Customer Reviews

Doing Our Own Thing

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

First off, let me say that McWhorter's The Power of Babel was one of the best books on language I have read. It is so dense with information presented in a readable, positive style, that I think I'll read it again.

Doing Our Own Thing seems to have been written by McWhorter's evil twin. He assures us near the beginning that this will not be a John Simon-type screed bemoaning the degradation of language in America. Then he goes on to bemoan the degradation of language in America. He manages to be just as pedantic as any language maven about the fact that "Billy and me went to the store" is NOT an ungrammatical sentence, mentioning the same example at regular intervals throughout the book.

Doing Our Own Thing seems like a collection of the author's pet peeves loosely connected to make up a book. McWhorter is concerned about the lack of memorable public speech today and the decline in quality of lyrics, especially in musical theater. He is also annoyed by baggy pants, poetry, and Democrats.

In decrying the decline of American speech today, he claims that no public figure can extemporaneously concoct complex sentences and thoughts. Everyone speaks like a regular guy, or worse, like someone a regular guy can feel superior to. But I can recall Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton giving speeches, that while not memorable in a William Jennings Bryan or even John F. Kennedy style, were complex, yet clear. Bill Clinton's speech at the memorial service for the two security guards who were killed at the House of Representatives was eloquent, for instance.

McWhorter mentions screenwriter David Mamet as someone who is in touch with real speech and can write dialogue that is both authentic and dramatic. This was a particular surprise to me, since I recently saw Heist on video, a Mamet film, and was distracted from the plot several times by painful dialogue. Not only did all of the characters speak with the same voice, they said things like "cute as a bucketful of kittens" and "as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton." If that is authentic speech, then I must be hanging out with a different crowd than McWhorter.

And so it would seem. McWhorter mentions, more than once, that he likes to go to piano bars where you can not only listen to show tunes, but sing along. He notes that there are few straight men at these bars, and for that reason, he finds them an excellent place to meet women. Indeed.

It is not surprising that someone who loves language enough to have made it his life's work would be upset at what he perceives to be the decline of his first langauge. But sometimes his complaints have little to do with language at all. He shows us a soap ad from 1929 that has six panels and quite a bit more text than the typical print ad today. Then McWhorter wonders whether ordinary people in 1929 would have used words like "dainty," which appear in the ad (as he uses the word "exquisite" to describe this very ad). Perhaps a better observation is that few ads these days are as wordy because they need to get our attention fast. When was the last time you saw a 60-second commercial on TV? They used to exist, but now advertisers know they only have 15 seconds to get our attention. Is that a language problem, or something else?

Doing Our Own Thing is definitely readable and there is enough here to get you thinking (not unlike talk radio), but if you want to read a good book about language, I recommend Power of Babel instead.

John McWhorter has long had a double identity. As a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, he's written on the evolution of languages over time (THE POWER OF BABEL) and on English dialectology (WORD ON THE STREET). But he's also a cultural commentator, until recently directing his attention to the issues facing African-Americans (LOSING THE RACE and AUTHENTICALLY BLACK). In DOING OUR OWN THING: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care he combines his two interests. McWhorter claims that there's indeed a real problem with the English that we hear today in the media and from our politics, and the English we read in popular literature.

McWhorter, like all reputable linguists, will readily state that all languages are essentially equal in that they serve the basic needs of their bodies of speakers. His argument is not that English is going downhill in a way that is reducing people to unintelligent brutes who can't get their message across. No, McWhorter believes that the decline of oratorical skills and literary flair is simply depriving English-speaking culture of some beauty that people could enjoy. He pairs letters from grade-school dropouts of the 1800s with newspaper articles by professional journalists of today to show that, yes, in days of yore people used to appreciate the skill they could display in writing elegant prose, and everyone was capable of giving it a go. He puts the Gettysburg Address next to what a professional speechwriter prepared for President Bush to show that nowadays our politicians provide uninspiring and half-hearted explanations of their motivations and goals. English in the public sphere, McWhorter claims, is lame.

McWhorter has no problem with people on the street talking like they are wont to. He notes that the civil engineer of a century ago who wrote a lovely letter to his sweetheart likely used much coarser language on the job with his construction men. But there should be a place for linguistic virtuosity. Great literature, which is the very exploitation of a language's possibilities, is today rarely encountered in the mainstream media. Poetry is replaced by the Spoken Word, where there's little elegance or artfullness in the construction, just rants against the Man. Indeed, McWhorter traces much of the downhill trend to the 1960s, when the rebellion against authorities tragically entailed a rejection of fine arts, which was mistakenly seen as elitist.

