Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [29]
A HOMEMADE CONBOBBERATION
Many early Americans busied themselves making up words to fit their rough, frontier lifestyle. Among the beauties were ringtailed roarer (hearty guy), ramsquaddle (to beat up), conbobberation (ruckus), hornswoggle (cheat), screamer (beefy man), and rambunctious (unruly). So the ringtailed roarer no longer creates a conbobberation when he hornswoggles the rambunctious screamer.
Or in today’s terms, will the digerati greenwash their Blu-Rays via cloud computing and get enough street cred to virtualize their carbon footprint? I’m jus sayin.
THE SEVEN BAD WORDS
Carlin in particular was a master of originality with words. His magnum opus, Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, made it all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1978 in a case involving the government’s right to regulate so-called indecent and obscene material on the public airwaves.22 The Supremes didn’t get any of the jokes and ruled in favor of censorship by the Federal Communications Commission.
The ruling effectively banned the seven words—ones that every adult knows—from programs likely to be seen or heard by children. In reality, however, the ruling boosted Carlin’s fame and inspired even greater usage of the contested words both in and outside broadcasting. There’s nothing like prohibition to make a banned item wanted even more.
Contemporary comedians continue to have a ball with their native language, particularly with their ability to get laughs with neologisms. Recent additions to the list include Stephen Colbert’s truthiness and the recycled frenemies and Jon Stewart’s labels for things like Mess-O-Potamia and Californigaytion.
GROUNDBREAKING AUTHORS
The first major author to go native—and graphic—was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used the language of slaves and their masters to take a strong stand against the way most blacks were treated in the United States. Her gutsy book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851, sold more copies than any other in the nineteenth century.
Samples included “Never was born,” persisted Topsy. . . . “Never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin’. I was raised by a speculator, with lots of others.” Other quotations from characters in the book reflected her strong sentiments: “Treat ’em like dogs, and you’ll have dogs’ works and dogs’ actions. Treat ’em like men, and you’ll have men’s works.”
The passionate novel brought her fame but also much grief, mostly from the Southern establishment and its sympathizers in the North. Many people blamed her—or credited her—for instigating the Civil War that resulted in freeing the slaves. She was also accused of oversympathizing with blacks by imitating their language and describing their woes so graphically.
Strong reactions continued long after her death. As the era of political correctness set in, there were numerous efforts to denigrate her book for not representing slave life more accurately. In 1949, author James Baldwin blamed her for not fully revealing “the inherent evils of a bad system.” Talk about late-hitting a little old lady when she’s down—and under!
Stowe’s realistic style became the pattern for T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, published three years later. Like Stowe’s book, this was a clever use of common speech to plead for a cause, in this case temperance. These books helped break the template of stuffy British literature and plot a more permissive course for American literature.
AN ACTIVIST LEXICOGRAPHER
Even some dictionary makers can be called pioneers when they aim both to codify the language and change it. Noah Webster was a rare bird who fitted both job descriptions. He led a move not only to Americanize the language brought across the ocean but to inventory the vocabulary that existed mostly in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
His Dictionary of the English Language