The United States of English

In the end, it turned out the committee’s only easy job was its first motion. Out went the names of all states that weren’t English names.

That took care of all the Spanish names, like California and Florida, and a swarm of Indian names, like Illinois, Michigan and Arkansas. The one French name, Vermont, went too, along with Hawaii, the only name of Polynesian origin. That left New York, New Hampshire, Maine, Washington, and Maryland. Rhode Island was admitted to the English origin group grudgingly while New Jersey, excluded for a quasi-French origin, was quickly dubbed “Meadowland.” And it was finally decided to leave Indiana alone. “Let’ em have one,” was the unpublished reasoning.

But following the provisions of the new “English as an Official Language Law” were more difficult when it came to coming up with replacements for the rest of the union.

Finding substitutes for the Latin names were relatively simple: Pennsylvania became Penn’s Woods, the original meaning. North and South Carolina quickly were designed North and South Caroline. Georgia was likewise renamed the state of George. It got trickier for Virginia and West Virginia when the thought of “Entering the State of Virgin” as a sign on bridges across the Potomac, were a bit to humorous. In the end, a promise of state aid for schools persuaded other regions of Virginia to go for Tidewater. West Virginia opted for the Mountain State, over the protests of the former Colorado (which shunned the idea of a straight translation to “The Colored State” and picked “Vail-Aspen.”)

Commercial interests converted Michigan to the grand “State of Ford.” But more states took an environmental route so that Arizona became Canyon; Montana was Glacier; Utah, Salt Lake; and Kentucky, Blue Grass. New Mexico became Desert and when California was split into two, while the northern part was now the state of Freeway, the lower part was renamed New Mexico (that proposal was to be worked out in the final amendment to the law, along with the Indiana decision), which seemed to better reflect the area’s population.

Towns had to change too—particularly in California, whose map sported names such as the Angels, St. James, and St. Francis. “It was fortunate the state at least had Oakland and Bakersfield,” was one comment. Other major towns needed work.

Translation didn’t work for Chicago, whose name originally meant something like a place with skunks. “The Loop” was adopted and few residents noticed the difference.

New England fared well, with towns like Boston, Quincy, Chatham and the like, in no need of new maps.

All and all, the committee noted in its final minutes, it was a prodigious efforts, but highly satisfying in complying with wishes of the people of the United States of English.

Oh, yes. In its final meeting, it was noted that America stemmed from “Americus Vespucci.”

“We don’t want to be named for some damned Italian,” said one resident of Plains (formerly Kansas), in a sentiment that carried the day.

Young Women and Old Men: The Right Rx?

Few news items brought joy to a certain generation than a report a few months ago that a scientific study found that men in their sixties who have sex with women in their twenties live longer.

It’s the greatest medical discovery in the last 300 years.

From a practical point of view, it suggests a new weapon in the arsenal of persuasion and as I approach that advanced decade, I decided to take advantage of the latest scientific finding and went to a gathering spot.

“It’s a matter of life and death. Don’t you want to help me live longer honey?”

"That's the most ridiculous line I've ever heard," one young lovely responded.

I immediately produced a newspaper article which bore the headline, “Older Men, Younger Women: Perfect Together.”

“What kind of idiot would write something like that?” she retorted

“Hey, I don’t go calling you names, do I?”

But after I more thoroughly explained the benefits, she thought about and agreed.

“Let’s go to my place.”

“No, let’s go out to dinner first. My doctor said not to do this on an empty stomach.”

So we went out to eat at one of the finest restaurants in town. When the food arrived, she commented, “This is costing you an awful lot.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “The meal and the hotel room are covered. They’re considered medical expenses.”

Out in the car, we started getting friendly but she got irritated.

“Why do you keep staring at my chest?”

“My doctor told me to take two of those every 12 hours, by mouth.”

But wouldn’t you know it, I had trouble getting her bra off. It was child proof.

However, the night turned out fine and we had a nice time for a few months. But then she said, we shouldn’t see each other any more.

“Wasn’t the sex good?"

“It was great,” she responded. “But I called your doctor and he said you don’t have any refills left.”

Do You Speak Textish?

Journalists have always stood for correct spelling, grammar and stylistic consistent.

But two weeks ago, my former boss asked, “Is that still important?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

In a world in which textish is increasingly the language of the young and technologically entitled does good spelling and grammar and consistent style matter?

Unless you are simply obsessive, the only reason for standardized spelling, grammar and style is to ensure communication. Obviously, a lot of “errors” in the traditional classroom sense can occur in any medium using visual letter images—and I’ll include electronic communication here because it using letter images, even if they aren’t printed on paper.

The rational for enforcing rules is that, left to itself, language tends to wander off into new dialects, although spoken mass communications has made this tougher, although not impossible. We all think we sound like the TV announcers.

Standards are also the enemies of a vital language and they mask the changes in the spoken word, which always move faster than the mutations in their print counterparts.

Thus, classical Latin persisted in the written form long after the people in the provinces started dropping the word endings added preposition to a highly declined language, on their way to become the Romance family.

The same is true of English, whose spelling reflects pronunciations as long-dead as Chaucer—take those “silent E’s” at the end of words. Or take the “gh family” in which words like daughter, tough and thought testify to the disappearance of an aspirated guttural sound (like the Scottish ‘Loch”).

Spoken language could change rapidly because it is used so much more outside of the classroom where there are few monitors to say, “That’s not the way we say it.”

Lacking language Academy to fight change, the way the French do, English speakers have seen the written language slowed by schools and in my ways by written journalism. And journalists hang on to usage long after the rest of the world has changed. After all, many of us are the last bastions of the use of traditional state abbreviations like Calif., N.Y., and IN while the schools capitulated to the postal CA, NY and IN a long time ago.

