Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 8

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I believe there are no scientific investigators that actually call themselves psychosemanticists, but it is surely time for these highly specialized therapeuticians to set up offices. They must not be carelessly confused with psychosomaticists, who study the effects of mental weather upon the ramparts of the body. The psychosemanticists will specialize in the havoc wrought by verbal artillery upon the fortress of reason. Their job will be to cope with the psychic trauma caused by linguistic meaninglessness, to prevent the language from degenerating into gibberish, and to save the sanity of persons threatened by the onset of polysyllabic monstrosititis.

We have always been a nation of categorizationists, but what was once merely a national characteristic is showing signs of malignancy. I shall not attempt to discover the incipient primary lesion, for I am not a qualified research scholar in this field. Indeed, for having had the impudence to trespass thus far I shall no doubt be denounced by the classificationists as a fractional impactionist (one who hits subjects a glancing blow), an unauthorized incursionist, a unilateral conclusionist, and a presumptuous deductionist. Our national predilection for ponderous phraseology has been traced by one authority as far back as the awkward expression “taxation without representation” (unjust impost). It is interesting to note that the irate American colonists of that period in our history would be categorized today as “anti-taxation-without-representationists.”

Not long ago, for the most recent instance in my collection, Senator Lyndon Johnson was described by a Washington newspaperman as a pragmatic functionalist, a term that was used in a laudatory sense. It isn’t always easy nowadays to tell the laudatory from the derogatory at first glance, but we should be glad that this Democratic leader is not a dogmatic divisionary or an occlusive impedimentarian. The most alarming incidence of verbal premalignancy occurs, of course, in this very area of politics, but let us skip over such worn and familiar double-jointedisms as creeping Socialists, disgruntled ex-employees, ritualistic liberals, massive retaliationists, agonized reappraisalists, unorthodox thinkers, unwitting handmaidens (male), to name only a few out of hundreds, and take a look at excessive prewar anti-Fascism, a colossal (I use the adjective as a noun, in the manner of television’s “spectacular”) that was disgorged a few years ago. Here the classificatory degradationists brought a time element into what might be called the post-evaluation of political morality. The operation of this kind of judgment during and after the Civil War would have thrown indelible suspicion upon all the Northern patriots, including Abraham Lincoln, who wanted Robert E. Lee to take command of the Federal Armies in the field. They would be known today as “overenthusiastic pre-Manassas pro-Leeists.”

The carcinomenclature of our time is, to be sure, an agglomerative phenomenon of accumulated concretions, to which a dozen different types of elaborative descriptivists have contributed--eminently the old Communist intellectuals, with their “dialectical materialists,” “factional deviationists,” “unimplemented obscurantists,” and so on, and so on. Once the political terminologists of all parties began to cross-infect our moribund vocabulary, the rate of degeneration became appalling. Elephantiasis of cliché set in, synonym atrophied, the pulse of inventiveness slowed alarmingly, and paraphrase died of impaction. Multiple sclerosis was apparent in the dragging rhythms of speech, and the complexion of writing and of conversation began to take on the tight, dry parchment look of death. We have become satisfied with gangrenous repetitions of threadbarisms, like an old man cackling in a chimney corner, and the onset of utter meaninglessness is imminent.

The symptoms of this ominous condition show up most clearly in the tertiary stage of “controversial figure.” The most complicated specimen of this type of modern American is the man of unquestionable loyalty, distinguished public service, and outstanding ability and experience who has nonetheless “lost his usefulness.” Actually, this victim of verbositosis has not lost his usefulness, his nation has lost it. It doesn’t do the national psyche any good to realize that a man may be cut off in the full flower of his usefulness, on the ground that that is not what it is. I trust I have made the urgent need for psychosemanticists apparent, even though I have admittedly become contaminated in the process, and I doubt whether my own psychosemanticist, after treating me, will ever be able to turn to my wife and say cheerfully, “Madam, your husband will write clearly again.”

