`A Small Enough Improvement'

Someone I don’t know well at the university last week observed: “You speak in complete sentences.” For a moment I was confused. Was this praise? Criticism? The tired allegation of elitism? Neither, really. She might have been pointing out that my hair was combed and my shoes were shined. In an age of oppressive informality, the formal becomes freakish. Joseph Epstein would understand. His modest goal is elimination of “yeah,” a word my father hated, from his conversation: 

“A small enough improvement, this attempt to eliminate a single slurry word from my speech, yet I would nonetheless like to achieve it. Some years ago I gave up, with reasonable if not complete success, profanity, which was threatening to take over my speech. (I still require a certain amount of profanity for my thoughts.) I long ago eliminated psychobabble from my vocabulary. I attempt to speak in full and grammatical sentences, not to mix metaphors, to divest myself of clichés, even to eliminate split infinitives, so with all this grooming of my speech, yeah, I feel, also has got to go.” 

I never picked up psychobabble but would feel almost defenseless without profanity.