Chapter One
Here’s the Deal
From the tough-guy kick ass to the airless opt, from the high-strung
Hel-lo?! to the laidback hey, from the withering whatever to the
triumphant Yesss!, an army of brave new words is occupying our
social life with coast-to-coast attitude. The catchwords, phrases,
inflections, and quickie concepts that Americans seem unable to
communicate without have grown into a verbal kudzu, overlaying
regional differences with a national (even an international) pop
accent that tells us more about how we think than we think.
What makes a word a pop word? First of all, we’re not talking mere
clichés. Most pop phrases are indeed clichés-that is, hackneyed or
trite. But a pop phrase packs more rhetorical oomph and social punch
than a conventional cliché. It’s the difference, say, between It’s
as plain as the nose on your face and Duh, between old hat and so
five minutes ago. Pop is the elite corps of clichés.
Nor is the pop vocabulary simply a collection of slang. Some pop
phrases, like bling bling or fashionista, may technically be slang,
or “nonstandard” and probably transient English. But most pop speech
today is made up of perfectly ordinary and permanent words, like
don’t go there and hello. It’s how our tongues twist them that
changes everything.
Here’s my definition: Pop language is, most obviously, verbal
expression that is widely popular and is part of popular culture.
Beyond that, it’s language that pops out of its surround; conveys
more attitude than literal meaning; pulses with a sense of an
invisible chorus speaking it, too; and, when properly inflected,
pulls attention, and probably consensus, its way. (And if it does
most of the above, it gives you a reward: a satisfying “pop.”)
There have always been popular catchphrases, of course, and in the
everyday jungle of small talk, they’ve always been used as verbal
machetes, proven tools for cutting through confusion-as well as for
showing off, fitting in, dishing dirt, shutting someone up,
flirting, and fighting. But today, as the media repeat and glamorize
buzzphrases constantly, the ability to spout a catchy word or two
has become a more highly valued skill-a social equalizer, a sign
that you, too, share the up-to-date American personality.
Or, to put that in pop: These phrases are our go-to guys-whether
flashing bling or singing “Ka-ching!,” they get the job done.
And everybody has them working. Coming off a spate of fund-raisers
in 2003, George W. Bush appeared on The Tonight Show and joked to
Leno about the audience: “These folks didn’t pay five grand apiece
to get in here? I’m outta here!” As John Kerry took the controls of
a helicopter on a campaign hop in Iowa, he shouted, “Rock ‘n’ roll!”
And, of course, both men said (Bush of Iraqi insurgents, Kerry of
Bush’s attacks on his record), “Bring ’em on!” As it turns out,
AARP-eligible presidential candidates are not so far removed,
ideal-American-personality-wise, from babelicious Gen X actresses,
like Cameron Diaz, who told Demi Moore in Charlie’s Angels: Full
Throttle, “Bring it on, bitch!”
Light, self-conscious, and theatrical, chockful of put-downs and
exaggerated inflections, today’s pop talk projects a personality
that has mastered the simulation of conversation. It’s a sort of air
guitar for the lips, seeking not so much communication as a
confirmation that … hey, we’re cool.
Human communication may seem to hold greater possibilities than
that, but the first obligation of pop language is not to help us
plumb life’s mysteries but to establish that you recognize and can
characterize any pre-characterized thing or situation. A famous
person not looking up to par? Someone somewhere will say, “Bad hair
day.” A familiar name escapes you? I’m having a senior moment. Did
you something dumb? “What was I thinking?” Producing the right
phrase at the right time reassures us: I’m awake, it says. I
connect.
The pop response can be punched in from Seattle to Waco, from the
Laundromat to the New York Stock Exchange. Each modular phrase is
part of a franchise deal, whose terms are the same everywhere. When
I say “No way” and you say “Way,” we may be exchanging a nod of
appreciation for our mutual acquaintance with Wayne and Garth or
Bill and Ted (assuming we’re old enough to remember those
characters), but we are also reducing each other to interchangeable
parts, minor guest stars in that moment’s passing sitcom.
Though pop ripples with such ironic attitude, irony is not the only
attitude the language conveys. The desirable mass personality is not
so one-dimensional: Sometimes it’s a baseball-capped, down-to-earth
regular guy, trading in roadkill, goin’ south, and I owe you. At
other times it’s socially earnest, talking up community, giving
back, empowerment, and, in general, its issues. Or its voice might
suddenly turn all corporate cubicle with bottom lines, agendas, and
win-wins, asking people it meets, And you are? The same person who
forms an “L” with his hand and places it on his forehead to call
someone “Loser” can probably, when necessary, switch-hit to a
morally upright It’s the right thing to do. These catchphrases (and
occasional gestures) may play on different teams, but they all have
one thing in common: the ability to be neatly snapped into place,
thereby releasing a little waft of some attitude.
