Greetings and Salutations

Could it be that, although I heard no rushing mighty wind, nor saw anything cloven and fiery, tongues of some sort have descended upon me, enabling me to speak the languages of grump and grouch, in their various dialects of peeve, churl, spleen, crab, and curmudgeon.   What makes me think I’ve been thus linguistically gifted?  The churning irritation I experience with the checkout clerk at the local grocery store, that’s what.

For more than eight months now, Philip has plied the register when I make my customary lunch hour “small shopping” run to the store to restock necessaries prior to the next “big shopping.”  And for more than eight months, as I deposit my basket on the counter, Philip has said the same thing: “How you doing today, sir.”  Always.  The same thing.  Exactly.  For more than eight months, Philip has taken my checks and listened to me discourse on the merits of braeburn apples and sprouted-grain bread and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  For more than eight months he has heard the produce manager and butcher and assistant manager and manager and other customers address me by name, ask after the family, inquire how my classes are going or the progress I’m making on my latest home-improvement project or whether I’ll take up golf again.  Eight months, and still he remains quarantined behind a practiced smile and the frayed cuff of a phrase: “How you doing today, sir.”  And not just me.  He uses the same greeting for everyone, varying only the last word if the customer is female: “How you doing today, ma’am.”

Perhaps my irritation is shamefully self-absorbed, or trivial, or even wasted, there being so many other things far more irritation-worthy.  Still, it’s real enough, palpable enough, and it’s got me thinking about the way we greet each other in our culture, why is has to be so impoverished, so flat-souled; why anything beyond the brisk and passing “How’s it going” or “How are you” and the bright, upbeat response “Fine” is a breach of decorum so outrageous it’s beyond the reach of the confessional; why, as with Philip’s, our greetings and salutations are so manufactured and   homogenized and rinsed clean of all particularity; why they are Lysoled to sterility, dehydrated of personal significance; why they are such Disneyesque simulacra of inquiry and concern, such gestures of exchange rather than the full-blooded reality of exchange; why we tune ourselves to the frequency of social interaction while engaging in woefully abridged and illusory version of it.  And that’s if we even get a chance to offer a greeting: so often, we encounter others so intent on  some smartphoned attraction or so involved in some cellphoned conversation that a greeting seems a punishably intrusive  breach of privacy.

Now, I am aware that our greeting style is a species of what linguists call “phatic communication,” nonreferential salutation rituals not intended to solicit or convey information but, rather, to meet social expectations.  They are culturally coded interactions, designed to  politely acknowledge another’s presence, nothing more.  They are inessential essentials, impertinently pertinent, unassailably decent and decorous and courteous and civil, to be sure, but so astringently impersonal, so devoid of warmth or at least the flavor of the person who utters/mutters them.  We encounter each other and, like threatened hedgehogs, we roll ourselves into  protective balls.  We meet and greet and quickly retreat. We occupy a shared space without being much occupied about it.  We pledge ourselves to sociality while disavowing our participation in it.  And to go beyond the formulaic response, to breach the ritual requirements, to actually explain how one is doing or how things are going, seemingly makes one a fit subject for police surveillance. 

And yet, I can’t help but wonder how it is that we accept such cultural conscription so compliantly, why we give it such snappy salutes.  Perhaps the problem is that I am so bad at it.  Perhaps I want too much.  I am insatiably curious about others.  I really do want to know how things are going for them, how they see and feel about things.  If we’re going to open a hailing frequency, it ought to be for a moment that feels whole, not an eighth or a sixteenth.  If we pay the price of a greeting, we should get some value in return, not a distanced and distancing “Fine” or “OK”  or a flutey “hello” that hangs in the air a beat or two after the speaker has hastened on. Where is it we hasten to?  What summons us away with such importunity?  Why are we in such desperate haste, Thoreau asked.   More than two millennia ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, “We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own.”  Our greetings a sleeptalking, and what they say, what lies coiled implicitly within them, is, “You’re marginal, a matter of peripheral vision, worth no more than a sidelong glance, only to be engaged as ritual requires, an inhabitant of a parallel world that is momentarily contiguous to mine and which I am obliged to acknowledge but only in the most formulaic manner.” 

Every meeting with another, every encounter, is a moment of connection.  Why not make it several moments, just several, and hem them together into an economy of exchange with more solidity than interstellar dust?  It would seem a shame to waste them, especially if the many chroniclers of our waning social connectedness, are correct.  If, as they assert, we yearn for social contact, need it, why is it we become bystanders in the very act of initiating it?  Why not make those encounters more consequential, less frictionless contact; why not make them denser with recognition, less an impassive passing? 

