graduate:

I admit to being onion-skinned sometimes, and I'm afraid this is one of the circumstances that I am. I read an article once in Thought Catalog suggesting the removal of (almost) all liberal arts from college. The parenthetical almost is the author's idea, perhaps in an attempt to sound less scathing and considerate, which to me fails terribly and only makes him look like a half-ass.

If someone can’t handle the STEM majors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym), they have no business in college. While this sounds unnecessarily harsh, the realities of the 21st century world make it true.

The author seems to assume that those who study humanities are too stupid to study what he calls the STEM majors. He even goes as far as saying that those who do want to study literature, philosophy, and the human person are better off studying by themselves at home. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps we are better off studying by ourselves because the world "has evolved past the point of needing to pay outrageous sums of money to read and talk about a topic for 3-4 months — which is essentially what the average liberal arts course is." 

This brings me to think about what real education is. Is education only a means to an end (i.e., finding a job)? Can't I want to go to school because I genuinely want to learn how the world works, because I have a thirst for answers about life and happiness and truth?  

Doris Lessing, upon receiving her Prince of Asturias Prize in 2002, said this about education in the 21st century:

This kind of education, the humanist education is vanishing. Increasingly governments -our British government among them- encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.

The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He -or she- read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best known writers of other European countries, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from Spain, one from St. Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveller from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other, they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind was thought, said, written.

This has gone.

This is a sad fact to observe, that people nowadays don't read anymore, and those who do settle for books whose chief purpose is only to entertain. We don't question anymore, and if we lose this desire to question, we become too lazy to search for the answers, for the truth. We lose the logic in our thoughts and we succumb to the bandwagon mentality. This modern world obsesses so much about individuality but ironically weaves itself in the tapestry of uniform thought.

I'd like to believe that I went to school so I can think for myself,  to see reality and learn how to face it with my head held high and my heart hungry for truth. I studied literature not because I'm too stupid to go to engineering school. In fact, if I had gone to engineering school, I'd have been a good student too. I'd have gone to engineering school because I wanted to learn how to make things, because it fulfills me to make things. 

The university is not a factory, and humans are not commodities packaged and shipped to supply market demands.  If this had been what God made us for, he'd have made us robots, without reason or desires. But He made us with the capacity to think and love. What good then is education if not to better this capacity? What kind of education is it that reduces thinking into a superficial level and demotes love into a mere sentiment? Certainly not the kind of education I wanted for myself, and certainly not the kind of education I want for my children.

To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background - impossible. To call oneself educated without a background of reading - impossible.

Birth

in all
silence
before

and afterward
a thought
floats