Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [22]
This slogan with the questionable grammar became one of the clearest public signals that a new type of English was emerging in the United States that no longer respected the outworn rules and standards of formal English inherited from the mother country.
Today, such an ad would not even be noticed for its language. But back then, pillars of culture went wobbly, English teachers were horrified, and millions of former students who had had problems in class finally got a whiff of emancipation. Until then, the language establishment had insisted that in such usage, like should be as, because of the conjunction function or something.
The Winston advertisement was so widely circulated on radio and television, including the Beverly Hillbillies and The Flintstones, that the otherwise undistinguished Winston brand soon rose to the top of the market. The poet Ogden Nash celebrated with a ditty saying, “Like goes Madison Avenue, like so goes the nation.”
Many Americans finally felt like they could let all their linguistic frustrations hang out if such powerful commercial interests were so relaxed.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The ad also did what no previous event had been able to do: it essentially switched the power over language changes from the much-feared guardians of grammar to the general population, from professors, publishers, and lexicographers to street bums, pop musicians, and others on the lower and middle rungs of society.
Seven years later, defenders of the status quo were stunned further when Merriam-Webster published its Third International Dictionary, with no criticism of the word like for such usage. Strict constructionists, who were waiting for some support from on high, suddenly saw a major dictionary without a spine.
Language sticklers took another blow a few years later when ad writers gave the relaxed-grammar movement a new boost with a slogan for Tareyton cigarettes saying, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.” Like the Winston breakthrough, this deliberate use of a grammatical “error” rocketed Tareyton up the sales rankings.
These new signs of Amglish were proving to be good for cigarette sales, not to mention lung cancer.
A SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Although it was not readily apparent at the time, the building language revolt became part of a broader political and social rebellion. The seeds had been sown by social rebels all the way back to the ancient Greeks and from them to Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Luther, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, to mention only a few who refused to conform to the norms of the day.
Signs of broad social change began a decade or so after the end of World War II. The most immediate prototypes were members of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg, with their bohemian, beatnik styles of the 1950s. More sparks came in the next decade from yippies, hippies, and civil rights activists. Others were spurred by the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King in 1968.
Many cities were hit by devastating riots. The city of Chicago added to the violence when the city’s police force decided to crack down with a vengeance on political dissidents at the 1968 Democratic convention. Growing resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War added even more to the general dissidence.
The hippie movement emphasized a counterculture lifestyle including sloppy (or optional) clothes, pot smoking, and free thinking, mostly by young people. It was a natural convergence of beatniks, young rebels, college dropouts, draft resisters, environmentalists, and flower girls, in addition to poets, musicians, writers, and assorted dreamers. A popular bumper sticker was “If it feels good, do it.”
At first the movement centered in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco; then it spread to other cities around the country, including Greenwich