Before visiting my hypothetical psychosemanticist for a brief imaginary interview, I feel that I should get something reassuring into this survey of depressing ailments of the tongue. We have, then, cured, or at least survived, various incipient mouth maladies in the past. There was a moment when “globaloneyism,” growing out of the Timethod of wordoggle, seemed likely to become epidemic, but it fortunately turned out to be no worse than a touch of pig Latin or a slight case of Knock, Knock, Who’s There? Congress was not prepared to adopt the telescoping of words, which takes both time and ingenuity, and unless an expression becomes absorbed by Congressionalese, it has little chance of general survival. This brings me to what may easily be the direct cause of my being bundled off to the psychosemanticist’s before long: the beating the word “security” is taking in this great, scared land of ours. It is becoming paralyzed. This is bound to occur to any forceful word when it loses its quality of affirmation and is employed exclusively in a connotation of fear, uncertainty, and suspicion. The most frequent use of “security” (I hate to add to its shakiness with quotation marks, which have taken on a tone of mockery in our day) is in “security risk,” “weakest link in our chain of security,” and “lulled into a false sense of security.” Precision of speech and meaning takes a small tossing around in the last of those three phrases. “Lulled” is actually what happens to a nation after it has been argued, tricked, maneuvered, reasoned, coaxed, cajoled, or jockeyed into a false sense of security, but the inflexibility that has descended upon us has ruled out the once noble search for the perfect word and the exact expression. What Eric Partridge calls “a poverty of linguistic resource” is exemplified by the practically exclusive use of two verbs in any public-forum discussion of national security. It is threatened or it is bolstered; I never heard of its being supported, reinforced, fortified, buttressed, or shored up, and only very rarely is it menaced, endangered, or in jeopardy.

The word “insecurity,” by the way, seems to have been taken over by the psychiatrists as their personal property. In politics, as in penology, “security” itself has come to mean “insecurity.” Take, for example, this sentence: “He was considered a ‘maximum security’ prisoner because of his police record and was never allowed out of his cell block.” Similarly, “security data” means data of the kind calculated to scare the living daylights out of you, if not, indeed, your pants off. I could prove that “maximum,” in the case of the prisoner mentioned above, really means “minimum,” but I don’t want to get us in so deep that we can’t get out. The present confused usage of “security” may have originated with the ancient Romans. Anyway, here is what Cassell’s Latin Dictionary has to say about securitas: “I. freedom from care. A. In a good sense, peace of mind, quiet, Cic. B. In a bad sense, carelessness, indifference, Tac. II. Transf., freedom from danger, security, Tac.”

A vital and restless breed of men, given to tapping our toes and drumming with our fingers, infatuated with every new crazy rhythm that rears its ugly beat, we have never truly loved harmony, the graceful structure of shapes and tones, and for this blindness and deafness we pay the awful price of continuous cacophony. It gets into language as well as music; we mug melody for the sake of sound effects, and the louder and more dissonant they are, the better we seem to like them. Our national veins have taken in the singing blood of Italy, Wales, Ireland, and Germany, but the transfusion has had no beneficial effect. Great big blocky words and phrases bumble off our tongues and presses every day. In four weeks of purposeful listening to the radio and reading the newspapers I have come up with a staggering list, full of sound and fury, dignifying nothing: “automation,” “roadability,” “humature,” “motivational cognition” (this baby turned up in a series of travel lectures and was never defined), “fractionalization,” “varietism,” “redesegregation,” “additive,” “concertization” (this means giving a concert in a hall, and is not to be confused with cinematization or televisionization). The colloquial deformity “knowledgeable,” which should have been clubbed to death years ago, when it first began crawling about like the late Lon Chaney, has gained new life in recent months. It is a dented derby of a word, often found in the scrawny company of such battered straw hats as “do-gooder,” “know-how,” “update,” “uptake” (I recently uptook the iodine uptake test for thyroidism), and others so ugly and strange I can’t decipher them in my notes. One of them looks like “de-egghead,” which would mean to disintellectualize or mentally emasculate--a crippling operation approved of by an alarming number of squash-heads, in Washington and elsewhere.