McWhorter extends the argument to music, feeling that popular music today concentrates on rhythm at the expense of other parameters of music. Compare a rap song to a fine jazz tune from half a century ago: once upon a time popular music was rich. This extension is reasonable, but the musical portion of the book is so slim that it seems an after-thought; would that he have fleshed it out a bit. I'm also not sure I buy McWhorter's assertion that English-speaking cultures are the only ones neglecting linguistic virtuosity. Sure, there are cultures out there where speaking eloquently still elicits wonder, but things like poetry are dead in lots of places. Just as the average Dane if he knows who Pia Tafdrup or Ole Sarvig are, or the average Japanese young person if he'd prefer to put down his manga and enjoy some Kawabata instead. The trend may have started in the United States, fount of much international popular culture, but all developed societies are going post-literary.

I am a graduate student of linguistics because I love the diversity of human speech. I am fascinated by the rainbow of languages on Earth, and how within each there is a lively array of registers. But in English, as well as various other languages I speak, things are getting awfully monochromatic and the spice is gone. With DOING OUR OWN THING McWhorter might not be able to stop this massive trend, but it's admirable that he notices there's a problem, and the book is sure to be thought-provoking for the lovers of language, literature, and fine music among us.

There was a time not long ago in our history when an elaborate command of the English language was considered part of the fabric of American culture. Orator Edward Everett kept a crowd hanging on his every word during his three-hour speech (yes, three hours!) at Gettysburg in 1863 because he was an excellent orator in a time when American society valued excellent orators. Even during the first half of the 20th century, a command of spoken and written English on a level that today would confound many college students was not only required by the time one finished the eighth grade, but was the social norm; ain't so anymore.

In Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, John McWhorter examines this cultural decline in the use of high-fallutin English in contemporary America. He shows that people were taught from grade school, whether or not they went on for higher education, to always put the English language in its Sunday best. W.E.B. Du Bois stands out in particular. Du Bois's first assignment in a composition class at Harvard in 1890 was to write about himself. This is what he wrote:

"For the usual purposes of identification I have been labeled in this life: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on the day after Washington's birthday, in 1868. I shall room during the present twelve-month at number twenty Flagg Street, Cambridge. As to who I really am, I am much in doubt, and can consequently give little reliable information from casual hints and observations. I doubt not that there are many who could supply better data than the writer. In the midst then of personal uncertainty I can only supply a few alleged facts from memory according to the usual way."

And if that's not enough, he finishes with this closing linguistic zinger:

"I have something to say to the world and I have taken English twelve in order to say it well."

This example speaks volumes about the cultural currency that a high command of English possessed back then, and which no longer exists. Can you imagine anyone writing or speaking like this today and not be viewed as pretentious, arrogant or just plain uppity? What happened to cause American society to no longer value such an elevated command of our language?

The authors shows that the 1960's, which scorned the American Establishment as oppressive and constricting, also caused modern-day America to view the highly stylized English of earlier generations as old-fashioned and morally suspect - hence the linguistic shift from the formal to the informal. Americans of an earlier time went out of their way to write and speak good English, and the gap between written and spoken English was indeed wide. The 1960's (McWhorter puts it around 1965 exactly) changed all that. Now, we just talk - and we write how we talk. Using dressed-up English is just so "old school." This counter-cultural revolution is also reflected in poetry, music and journalism. Furthermore, the author points our how this phenomenon is uniquely American: we just do not love our own language today like other countries love theirs (most notably France).

What new American dialect, then, best embodies this new linguistic counter-cultural paradigm? Why, Black English, of course. McWhorter points out how Americans of all stripes since the 1960's have incorporated Black English and its accompanying body language and vocal cadence into this counter-cultural toolkit. By no means criticizing Black English, he devotes considerable space in chapter five analyzing the cultural meaning of the 1970's funk music hit "Play That Funky Music, White Boy." For the P.C. crowd, try to tell a white guy to "Perform with spiritual dedication the bewitchingly vernacular songs familiar to us, young Caucasian male," and see how far that gets you.

