Having exhausted the spring break and amateur stripper genres,
Hollywood has at long last taken notice of the state of the English
language. In films like Idiocracy (called by Slate’s film critic “The most
stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France”) and the
television series Deadwood language is at the fore; that
is, what language says about society and how it has been allowed to
deteriorate.
Nowhere is this concern with language better demonstrated than
in the new Mike Judge film Idiocracy. Judge’s film depicts
a dystopian future where language has degenerated into a medley of
ghetto/hillbilly/valley girl-speak and grunts. The film’s conceit
is simple: the smart and affluent people have ceased procreating —
whether because of their busy careers or plain selfishness —
leaving the field open for the ultra-fertile knuckledraggers, who
tend to produce an overabundance of offspring with an endless
string of partners, until there is no one left with an IQ over 80.
When an Army enlisted man — frozen as part of a military
experiment — awakens some 500 years hence, he is ridiculed and
pummeled for speaking in complete and coherent sentences.
This is indeed our future. Successful, college-educated women do
have far fewer children than their less educated counterparts.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, “A woman’s
educational level is the best predictor of how many children she
will have.” A Phillip Longman study of a group of college-educated
women reported a fertility rate of only 0.37 children per woman,
which would mean in the long term a halving every 12 years or a
decline of 99 percent within a human lifetime. A continued increase
in the percentage of women going to college or graduate school may
well push this rate down further, Longman warns. Men too seem to be
intimidated by highly intelligent women and often “marry down.”
But one does not have to time travel to the future to hear the
barnyard language depicted in Judge’s film. One has only to turn on
the television. It can be found on shows like Jerry
Springer and The Wire, where even the cops seem
unable to express themselves without generous recourse to the all
purpose F-word, which substitutes for noun, verb, adjective,
adverb, any part of speech the speaker is unable to articulate.
The HBO series Deadwood is likewise compelling for its
use of language. In Deadwood class distinctions are marked
by dress, profession, living conditions, but most of all by
language. The speech of the lower classes is raw, obscene, and
hopelessly ungrammatical, while the few upper class denizens (who
never swear nor curse) speak the impeccable English of the
Victorian parlor. Once the educated classes were taught that
cursing was for the low and vulgar, while they — schooled on the
verse of Latin and Elizabethan poets — learned to respect the
power, beauty, and subtleties of language. It was a time when the
pen was indeed mightier than the sword.
IN RETROSPECT THE language of Deadwood and the Old West
seems tame by today’s standards. Deadwood’s writers were
therefore obliged to use today’s most base vulgarisms in order to
convey the depravity of the language. Otherwise
>Deadwood’s tough guys would have sounded like pansies.
USA Today counted at least 63 mentions of the F-word in
one random episode of Deadwood. (Historians seem to agree
that the swearing in Deadwood is rather extreme and not
historically accurate. For instance, the F-word was not used for
emphasis until some twenty or more years after the events portrayed
on the series.) Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg notes that before the
1920s swearing usually meant taking the Lord’s name in vain. It was
not until that lost its bite in an increasingly secular post-World
War I society that those in search of more scandalous curses went
— so to speak — from the Bible to the bedroom and bath.
Since the 1920s cursing has become more and more a part of the
popular culture, more, if you will, mainstream. That coupled with
the '60s attitude in education that grammar “doesn’t allow us to
express our inner souls,” that grammar is in fact a class warfare
tool used by the ruling elite to oppress the lumpen proletariat,
may have placed the English language beyond redemption. This suits
some linguists fine.
David Crystal, in his new book How Language Works,
calls prescriptivists (those who would uphold grammatical
standards) “linguistic Stalinists” and insists that “Language
change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional.
Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just —
change.” So back off. Even if those changes lead to a future where
communication resembles the squeals and grunts of the Neanderthals
portrayed in Idiocracy or an episode of The Howard
Stern Show, even if it leaves mankind with the inability not
only to examine and express complex ideas and concepts, but to
express anything beyond mere animalistic impulses. But, as the
linguists say, that is okay, because language change is good. Well,
not good, but not bad either. Or as our
great-great-great-great-great grandchildren might say: “Uhhhn!”
