Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [9]
None other than Jonathan Yardley, a word master par excellence as the chief book reviewer of the Washington Post, let snuck sneak into his own prose in 2006.12 His use of the term was a clear sign that the word had finally attained all the respectability it needed for today’s atmosphere.
Once the dam holding snuck was broken, other journalists felt free to let it all hang out. One of the least likely copycats was New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She wrote a year later that she had snuck her sister into a press breakfast attended by President and Mrs. Bush in 2000.13 The word was out: snuck had finally hit the big tent.
Another word on the way to respectability is drug, but not the medicinal or hallucinatory kind. This drug is posing as the past tense of drag. At least that is the way it was used on BBC News in 2007 by Ruth Wedgewood, a Johns Hopkins professor of international relations. During the scandal involving Paul Wolfowitz’s tenure as World Bank president, she said his paramour had been “drug through the mud.”
Shortly after Professor Wedgewood’s courageous move, President Bush put the White House imprimatur on the word in discussing the long ordeal suffered by his attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, in testifying before Congress about the firing of some U.S. attorneys. “This process,” said Bush, “has been drug out a long time.”
It means that Dizzy Dean, the famed baseball pitcher of the 1930s, did not labor in vain when he would say that a runner slud into third base. He also helped set a pattern for years to come with colloquialisms like “Me an’ Paul (his brother Daffy) are gonna win forty-five games.”
IT’S, LIKE, YOU KNOW
Two of the most common signs of Amglish are the terms like and you know, often uttered together unconsciously. One leader in this area is Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late President. In an interview with the New York Daily News, she bravely uttered “you know” more than 200 times, and during an interview with the New York Times, she did so an incredible 130 times according to a count by Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens.14 The conversations were about the possibility of her running for the U.S. Senate. The possibility vanished, you know, after the interviews.
Language purists tend to look down their noses on such usage. But there is more here than meets the eye. To fully understand, you have to realize the fear and timidity that still grip many people, especially younger ones, as they try to conform to all the outmoded rules of formal English without appearing to do so.
In some cases, it might be an innate inability to speak with confidence. Quite a few people seem to need sentence fillers to give themselves time to think through their options before speaking further. For them, words like like and you know are perfectly designed to provide those extra split seconds necessary to plan the rest of a sentence.
By public acclaim, like has also been pressed into service as an acceptable replacement for the antique conjunctions as and such as. So while some English teachers might still say a certain young man drove too fast “as he always has done,” almost everybody else says, “like he always has.”
“BY THE WAY, HAVE A LOUSY DAY”
Nothing is untouched by the new lingo, including the routine way of parting after talking with another human being. What once was an upbeat Good day or Good-bye has turned into an entire sentence: “Have a good (nice) day,” even when the speaker clearly has opposite thoughts.
Ginni Thomas, wife of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, managed to set the gold standard for this sort of greeting in October 2010 when she called Anita Hill, a woman she hated for having testified against her husband’s confirmation nineteen years earlier, to suggest that Hill apologize to him. She ended the phone message—at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday—with, “Okay, have a