During my month of vigil and research, I heard an able physiologist who has a radio program say, quite simply, “We do not use up all the food we take in.” He wasn’t allowed to get away with that piece of clarity, however. “Ah,” cut in his announcer, for the benefit of those no longer able to understand simplicity, “the utilization factor!” I turned from this station to a droning psychologist, just in time to hear him say, “The female is sometimes the sexual aggressor.” Here a familiar noun of mental illness and military invasion was clumsily at work beating in the skull of love with a verbal bung-starter. The sweetheart now often wears the fustian of the sick man and the Caesar. In the evening, I tuned in on one of the space-patrol programs that gleefully exude the great big blockyisms. “Your astrogation bank will tell you!” cried the captain of a space ship to another interplanetary pilot, meaning his navigational instruments. In a fairy tale, an astrogation bank would be a “star panel,” but the quality of fairy tale is nowhere to be found in these dime novels of the constellations.

One Sunday morning, my head aching with “kiss-close” and “swivel-chair-it,” meaning, I guess, “at kissing distance” and “maul it over in your executive brain,” respectively, I stumbled upon a small radio station that had been captured by a man of God, ominous and squealful, who was begging his listeners to live on their knees, not as slaves but as supplicants. This particular fundamentalist, or maybe it is fundamentalitarian, had probably never heard of the great protest “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” But these yammering eschatologists, and many of their followers, have even less respect for the glory and grace of English than the unsaved politicians. “Let us cease to sugar-coat, let us cease to whitewash, let us cease to bargain-counter the Bible!” the speaker implored us. He finished second in vulgarity, I regret to say, to a reverend I had heard earlier in the year, who shouted, “I didn’t cook up this dish, God cooked it up. I’m just dishing it out to ye!” The line between holiness and blasphemy becomes even thinner when some of the lay testimonialists begin ranting. “I own a shoe store in New Jersey,” one of them confessed, “but Jesus Christ is my senior partner.”

A recent investigation of the worries and concerns of five thousand selected Americans revealed that we are preoccupied almost wholly with the personal and private, and are troubled only mildly by political anxieties, including the danger of war, the state of civil liberties, and the internal Communist threat. This does not come as a surprise to me, since the nature of our national concern about Communism is proved to be personal by such expressions as “anti-anti-Communists” and “anti-anti-anti-Communists.” The first actually means men who are against men who are against Communists, and the second, when you unravel it, means men who are against men who are against men who are against Communists. In these wonderful examples of our love of formidable elaborationisms, concept and doctrine are put aside, and personalities take their place. What we have left is pure personalism--a specific reactionary who is against a specific liberal who is against Senator Malone, let us say. The multiplicity of prefixes, another sign of linguistic poverty, was touched with a fine and healthful irony in Quincy Howe’s invention of the phrase “ex-ex-Communist.” (Many will claim that for their own, but Mr. Howe got to it first.) One would think that Americans would be worried, or at least concerned, by a man who may have ceased to be a man who may have ceased to be a Communist, but the Worry Research I have mentioned showed that this isn’t so. We are worried about health, family matters and money, and we have no time for a man who may be lying about lying. Incidentally, a fairly new advertising slogan, “The portable portable,” fits neatly into modern jargon: the typewriter that you can carry that you can carry.

While I was exploring the decline of expression in America, I spent a week in a hospital. Medical science has done much for humanity, but not in the area of verbal communication. It should undergo a prefectomy, and have some of its prefixes taken out. I should like to see the “semi” removed from “semi-private,” a dispiriting word that originated in hospitals; there must be a less depressing way of describing a room with two or more beds. I am also for taking the “sub” out of “sub-clinical,” and starting all over again with the idea in mind of making the word mean something. Incidentally, I discovered at the hospital the difference between “to be hospitalized” and “to become hospitalized.” The first means to be placed in a hospital, and the second has two meanings: to get so that you can’t stand it in the hospital any longer, and to like it so much there that you don’t want to leave.