Although the author points out that the natural evolution of language in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as all world languages evolve, he does point out some important drawbacks to the modern-day tendency to "dress down" English. This can be seen particularly in the modern education establishment, where the emphasis on the formal language acquisition of earlier generations has been all but tossed out the window. This does not bode well for anyone, but it is particularly damaging to black and immigrant schoolchildren.

McWhorter covers a lot of ground in Doing Our Own Thing, giving the reader plenty to chew on. It is a fascinating look into how the 1960's transformed American society from one that spoke the language and held it in high esteem to one in which people just talk. Regrettably, it looks as if this trend in linguistic informality (some would call it pure laziness) will continue.

John McWhorter's "Doing our own thing" examines the decline of formal English in 20th century America, in the same vein as George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". McWhorter believes that the anti-authoritarian attitude, prevalent to the North American (youth) culture, is responsible for eroding the art of formal English in writing and speech. McWhorter presented plenty of examples from literature and mass media to support his argument. In my opinion, this is an excellent book on trends in American English, and McWhorter's comments are both insightful and humorous, particularly his footnotes.

Despite the richness in evidence, they are merely circumstantial. Nowhere in his book did McWhorter directly discuss the "anti-authoritarian" movement, which was central to his argument. He did, however, admit this shortcoming in various occasions. Most of these examples, in his words, are "symptoms" to a bigger phenomenon. By that, he also implied that Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Britney Spears were products, not causes, of said movement.

On two points I would disagree with McWhorter. First is on his discussion on performing operas in translation, of which he is a strong advocate. McWhorter did contradict himself when he ridiculed the French language edition of Seinfeld, confirming my belief, that the issue is simply a matter of opinion. The other point is McWhorter's criticism of students preparing for the SAT. Quite clearly, if given the means, McWhorter would propose a more rigorous school curriculum for the English language. The point which he (deliberately) missed, is that students who memorize such "SAT" words usually have little understanding on the nuances behind the words, something which McWhorter strived for throughout the book.

Going back to the theme of "bad English", McWhorter emphasized, that the problem goes much deeper than poor grammar, and he proved the point by writing the entire book with "poor" grammar. Formally written English is highly processed and demands conscious participation from both the writer and the audience. The thinking process stopped with the gradual substitution of colloquial English in formal speech. The people, who see soundbyte as rhetoric, he argued, are effectively throwing their liberty away, an ironic consequence of the counter-authoritarian revolution.

Although McWhorter's opinions are somewhat controversial, and I do not agree with every one of them wholeheartedly, "Doing our own thing" does make me question the way I perceive the English language, and become conscious of my own thought process.

Postscript: A lot of people think McWhorter is a sellout for his views on racial issues. I think otherwise. The Chinese identity in America, though emerges much later than the Blacks, is no longer built upon head tax, piggy tails, and laundry stores. Yet we still preserve the core of our culture. Along the same argument, the Black identity needs not be built upon slavery, violence, and poverty. McWhorter urges others not to yield to social pressures and break free from the invisible bondage, a struggle that is universal and transparent.

Through tracing the simplification of American speech and music over the last century (in some cases, longer), McWhorter demonstrates the loss of complexity, and with it, a love for the English (American) language. Showing his own ambivalence about, or possibly seduction by, this simplification, McWhorter shows how this continued degradation is stripping our public discourse of the very richness and precision we most need in these complex times, though he doesn't hammer this point home. (Note: This book makes much more sense if one realizes that good writing is thought on paper.) McWhorter subtly implies, though never states, that the American public's desire for the 'real,' the 'honest' and the simple, is, perhaps, a mistake.

Very well written (with a few editing mistakes!), I give it 4 stars, as it doesn't provide any ideas for changing the situation. Having said that, I am making efforts to improve my own writing and speaking as a result of this book.

This book is about the distinction between spoken and written language. McWhorter shows that, whenever Americans wrote things before about 1965, they tried to do so in language that was grammatically correct, aesthetically pleasing, and unabashedly literary. It would have been as unthinkable in those days to write in the same casual voice that one used for routine spoken communication as it would have been to go to town in anything other than your best suit. Today, no one wears a suit anymore, and no one tries to write in the more elaborate style of old.

McWhorter doesn't persuade me that I should, like, care. But, in making his case, he cites many little factoids and anecdotes that would fascinate anyone interested in semantics. He explains, for example, where the rule against ending sentences with prepositions came from, and how, a hundred years ago, a house under construction was "building" rather than "being built." I learned a lot, and I enjoyed the book.

