Aaron Spain CATE President

Language in Thought and Action (apologies to S. I. Hayakawa)

"Another great Advantage proposed by this Invention, was, that it would serve as an universal
Language to be understood in all civilized Nations, whose Goods and Utensils are generally of the
same kind. . . And thus, Embassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign Princes and Ministers
of State, to whose Tongues they were utter Strangers." Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1728)

". . . Since nothing is more important than the language it uses -- there would be no society without
it-- we would be better off if we spoke and wrote with exactness and grace, and if we preserved
rather than destroyed the value of our language." Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking (1974)

"Newspeak is a transparent neologism. For Orwell, it is the fictional portrait of the deliberate
distortion of an Oldspeak that never was." Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The
Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988)

The attacks of September 11, 2001 have rallied Americans in a way that has perhaps confounded and confused the terrorists (sorry, Reuters, these were nobody's "freedom fighters," no matter how you splice your semantic rope). We have read and heard an avalanche of commentary on what it means to be an American, what we are to learn from this experience, what we ought to have known before, and so forth. Our image-conscious media have inundated us with pictures so startling, so ghastly that sometimes we cannot fully comprehend what we see. Sometimes words are inarticulate expressions of the wrenching emotions we feel, yet we are bombarded by words and phrases that become perversely inaccurate or nearly meaningless in a few days or a few hours.

English teachers need to be wary of language's nuances in a time of national stress. Note how quickly network journalism adopted on-screen logos like "America's New War" or "America Rising" while reporting even local news. In a vaporous attempt to rally Americans after September 11, President Bush included the phrases "the first war of the twenty-first century" and "monumental struggle of good versus evil." In this moment of emotional renderings, the editor of Vanity Fair is supposed to have said that this is a time to be more serious, apparently without betraying a sense of irony. Leon Wieseltier, commenting on the over-written, over-signified, sometimes over-precious writing of the now famous black covered The New Yorker' warned against "the old bathos to protect against the new knowledge." The temptation to wallow in sorrow and grief for profit must be overwhelmingly irresistible. One of the Big Three telecasters has made sure to connect its weekly drama about fictional rescue to guest appearances of real-life rescuers in lower Manhattan. Such timely bathos will probably improve ratings. Ford Motor Company and General Motors took less than two weeks to equate America recovering from its emotional shock with buying a new car. Patriotism can save you a few dollars and "move the country forward" in the healing process. More than one Wall Street brokerage firm has televised an advertisement that equates political freedom with making money on the New York Stock Exchange. As Wieseltier says, "We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners."

Writing just after World War II, George Orwell cautioned readers, writers, and thinkers to use language carefully, consciously, specifically. He noted in "Politics and the English Language" that "the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." Correctly or not, September 11, 2001 has been compared to December 7, 1941. Our political and media leaders could benefit from reading and understanding Geoge Orwell's essay. Before we declare "war on terrorism" we need to understand what we mean by war. If we judge by the success of our "war on drugs" we may be in for a mordant and pointless effort. Orwell reminds us, "Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give and appearance of solidity to pure wind." It is not unpatriotic, it is not divisive in a democratic republic to question the rhetoric, the diction, the
vocabulary, and the ideas of our political debate. English teachers have a responsibility to teach their students to examine the language of our politics, our media, and our cultural diversions.

The traumatic events of September 11 might prompt English teachers to examine how we perceive, comprehend,and discuss the apparently incredible. What happens to the meaning of meaning when phrases or words like "horrific event," "heinous crime," "terrorist," "tragedy," and "hero" are repeated and repeated? My Advanced Placement students had some trouble working through Beowulf because they could not isolate the Old English scop's description of Grendel -- he reminded them of a terrorist whose life is simply and solely dedicated to the destruction of others. Though I probably can't prove it on a standardized test scale, reading the ancient epic became a visceral and emotional encounter with real art for nearly all of those students. The
metaphor of the monster did not need elaboration. The grand old poem became the teacher, but these students are clever enough to separate a metaphorical and possibly allegorical literary hero and his ultimate tragedy from the real life they saw on television or read about in newspapers. Even if art reminded them of reality, it was a painful, memorable, and reassuring moment for my students and me.

The uniquely American experiment in Enlightenment Age idealism we call democratic republicanism will survive terrorism, economic downturns, misguided reform movements, Coca-colonization, McDonaldization, Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer, WWF Smackdown, and who knows how many other cultural attacks, but only to the extent that individual teachers, especially English teachers, are willing to separate bathos from pathos, political liberty from commercial brand name hype, standardization from reform, and propaganda from reasoned argument. In a time of cliche, English teachers can "raise the bar," "shift the paradigm," "invest in excellence," make a "world class" statement if, with their students, they consciously examine how language is ordered and organized for martial, political, and social effects.

To what extent do linguistic and semantic values suffer in the sacred names of security, nationalism, and patriotism? Might our highminded Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, freedom, individualism, and democracy give way to fear-mongering, jingoism, bathos, or aphorism? Parsing generalizations and skewering cliches of accepted verbal intercourse ought to be what English teachers do everyday. How frequently does the language of government, business, educational bureaucracies, or media try to disguise or mask or reshape a sordid or reprehensible reality? To exaggerate the moment only a little, English teachers need to be the guerrilla fighters in the war against dishonest, manipulative language, especially language that exploits fear, that encourages
intolerance, that debases individual worth, that promotes mindless conformity in the name of some vague cause or mission.