Lying in bed brooding over these matters, I turned on the radio and heard an American describe another American as “an old-time A.D.A. type of anti-Jeffersonian radical”--a beautiful specimen of bumblery. Sir Winston Churchill, in the exhilarating years of his public life, turned out many phrases as sharp as stilettos--for one example, “squalid gamin.” But you can count on your fingers the Americans, since the Thomas Paine of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” who have added bright, clear phrases to our language. If you can bumble an opponent to death why stab him seems to be the general feeling among our politicians, some of whom have got through the twelve years since the war ended with only five adjectives of derogation: naïve, hostile, unrealistic, complacent, and irresponsible. All these slither easily, if boggily, into bumblery, and the bumbler is spared the tedious exercising of his mental faculties.

The day I got dressed and was about to leave the hospital, I heard a nurse and an interne discussing a patient who had got something in his eye. “It’s a bad city to get something in your eye in,” the nurse said. “Yes,” the interne agreed, “but there isn’t a better place to get something in your eye out in.” I rushed past them with my hair in my wild eyes, and left the hospital. It was high time, too.

When and if I find a reputable psychosemanticist, I want to take up with him something that happened to me one night more than two years ago. It may be the basis of my etymological or philological problems, if that’s what they are--words, especially big ones, are beginning to lose their meaning for me. Anyway, I woke up one summer night, from a deep dream of peacelessness, only to realize that I had been startled by nothing whatever into a false sense of insecurity. I had a desperate feeling that I was being closed in on, that there was a menace in the woods behind my house or on the road in front of it, watchful, waiting, biding its time. A few weeks later I bought a .38-calibre Smith & Wesson police revolver, which startled my wife into a genuine sense of insecurity. She hid the gun somewhere, and the cartridges somewhere else, and I still don’t know where they are. I have often thought of telling my psychosemanticist about it, and I sometimes have the feeling that I did call on him and that the interview went like this:

“Doesn’t your wife’s hiding the gun worry you?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“It would me,” he confessed.

“It would what you?” I demanded.

It seemed to disturb him. “What would what me?” he asked cautiously.

I suddenly couldn’t think of a thing. I didn’t even know what what was, but I had to say something, so I said something: “Ill fares the land, to galloping fears a prey, where gobbledygook accumulates, and words decay.”

About two years ago a wistful attempt was made by some Washington bureau to straighten out the governmentalization of English. Directives were sent to the various departments demanding, among other things, the elimination of “finalize.” It was as hopeless as asking a tiny child to drop its popsicle and bathe the St. Bernard. Izationism is here to stay. It appeals to bureaucrats and congressmen because of its portentous polysyllabification. Politicians love it the way they love such expressions as “legislativewise.” Lord Conesford, stout defender of the Queen’s English, recently paraphrased Churchill’s “Give us the tools and we will finish the job” by Washingtonizing it like this: “Supply us with the implements and we will finalize the solution of the matter.”

Webster’s Unabridged, to my sorrow, recognizes such mastadonisms as “psychologize” and “physiologize” and, a prime favorite of congressmen, “analogize.” It was, however, the physiologist I have already mentioned who classified those of us who are still up and about as “the non-institutionalized.” This is a piece of bungalorum calculated to give even the healthiest men a sense of monolithic insecurity. “Non” has an insidious way of creeping into izationisms. A piece of journalism was described on the air not long ago as “absolutely non-fictionalized.” This negationization of what once could be described as verbal communication caused a Scot of my acquaintance to ask me, “Have you nothing that is positively American? It seems to me that everything one hears about in America is un-American.” This abused and imprecise arrangement of letters seems bound to lose its proud A before long and to end up as “Un-american.” President Eisenhower might well add to his imperatives the necessity to speak and write in such a way that we can be understood by the English-speaking peoples as well as the other races of a world that stands in grave need of clarity, accuracy, and sense.

The conspiracy of yammer and merchandising against literate speech reached a notorious height in 1956 with a singing commercial for a certain cigarette which we were told “tastes good like a cigarette should.” I have one or two suggestions for the Madison Avenue illiterates in the gray flannel suits. The first is a slogan for a brewery: “We still brew good like we used to could.” The second is an ad for some maker of tranquillizing drugs:

Does he seldomly praise you any more? Those kind of husbands can be cured of the grumps with Hush-Up. So give you and he a break. Put Hush-Up in his food. It don’t have no taste.

And now, for God’s sake, let’s go out and get a breath of fresh air.