However, the various forms of speedy electronic communication such as email, instant message and texting (as opposed to static Web page postings), bypass the traditional monitors.

With teenagers spewing out text at a frightening rate (frightening to bill payers), it seems possible they will change the written language at a rate that was previously impossible.
Or will texting simply become another layer of usage, like the existing one of vulgar, slag, colloquial and formal, that happily co-exist in various parts of our lives.

M I sure? I don’t no.

The Critter Song

Warning, may offend small children and animal rights advocates.

All God's creatures got a place on the plate.
Some get fried and some get baked.
Some just lie there dead on the plate.
And some get sauce on their hands, their paws and anything you got now.

(Repeat endlessly).

The Electronic Small Town

“Over the river and through the woods to grandfather’s house we go.”

Yes, despite the fact that most people substitute grandmother for the elder of the original poem, there’s still a bucolic setting to the image of our ancestors, whether it’s a return to the parents or grandparents’ abode.

Look at the television ads and the number of times the person returning from the army, buying a new truck or coming home for the holidays ends up at a farm. Considering that 2 percent of the American population lives on a farm, it’s a less and less likely scenario with each passing year.

For many baby boomers, the image holds. Their parents or grandparents were often farmers. But for the generations that follows, this image is more and more a “Founding Myth,” representing cherished values than a vision of modern American life.

It’s more likely “Over the turnpike and through the toll booth, to grandfather’s retirement condo we go.”

Will succeeding generations adopt suburbia as their myth? Will there be nostalgic pictures of grandma and granddad in their Cape Cod? Instead of pictures of dad hard at work in the barn yard, will we see him on his riding mower? To some extent, we do see him hard at work over the backyard grill.

And grandma, instead of lovingly delivering that home-cooked meal, calls out “There’s some frozen dinners in the freezer. Careful, the microwave door is tricky,” as she heads off to the senior citizen center.”?

Cool Hand Oedipus?

“’Cool Hand Luke’ is a Greek tragedy.”

My girl friend at the time didn’t make much of a reaction, other than the usual, he-must-be-out-of-his–head look. But the thought has persisted that one in a very basic sense, “Cool Hand Luke,” one of Paul Newman’s greatest movies is as much a tragedy as anything the Greeks wrote, or at least since Oedy R. got a jolt when he found out where he should really be sending his Mother’s Day cards.

Now, the movie does not have a Greek chorus (unless you want to count the inmates at the prison camp. Nor does it have a legend with roots in the Olympian religion, or perhaps in the more primitive aspects such as Bacchus and Pan. But in its overall development, it is very much a tragedy in the classical sense.

The tragedy is the struggle of the prisoner, Luke, against his fate. As with Oedipus and ever other card-carrying Greek hero, he cannot escape it. Rex killed his dad and married his mom, despite every effort to avoid it. Achilles showed too much heel to survive the Trojan War, while Jason defied every mother’s warning about marrying bad girls.

Luke struggles against the environment in much the same way Jack Nicholson’s character does in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Both eventually succumb to the system they are forced to live in, which is inexorable in defending itself.

And Luke’s efforts are particularly senseless. In his fist fight against George C. Scott’s character, he refuses to stay down—the sign of submission—and receives a more and more devastating pounding from his physically superior opponent. He turns a typical slug fest into something so distasteful that no one derives pleasure from it. In a sense, he wins.

However, his struggle for individuality, for respect, for freedom moves relentlessly to his being serious wounded by a gunshot. And the movie ends with a near certainty he will die as his transport takes its time to take him to treatment. In the modern movie world, this would be an open signal for a sequel.

It is this appeal to individualism that attracts us to Luke and to Nicholson’s character, Randle Patrick McMurphy. The difference, of course, is that McMurphy tries to rally the inmates of the mental hospital to band together while Luke makes no effort to make his cause a general one.

Why 1984 Didn't Happen.

The assignment was simple--discuss George Orwell's penetrating novel "1984."

It was an assignment I told my 16-year-old daughter that reminded me that I had the same task when 1984 was a long distance in the future, and seemed likely to happen. But the year came and went, and Orwell's vision was not the one we have lived in since the target year.
Why didn't Orwell's world of three superpowers in ever-changing alliances, of carefully controlled language and the ability to rewrite the past at will come about, no matter how inevitable those developments may have once seemed?

Two unforeseen trends derailed that movement--The development of individual control over data and religious and national ferment.

Orwell's world relied on controlled data and the mainframe centered world that existed before 1984 was ideal for creating the belief we were headed towards a truly effective Big Brother. But as the pictures from the repression in Mynamar shows, controlling information has gotten tougher. The move toward democratization of data started with the PC and then continued with the development of the Internet and steamrolled along with hand-held voice and data devices.

The other development was the power of two older movements--religion and nationalism--to challenge the regime in the Soviet Union that was founded on economic theory--Communism.
The power of religion resonates with radical Islam in the Middle East and, in some sense, it simmers with those in the United States who would be happier with religion as part of day-to-day government. It is embodied in the fact that Israel exists and is opposed. It gave the worker's movement in Poland a base to challenge the Soviet system. It threatens to shake the generals in Myanmar.

The spread of nationalism has been part of the last 200 years, although it was seriously sidetracked by the Russian Revolution and the spread of Communism. But the fact that countries that have often not been independent, such as Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania once again exist and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia split apart, and the arrival of so many new nations across the globe, is a tribute to the power of nationalism.

Big Brother may be watching. But he's not always in control.