And the attitude-or, more precisely, the platitude as attitude-is
emboldened by the knowledge that, if properly phrased, it will
resonate with millions. Whether biting or benign, what all pop
phrases have in common is the roar of a phantom crowd: They always
speak of other people having spoken them. It’s as if the words came
with built-in applause signs and laugh tracks. And keeping us on
track, they provoke in us click responses, the sort of
electronic-entertainment tic we twitch and jerk with more often
lately. We hear too much information, your worst nightmare, or (my
worst nightmare) Duh, and we immediately sense the power structure
of the moment. In fact, we may subconsciously applaud such speakers
because they’ve hypertexted our little lives right into Desperate
Housewives, American Idol, or whatever piece of media currently
holds life’s sparkle.
Brave New Words
Hey, lady, lighten up. It just feels good to grab the mot juste;
there’s a rush, a ride, and a whirl. And, OK, some pop talk is on
the predictable side, but what’s so wrong with knowing how someone
will finish a sentence? At least it makes us feel that we know
what’s going on in the world.
It’s true, pop can be just plain fun, and it’s always supremely
useful. Coinages like yuppie, glitterati, and red state/blue state
help organize the world, setting up reassuring stepping stones
through the raging currents of affairs. These stones may amount to
little more than hardened stereotypes, but without them, how could
we navigate postmodern life? The very term road rage, for instance,
has made us more aware of the phenomenon, probably saved a few
lives: Do you want to be a red-faced,
veins-popping-out-of-your-skull road-rage warrior who kills children
in order to get one car ahead on the highway? Now that road rage has
a handy label, we may believe that violence on the road occurs more
often than it actually does, as one study has suggested. However,
workplace rage, air rage (angry airline passengers), sideline rage
(uncontrollable parents or coaches at children’s sports games), and
roid rage (steroid-induced aggression) apparently really have
increased. Whether a trend is smaller or larger than the coinage
that describes it, it’s the words themselves that are all the rage.
Pop speech is a form of entertainment that almost anyone can
perform. It connects people instantly. It can keep conversations
bobbing with humor and work against our taking ourselves too
seriously. It’s nothing if not accessible.
But while pop language is fun, useful, and free, it is so in the
same way that advertising-supported media is fun, useful, and
“free”: It requires subtle social and political trade-offs. And so I
come not to praise pop, but to ask, What do we lose and gain in the
deal?
A friend of mine who rewrites movie scripts is often told to add
certain phrases to “punch them up,” he says. “It’s like McDonald’s
discovered that people have three basic tastes-sweet, salty, and
fat-and therefore it never has to create foods for more subtle
tastes.” Yesss! (the spoonful of sugar in so many movies) takes care
of positive, overcoming-the-odds feelings, while Hel-lo?! covers
dealing with idiots, I don’t think so can stop a fool in his tracks,
and so on.
This is the main trade-off: Pop’s prefab repartee can serve as
thought replacement. Get over it. Not ready for prime time. It’s a
no-brainer. Repeated and mentally applauded over years, pop language
carves tunnels that ideas expressed otherwise are too fat to fit
through. Whatever point a speaker is making, it gains acceptance not
on its merits, but on how familiarly it’s presented and how
efficiently tongue snaps into groove. It’s as if each of these
phrases were itself a no-brainer.
Which leads to the questions: Does a buzz-loaded repertoire displace
thinking with a pleasant buzz? Are we, in fact, talking about some
kind of syllabic soma?
As the late Neil Postman wrote in his book Amusing Ourselves to
Death, Aldous Huxley painted a more probable future in Brave New
World than George Orwell did in 1984, because, over the long run,
pleasure is more likely than fear to produce compliant citizens. In
“Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of
their autonomy, maturity and history,” Postman wrote. “As he saw it,
people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies
that undo their capacities to think…. Orwell feared those who
would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give
us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell
feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the
truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
Today, there are clearly attempts by the government and corporations
to conceal truth and to insist, as Newspeak did, that War Is Peace
and Ignorance Is Strength-but rarely in so many words. Such harsh
notes don’t jibe with our vernacular. Much more effective is the
let-me-entertain-you language of the mass media; it bubbles and
bops, tickles and cajoles until we come to adore it. I’m not saying
that pop language is a tranquilizing drug with totalitarian side
effects, like Huxley’s soma. In its ability to break through
obfuscation, which it does every day, pop can be a powerful force
for truth. But in its ability to divert thought and numb our
imaginations with commercial confetti, pop can also be a force that
drowns the truth in “a sea of irrelevance.”
Way/No Way
The pleasure of pop derives from our intimate, id-ridden
relationship with media and marketing. The continual flow between
the way “real people” talk and mass media that mine their speech in
order to better sell things (products, arguments, “personalities”)
creates commercial-flavored norms that real people then absorb. Pop
language both reflects and shapes those norms, with all their
unspoken values and expectations.
