`The Irrepressible Human Urge to Talk'

I had a Canadian-born friend in Findlay, Ohio, a retired tractor salesman with a gift for pungently archaic figures of speech. Speaking of a former acquaintance, Bob said, “I haven’t seen him since Hector was a pup.” And of a woman given to violent mood swings, he said, “She’s up and down like a washerwoman’s ass.” Once, when we observed an exceedingly thin woman in downtown Fostoria, Ohio, he said, “She’s as skinny as six o’clock.” Today, classical references and “sexist” language just won’t do. Each of us, even the most illiterate, is a linguistic snob of some persuasion.

Monday morning, I heard a woman here in Bellevue, Wa., make fun of a college applicant who had said she was “fixin’ to do” something. Four years in Texas softened my hauteur about such harmless conveniences. It’s the cliché that rankles me more than the errant “ain’t,” and the lazy catchphrase, especially those drawn from popular culture – empty sounds bereft of thought, the non-pathological counterpart of the obscenities shouted by a Tourette’s sufferer. I agree, in part, with Emerson’s assessment of linguistic entropy in “The Poet”:

“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

Though I doubt the existence of a linguistic Golden Age, when every word and phrase glittered in our mouths, Emerson’s insight is still cause for hope. He implies that each of us can potentially “speak like a poet,” using language that is precise and colorful. When we meet such a person – speaker or writer – we feel refreshed and entertained, and we strive to reenergize our own way with words. The obvious mistake is to become self-consciously folksy or pretentious. The best language feels natural, though it may be the product of high artifice. In The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg mourned the passing of such antiquated phrases as “boardinghouse reach.” Then Klinkenborg shakes off the ooze of nostalgia and reminds himself that language is forever sloughing off old words and accumulating new ones. He writes:

“But the power of common speech doesn’t grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything. And though I know that all of this is true, I’d like to go back to the past for a time in any case. Not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I’d like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children, singing to herself the words of the hymn my grandmother, whose name was Nellie, plays. The oldest child pretends to be coloring, but he’s really waiting until the mowing and the music stop and his mother and grandparents start to talk together among themselves. He can hardly wait to hear what they’ll say.”

Does anyone remember the ending of Robert Benton’s 1984 movie Places in the Heart? Klinkenborg’s reverie reminds me of that beautiful scene in the church.