Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [28]
Much of the credit for the new atmosphere should go to the many comedians who have played a big role in this self-cleansing action. Few have been more ingenious than Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. By uttering the f-word so often while knowing it will be bleeped, he spares the millions outside the studio audience from hearing the word and, of course, laughing at his jokes. That’s a sacrifice beyond the call.
ARE LIKE AND YOU KNOW EXPLETIVES?
It turns out that expletives may not necessarily be dirty words after all.
The 1972 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary lists two meanings of expletive: an oath or filler in a sentence. Webster’s Third New International, which was published in 1961, lists two meanings: the first is filler, the second is obscenity.
So if a verbal filler is an expletive, would words like like and you know be expletives, obscenities, or just plain fillers?
However, don’t call the f-word dead yet by any means. In early March 2011, three songs with that word in their titles or choruses made it to the Top 10 Hits, one helluva bleeping development. It was part of an effort of the music industry to get away from the restrictions of censored broadcast media now that the Internet and related devices have become such a viable alternative. It also might have meant that the giant word filter was temporarily too clogged to work efficiently.
Meanwhile, raw obscenities seem to have lost favor with some politicians. They now seem to prefer more original terms. This is another linguistic area where George W. Bush set the pace early. When he came to publicly label his longtime adviser Karl Rove, for example, he did not choose a worn-out term like sh—head or a—hole, which might have been more apt for Rove. Instead, Bush chose to call him “turd blossom,” a Texan expression from the pasture. Only a genuine language leader could be so original and effective.
Neither government nor self-appointed language censors have the right stuff for reducing the smut quotient in movie and media fare. The only workable process is the Amglish filter that lets the public make its own decisions in the natural course of things. The trouble is that it sometimes takes too f—ing long.
Another area where such standards are still in flux, however, is the blogosphere, especially where space is provided on websites for individuals to post personal comments. The amount of vitriol and filth on some websites appears to be reaching saturation levels. But it apparently has not yet hit the level for the filter of public judgment to change the pattern.
COMEDIANS DO THEIR BIT
Comedy is central to language development because it requires an atmosphere for experimenting with words, an openness so essential to the healthy growth of language.
American comedians have been especially blessed in having such a quirky language to work with. For example, everyone knows there is no English in English muffins, and there’s no ham in a hamburger or egg in an eggplant. And if the plural of mouse is mice, then why isn’t the plural of house hice? Only a speaker of English would know that stars are visible only when they are out and that lights are not visible when they are out.
These and the many other quirks of the language weren’t purposely put there; they were inherited from people even more idiosyncratic than Americans, the English. They spent centuries developing such peculiarities before shipping them across the sea for Americans to add their own touches.
Mark Twain was quick to see the humor in the design. And he took full advantage of it. A champion wordsmith, he tried to reduce the length of words and simplify spelling without success. Tina Fey, the latest winner of the Mark Twain award, also likes to play with words. One of her favorites is snart, a combined sneeze and fart.
Among those who helped