That’s what this book is about. What it’s not about is collecting
gaffes or other evidence for the grammar police (there’s an
overworked phrase). And while I will occasionally cover word origins
and first-recorded uses, this book is not really about them either.
And jargon? Get outta here. Unlike the jargon that binds relatively
small groups (be they skateboarders or day traders, instant-message
junkies or ink-stained wretches), true pop pops for everyone,
regardless of age, race, class, region, or occupation.
Pop lingo is usually stereotyped as coming out of the mouths of
media-savvy adolescents, Gen Xers, or Boomers, but pop permeates us
all. Militia men, gangsta rappers, soccer moms, and all of their
children traffic in Yeah, right, Not even close, and You just don’t
get it. Even a low hipness level is no longer a barrier. In spots
for the U.S. Mint, a very downtown George Washington was out hawking
the new “golden dollar” with the refrain that “It’s so money.” Suck
has global reach. Cool is simply galactic.
By definition, jargon doesn’t have such demographic reach, though
some jargon may eventually move on to broader status. And so, while
I will discuss “mini-pop” lingoes from which mass-pop may derive
(such as hip-hop slang or the corporate patois), this book isn’t a
compendium of various group jargons. The focus here is on words that
have already reached general circulation; that float, perhaps for
years, in the mainstream; and that function as verbal viruses,
spreading through the media and flying off our tongues before we
even know it.
Vox-Office Hits
But a viral quality only partly describes pop language. After all,
as William Burroughs said, all language is a virus. Perhaps the
better metaphor is that these are celebrity words, the stars of our
sentences. Amid the fractured, fuzzy notions and mumbled grunts of
everyday verbal intercourse, a snappy catchphrase practically steps
out of the limo and onto the red carpet, a confident grin gracing
its flash-lit face.
Skillfully applied, the celebrity word can temporarily stun us-much
the way seeing a famous person does-and make us more likely to buy
whatever it’s saying or selling.
Take George Tenet’s now infamous remark that finding weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq would be a “slam dunk,” as reported in Bob
Woodward’s Plan of Attack. On December 21, 2002, Tenet and his top
deputy at the CIA, John McLaughlin, went to the Oval Office, where
McLaughlin gave a detailed intelligence briefing to Bush, Dick
Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House
Chief of Staff Andrew Card. It’s not clear whether all the charts,
photos, and intercepts convinced anyone in the room that Iraqi WMD
actually existed. But apparently more to the point, the presentation
failed to persuade anyone that the evidence would persuade the
public. “In terms of marketing,” Woodward wrote, the briefing was “a
flop.” Bush complained that “Joe Public” wouldn’t understand it, and
asked, “[T]his is the best we’ve got?” “From the end of one of the
couches in the Oval Office,” Woodward continued, “Tenet rose up,
threw his arms in the air. ‘It’s a slam dunk case!'” he said. Bush
asked how confident he was, and the director of the CIA, a
Georgetown basketball fan, repeated the arms gesture, saying “Don’t
worry, it’s a slam dunk!” Bush later told Woodward that
“McLaughlin’s presentation ‘wouldn’t have stood the test of time,’
but Tenet’s reassurance, ‘That was very important.'”
Just three weeks later, another pop phrase helped the White House
make its case for war in Iraq. Woodward describes the scene in the
vice president’s West Wing office on January 11, 2003. The vice
president had gathered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Myers to meet with
Bandar bin Sultan, chief representative of the Saudi monarchy in the
U.S. and a longtime friend of the Bush family. Bandar was reluctant
to use his influence to win the support of Saudi Arabia for the
invasion of Iraq without assurances that the U.S. would definitely
get rid of Saddam after having failed to do so in 1991.
“What is the chance of Saddam surviving this?” Bandar asked. He
believed Hussein was intent on killing everyone involved at a high
level with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including himself.
Rumsfeld and Myers didn’t answer.
“Saddam, this time, will be out, period?” Bandar asked skeptically.
“What will happen to him?”
Cheney, who had been quiet as usual, replied, “Prince Bandar, once
we start, Saddam is toast.”
… “I am convinced now that this is something I can take to my
Prince Abdullah,” Bandar said, “and think I can convince him.”
… [After Bandar left] Rumsfeld voiced some concern about the
vice president’s “toast” remark. “Jesus Christ, what was that all
about, Dick?”
“I didn’t want to leave any doubt in his mind what we’re planning to
do,” Cheney said.
(Continues…)
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Leslie Savan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-40247-0
Excerpted from Slam Dunks and No-Brainers
by Leslie Savan
Copyright © 2005 by Leslie Savan.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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