A few reviewers here (most notably A. Holt) accuse McWhorter of resisting the unavoidable evolution of our language. That is the opposite of the truth. McWhorter expressly embraces the idea that there are no objectively "correct" rules in our or any language. He has no trouble at all with deviations from traditional grammar, syntax, and usage. He himself openly uses structures and neologisms that would make a schoolmarm shudder. And he explicitly scoffs at those, like me, who annoy their friends by "correcting" their grammar.

The previous reviewer casually accuses McWhorter of being a cultural elitist, and to some extent that is the case. However, if you actually read the book with an open mind, instead of coming to it with prejudices about cultural relativity, you'll find that McWhorter's arguments are much more subtle than they're presented in the previous review, which boils the two positions down to either appreciating the western canon or appreciating all art and language.

Personally, I found this to be a decent read that gave me a decent amount to think about. I'd rate it a 3.5.

From an author clearly intelligent and knowledgeable, and with a command not just of English but of who knows how many other languages as well, this is one disjointed and, at times, tedious book. Many of the criticisms leveled elsewhere on this page seem off the mark to me. He is not just whining about some age-old language purity that is no longer present. But the "Why this decline is a problem" is not clearly and effectively spelled out. I agree (how could one not?) that we seem to have lost something significant when Barack Obama is hailed as an orator. But what does it mean? And how does he domonstrate, rather than claim, it does?

Let me focus on two lengthy chunks. Mr. McWhorter enjoys musicals. And believes that the quality of writing, both lyrically and musically, has declined significantly. Well, I cannot match him on chapter and verse, but there were lots of dreary and silly songs in musicals in the Thirties and Forties, and if these were, indeed Golden Years, why did this glory grow from the minstrel/vaudeville world that preceded it. If there was a decline since then due to language deterioration, how were the Thirties better than the Gay Nineties? But really, is "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair" a song for the ages? Performed in his beloved piano bars? Remember Sturgeon's Law, which holds that "90 Percent of Everything Is Junk" and we just can't tell very well which is the 10 and which is the 90 while we're in it? The piano bar has performed that service after 60 or 70 years of winnowing.

Now, this is not to say that contemporary pop music isn't an almost primal cry for power, sex, and respect. But the problems this "music" exemplifies are bigger than the evolution from the written word to the spoken. And besides, even if McWhorter is unaware of it, there is lots of melodic and skilled and crafted material being written and performed today.

And his long and pointless discussion of opera? Well, I like the text supertitles. I like the operas sung in Italian, or German, or Russian. I even like the titles when the opera's in English. It takes a few moments to read the lines. I can do it....

Richard Mitchell addresses many of the questions McWhorter raises, but also has some clear and specific worries about what happens (other than boring piano bars) when we lose our language facility. A smaller vocabulary is like s smaller toolbox, and the fewer tools we have, the more often we must make do. A crescent wrench can perform as a hammer, but it slows the job and makes it less likely to be done at all, never mind done well.

Lots of interesting things in here, but too diffuse an argument and too much extraneous or repetitive material. I kept looking for the source of the essays that made up this tome, but apparently this is how it was composed. Disappointing.

Putting pen to paper with the same poigniant gusto of a great composer interweaving libretto to music, Mr. McWhorter hath produced such an entertaining writing on writing that little escapes his astute gaze and even less escapes the oppertunity to pique our interest and satisfaction.

Okay, enough with the joke. We do not write like that anymore and this book (notice I just said 'book' rather than 'entertaining writing on writing') tries to explain why that might be - why we've become so much more accustomed to and expectant of an informal style in our writing as the years have gone by.

McWhorter's answer, at the risk of sounding cliche, is that we Americans are not in love with our language anymore and that the sixties are partly the pivot point. The anti-establishment, anti-conformity, and anti-tradition notions of the sixties, he writes, made it beneficial NOT to use the highfalutin (some called it artful) languatge of yesteryear, as it connoted tradition, the establishment, and authority.

For those expecting a piss-fest by McWhorter on this point, you are half wrong and half right by that expectation. While he never out-and-out bemoans the happening (and gladly admits that he is imbued with the sixties informalism as much as anyone else), McWhorter will (possibly inadvertently?!) come off as a bit preachy in this book. He goes through chapter after chapter citing what he exalts as florid and artful prose, only to remind us that we'd never even dream of talking like that today.