My colleague Brian greets every student that appears at his office door with a hearty, surprised-and-delighted “hi,” that rings down the hall.  My colleague Barbara sweeps students into her office, offers them a chair, slides her computer aside and asks about important past or upcoming events they may have previously mentioned.  Another colleague, coming up behind me as we toiled up two flights of stairs to reach our classrooms, said, “You know, I’m convinced that every summer, in the dead of night, some malign elf enters the building and adds one step to each flight.  It’s the only way I can account for why each year I grow more fatigued climbing these stairs”—a slyly revelatory comment which got us talking about age.

I use a strategy suggested by the poet Jon Cotner’s Spontaneous Society, which is dedicated to making “gentle interventions” that puncture “urban anonymity”: initiating a social exchange by making observations about what others are doing or what is happening around them.  Last week, as I walked through the science and math building, I came upon one of my students looking frazzled before an open organic chemistry book.  “O-Chem has to be the hardest subject of all,” I said.  The student looked up and smiled wryly: “It’s so complicated; I can’t keep it all straight,” she said.  “I know exactly what you mean,” I replied; “I barely passed it when I took it in.  What’s the hardest part for you?” 

It is hard, exceedingly hard, maybe impossible, to make the phatic emphatic, to make greetings occasions, to be fully present in them, to fashion them into instants of authentic inquiry and regard.  The mundane has its own insistent demands.  They muddle our mindfulness, meander it, loosen its tensile grip.  It is hard.  But it is important.

Small talk in small moments in small encounters, fleeting, to be sure; but also, I’d like to think, small transfigurations, the melody of greeting in sync with its music, a momentary bond hijacked from the cubbyholes of fragmentation and isolation. 

Banished Words

As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.”  The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada.  The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance. 

Of more interest than the list, however, are the comments that accompany the nominations, for they reveal a rather flinty linguistic conservatism, a curmudgeony sense that words have gone wild, have wrinkled proper discourse beyond the smoothing ministrations of even a steam press.  Like beleaguering lexical Visigoths, the comments suggest, the nominated words have battered down the gate and spread their rampaging, disarray within the sacrosanct wall of the language community.

One large group of comments asserts that overuse, especially by celebrity culture, has led to a degradation or even possible loss of the word’s original meaning and has usurped a simpler and better word.  These commenters see overuse as a kind of lactic acid buildup leading to meaning muscle fatigue.  They appear to assume a meaning checkpoint beyond which a word should not stray, lest it wander into a Claymore-filled semantic field .  Martha Stewart is particularly pilloried for overusing “amazing.”  “Every talk show uses this word at least two times every five minutes,” writes one commenter.  “Hair is not ‘amazing.’  Shoes are not ‘amazing’. . . .  I saw Martha Stewart use the word ‘amazing’ six times in the first five minutes of her television show.”  Writes another, “I blame Martha Stewart because to her, EVERYTHING is amazing.”  Perhaps we now know one reason Hallmark Channel’s cancelling Stewart’s show, due to its paltry average of 225,000 viewers.  And lest we think such criticism is gender exclusive, another commenter notes that “Anderson Cooper used it three times recently in the opening 45 second of his program.” 

Other indictments of celebrity culture include “baby bump” (“I’m tired of a pregnancy being reduced to a celebrity accessory”), “the new normal” (“Often hosts on TV news channels use the phrase shortly before introducing some self-help guru who gives glib advice to the unemployed and other people having financial difficulties”), and “man cave” (Overused by television home design and home buying shows” and “has trickled down to sitcoms and commercials”).  We adore our celebrities.  We despise our celebrities because we despise ourselves for adoring them.  Do we contradict ourselves?  Well, that’s OK; we’re large; we contain multitudes.

Other commenters note that overuse has diluted they take to be the word’s true signification.  For “amazing”: “People use ‘amazing’ for anything that is nice or heartwarming.  In other words, for things that are not amazing.”  “There are any number of adjectives that are far more descriptive.”  “The word which once aptly described the process of birth is now used to describe such trivial things as toast, or the color of a shirt.”  For “baby bump”: “Why can’t we use the old tried-and-true ‘pregnant?’  For “occupy”: “It has been overused and abused even to promote Black Friday shopping.”  For “blowback”: “the word ‘reaction’ would have been more than sufficient.”  For “trickeration”:  “What’s wrong with ‘trick’ or ‘trickery?’”  For “ginormous”: “This word is just a made-up combination of two words.  Either word is sufficient.”

