This patch of land we call Planet Earth needs serious attention. As custodians we have neglected the air and the water so that doom may soon have it over bloom, and weeds over seeds. This state of affairs has its corollary in language itself.
Someday they’ll have
a softball game between the Yeasayers and Naysayers to settle the matter. The
two strains run through our national character as the punitive voice comes up
against a more liberating one. Our enlightened deist founders had to contend
with those anal Puritans. Maybe the differences go beyond theology or politics.
If language is any bellwether, it’s no contest. Negative words far outnumber
the positives. Google, which tallies our every utterance in some grand ledger,
has it that un words
swamp their counterpart by huge numbers. The bad to good ratio
is 5 to 1, unhappy to happy 260 to 1. The Thesaurus
lists twice as many synonyms for unpleasant as
for pleasant.
Are we a species of sour pusses? Do we see out of jaundiced eyes? Why do we get
such kicks from bad news, and ads from candidates which smear and scandalize
their opponents? Make a vampire movie and they will come. The lost, aggrieved, and seething anti-hero is favored
over the Boy Scouts of America model every time. Flawed characters feel like
us, perhaps that’s why. The late-great curmudgeon Oscar Levant once quipped
that he was so guilt-ridden, when watching courtroom dramas and the judge
ordered the defendant to rise he’d get up from the couch.
Freud and Oprah have consorted to encourage us to spill our guts. Anyone
without a deprived childhood has been deprived. We are all in recovery. When
asked at random for the intersecting event in their lives most people single
out a death or trauma that forced them to be the way there are. Victimization
is our default position and a vocabulary has been amassed to describe it. Cynicism
has become to many what daffodils were to Wordsworth to paraphrase Phillip
Larkin.
Maybe our negativity
is an antidote to those insufferable happy faces, good fellow, well-met,
painted smiles and happy endings. Perhaps skepticism is a natural response in a
consumerist society with a built-in sniffer for hype and the inauthentic.
Pessimism might be well-aligned with the decline of the American empire.
On the other hand it could be just a lag in language. Words for community, for
caring, and all the varieties of love seem to have been nearly taken out of
public discourse. We speak of childhood scars more than the nourishment we
received. We are more fluent in varieties of despondency, despair, dejection,
deceit and depression than in varieties of affection or the transcendence
offered by art.
Boys have trouble
using the word, love.
If everything is described as awesome or cool the language becomes
impoverished. Unlike Eskimos relation to snow we seem to lack the words to
express empathy and compassion without risking ridicule.
Hallmark cards have pillaged the warm and fuzzy words and sucked the life out
of them. They have raided the common tongue and now we mistrust sentiment.
Writers seem more inclined to prowl the darkness than shine a light and critics
hone their barbs rather than their faculty for appreciation. In the end, of
course, life is a tender and clumsy dance with both violins and kazoos. We
swallow the outsized myth of the super hero but have a paucity of words to
describe simple acts of daily heroism.
In spite of our
inattention to preserving democracy and neglect over our resources it is too
easy to convert the music of the spheres into a dirge. Revitalizing the lament
can be an Ode to Joy as we discover nuggets in the sludge.
Now I should follow
these words and hold my vituperative tongue against the new Confederacy and
their slate of mendacious fools. But it comes so easily and if I swallow my
rage I may break out in a rash. Besides, there is so much malignant about them
that has earned my scorn. Maybe it is enough to know when to scowl and when to
sing.
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