In fact, this is where my strongest criticism comes. The book is TOO repetitive in that sense. While citing examples is obviously needed to prove his case (and he does a good job of it) it starts to make the book terribly repetitive after the third chapter. Every chapter save the first, in fact, follows this format: take a slew of examples of what writing (music, oratory, or prose) was like in the past, quote some examples from today, and say, "See, we don't do it like we used to and wouldn't dream of it in this day and age." While I understand why McWhorter does this ad nauseum, when done in such high doses, it tends to make one want to skip chapters as I started feeling I could guess them word for word without reading them.

Now I return to a previous point: McWhorter doesn't do a whole lot of side-taking in this book. In a sense, actually, he oscillates. While he occasionally makes explicit the benefits of informalization of language and reminds us that he has been affected by it as much as anyone else, he also seems, with this book, to be bemoaning the fact that the love for colorful and poetic language of the past is gone today. While it is noble to try and remain this agnostic (or at least, ambivalent) it also becomes a detriment as the reader (at least this reader) thought it made his point less clear than it might have been. Was McWhorter taking a stand on this issue? Was he opining for days of old, or neutrally demonstrating a trend? He seemed to oscillate between them, fully comfortable with neither. While in a sense that is good, in antother sense, it gave his book a lack of direction as we don't know, and never find out, which direction he is trying to go with us.

Thus, the reader that holds this book in their eager hands, holds a book that will exhibit tendencies to simultaneously frustrate and fulminate, to unsettle and entertain, to amuse and bemuse, at the self-same instant, that the reader will find herself....oh, screw it. Just buy the book and see for yourself!

Was a WHOLE BOOK made out *this* topic?

Good points:

1. Clever, subtle insights. I never knew that there was such a big difference between the written and spoken languages, nor that the divergence was as large as it is for languages that have been written for such a long time.

2. Another clever insight: Talks about how languages are flattened out as they get used over large amounts of space and among large numbers of people. (This would explain the simplicity of the Chinese vocabulary and the movement toward greater simplicity within English.)

3. The author points out that a lot of English grammatical rules have come from a Latin base and make the assumption that because something was so in Latin that it should be so in English. This explains why the cognoscenti think that sentences should not be ended with pronouns (among other rules that seem to have no reason). He also gives us references/ sources for the origins of these rules.

Bad points (they exceed in both number AND quality the good ones):

1. Lots of inaccessible vocabulary. (We know that you think it's cute that you can drop these words, but just what do they add that a simpler/ more common word would not have sufficed to use instead?)Rococo? Aught? Leitmotif? Imperious? Be for real here. (In spite of all these $5 words, he manages to misspell "Dr. Seuss" several times in the text.)

2. Strange value judgments. "Vulgar materialism"? If some people like to make money and others aren't as concerned, are the former people "vulgar"? Where did this come from in a book about language? He makes the case that there is no such thing as bad grammar. OK, fair enough. But what about the continuity of the Hebrew language over vast amounts of time? If someone had said that "there is no such thing as bad grammar," would Hebrew be the same all over the world?

3. This book goes on a great length, and I really wonder: "Were all these words necessary to say nothing in particular?"

4. What is wrong with parsimony in word choice? Scientific papers (which have a lot more to say than almost every political speech that is ever made) make it a point to use the fewest words possible to say something. Speeches given by various political candidates make use of beautiful word imagery and yet manage to say nothing in particular. Speeches given by Post-modernists/ Communists/ Fabian Socialists go on at great length and make elaborate images, but seem to say NOTHING MUCH when all the smoke and dust clears. So, I just don't see what is McWhorter's point in aggrandizing bloated rhetorical speech over plain speaking when neither necessarily says more than the other.

5. McWhorter made mention (in a roundabout way) that languages tend to get simplified/ flattened out the more people that use them. Why not apply this same reasoning to what he perceives as the simplification of speeches by modern day English speakers?

6. Ok, so some people are really attached to their languages? So now what? French people are eternally enamored of the beauty of their language (and tell the whole world so at every opportunity), but WHO CARES? Who speaks French? Who publishes anything of scientific import in French? English is not even an official language in the States (or England or Australia)-- and don't you just know that the world's second language is English?