Alas, language changes whether we want it to or not.  They have to: things change, we change, and language changes so we can talk about it all.  As University of Illinois linguist Denis Baron says, “Like all living languages, English is always changing: new words are coined and old ones are modified or discarded, as we scramble to keep up with the human imagination and an ever-changing world.” And that means words broaden and narrow their meanings, or we metaphorically extend words ready at hand.  “Holy Day” became “holiday;” “cool” once referred to a specific style of jazz rather than a general expression of approval.  “Meat” once indicated any kind of food, “deer” any kind of animal, “vulgar” once meant ordinary, “girl” any young person.  We “surf” the Internet, likely using a “mouse” to do so and hoping to experience no “bugs” or “viruses” or “worms.”  Language is irrepressibly mutable, gloriously so, I think.  The only immutable languages are dead languages.

And “trickeration”?   You can find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, which records it as part of African American Vernacular English, first used in 1940.  Langston Hughes’s 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred contains the lines, "I believe my old lady's pregnant again! Fate must have some kind of trickeration to populate the cullud nation."  And “ginormous?”   It’s included in the 2007 update of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and was first used in 1948 in a British dictionary of military slang.  And “blowback?”  Sure, it means “reaction,” but that meaning has been extended to include effects and practices in such areas as forensics, jurisprudence, helicopter rotors and smoking marijuana—as well as being used as the title of three books, a film, and a role-playing game.  And “baby bump?”  Could it not be an attempt to make “pregnant,” which has no gradations to denote more or less, a gradable term meaning “just a little bit pregnant”?  We see such an attempt when folks say “very pregnant” to indicate a late, quite noticeable stage.

The fact is that words are always prone to vandalism, to being pilfered from their secure semantic niches and made the possession of others, to serve their own particular purposes.  And amid this linguistic leveraging, it’s unlikely that whatever prototypical meaning a word  has will be lost.  After all, we all know, and will continue to know, what “pregnant” means, even if we do use such phrases as “a pregnant pause,” or “a pregnant question” or describe a thundercloud “pregnant with rain.”  And we will continue to find it amazing.

Many of the comments on the banished twelve centered on their sound, specifically, the disagreeable sensation the word provoked.  Banish “amazing,” one commenter said, “to stop my head from exploding,” while another claimed it made her “teeth grate” and her “hackles rise” and “annoyed” her dog to boot. “Baby bump “makes pregnancy sound like some fun and in-style thing to do.”   “Pet parent” is “cloying” and “capable of raising my blood sugar,” “trickeration” “sounds unintelligent,” “ginormous” “makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it” and “just sounds ridiculous,” “the new normal” fosters “cynicism about the ability of government to improve people’s lives,” and the overuse of “occupy” is not “palatable.”

Linguists will tell us that words are simply strings of sounds, and that those sounds in no way determine the words’ legitimacy.  An opera in Italian is not better than one in German because you dislike the supposedly “harsh,” guttural, deep-in-the-throat sound of German.  Being put off by the soundscape of a language is a matter of taste, a subjective experience of its words, not an objective fact about them.  The bickering such judgments foster leads nowhere, for every person’s experience is, finally, true.  Still, it is interesting that we do more than see and hear words; we feel them.  Language is embodied, not just a baked-in set of abstract principles.  Words have physical impact, a texture, a sensation.  They are visceral, and perhaps this helps explain linguistic conservatism: any change is felt, not simply noted.

But, as Columbia University linguists John McWhorter maintains, language is “disheveled,” logically untidy and convoluted enough to send an efficiency expert scrambling for the exit.  According to McWhorter, language conservatives are textbound; they cleave to the change-resistant written word and view deviations from it as a ginormous trickeration toward language traditions they cherish and, therefore, wish to preserve.  For journalist and author Robert Lane Greene, such “aggrieved conservatism” is blowback against a change of style they feel should go out of style.  But, as Greene notes, “Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.”  As the life of any language reveals, language conservatism is a position cannot be long occupied, is thankless in advance, and will not win the future.  Language change is the old normal.  The spoken word always has and always will amble blithely away from its written tradition, with scarcely a backward glance.