Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [26]
Cosby was politely applauded at the predominantly black university, but some African-American leaders objected later, pointing to the contribution of black dialect to world culture and citing the popular art of Langston Hughes, Ray Charles, and others. In response, Cosby pointed out that such artists all spoke what he called standard American English.
THE FILTER PRINCIPLE
The drop in hip-hop sales should not have been surprising to close observers with a broad view of history. The key might be called the natural filter principle of language. When pollutants like oil threaten the life-giving qualities of ocean water, a natural cleansing action seeks to bring the pollutants under control. Likewise, when a language becomes too polluted, natural cleansing action takes over.
The U.S. Supreme Court essentially backs the same principle. It has left the matter of obscenity up to the general public by ruling that the key factor in determining whether something is obscene and therefore prohibited is whether it violates “contemporary community standards.”18
It is possible that Cosby’s speech helped slow the flow of language that threatened to destroy its own habitat. It is also possible that radio jock Don Imus’s excesses caused a similar effect. On April 4, 2007, the foul-mouthed faux cowboy flamed out when he called the Rutgers women’s biracial basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” a term for African-American whores. He didn’t object when his producer sitting with him added another racial insult.
After getting some immediate flack, Imus issued a quick apology. But some people called for his dismissal because of his long record of making similar remarks. A week later, NBC, citing many complaints, canceled its simulcast of the show, Imus in the Morning. The next day, CBS canceled the radio version, citing its sudden concern about the effect of such language on young people, “particularly young women of color.”
These reactions followed many public protests, essentially votes of individuals, some of whom had sought publicity for a book or for themselves on the show. There was yet another turn of the giant filter, perhaps the key one. It was the decision of seven sponsors to pull their ads, including American Express, General Motors, Staples, Sprint, GlaxoSmithKline, Nextel, and Procter and Gamble. There’s nothing like a pulled ad to get a talk jock’s attention.
So, in effect, it was the general public’s decision, the filter principle, that an important line had been crossed, and the violator needed to be ostracized. It was like the natural way that Amglish depends on the broad public, not the language police or broadcast censors, to set the ground rules in the final analysis.
Such a process does not work well in formal English with all its bewhiskered rules and self-appointed guardians of the sacred relics that range in age from four hundred to over two thousand years old. Look at how ineffective parents, teachers, and politicians have been in stamping out obscenities through censorship and punishment over the long haul.
HIP-HOP REVERBERATIONS
Only a few weeks later, it became apparent that the Imus case was reverberating in the hip-hip world. A campaign by the late C. Delores Tucker in 1995 to tone down some of the bitches, hos, n-words, and porno stuff was finally coming to a head. Punctuating this campaign was a further drop in album sales. Her widower said the Imus case had “brought about a revival of the struggle she waged” against lyrics demeaning to women.19
The drop in sales was also enough to cause Russell Simmons, the multimillionaire owner of the hip-hop label Def Jam and fashion house Phat Farm, to call for a voluntary ban on bad words and the imposition of guidelines. His decision coincided