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Even at the august New York Times, the guards sometimes seemed to be dozing. Some illegal entrants: "falsely padded expense accounts" (as opposed, the reader assumes, to truly padded ones); an obituary describing Playwright Saul Levitt as a "lifelong native of New York"; a man "shot fatally three times"; and David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" identified as the "alleged suspect."
Yet for those who flash on linguistic news, not all the evidence was discouraging. Indeed, quite a few language barriers were dismantled in 1977. Jimmy Carter is hardly a master of the lapidary prose style, preferring code phrases like "defensible borders" and "legitimate rights," and words from his engineering days such as "competent," "effective" and "specific."But he is making good on his promise that federal regulations would be written "in plain English for a change." Optimists have noted that in 1977 the Office of Education simplified its forms. The Federal Trade Commission, a major producer of fog, has hired Wordsmith Rudolf Flesch (Why Johnny Can 't Read) as a consultant. At the Department of Housing and Ur ban Development, Ruth Limmer, former English professor at Goucher College, is trying to turn federal letters into readable prose. "The writer has a terrible time setting the tone" she says. "So he uses an impersonal bureaucratic tone to cover himself. He uses it out of fear."
There are only two reliable remedies for the fear of plain speaking. One is to accept change, to celebrate rather than mourn the resilience of that living organism, language. "Reverse discrimination" may be an ungainly term, but it accurately describes a pragmatic philosophy. "Mainstreaming" is the short form of a long process: the education of disabled children alongside the normal. Slang, foreign phrases, black English continually enliven the American vocabulary. Even CBhavior has its inoffensive moments: "super slabs" seems as good a term as express highways, and "modjitating" (talking) while "dropping the hammer" (accelerating) is more dangerous to the driver than to his speech. Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett's warning remains as valid in the Colonies as in England: "We must use words as they are used or stand aside from life." That use does not mean an utter lapse of standards. When psychobabble, grammatical barbarities and jargon take the place of honest words, it is time to use remedy two: derision. Woody Allen aims his language critiques from the screen. In Annie Hall, when a rock promoter invites him to get mellow, Allen refuses: "When I get mellow I ripen and then I rot." "From time to time," wrote George Or well, "one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some verbal refuse into the dustbin where it belongs." "Downplay," for example, is jettisoned by Novelist Peter De Vries: "If I heard a speaker use it I would upget and outwalk." Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. objects to the popular synonym for homosexual: " 'Gay' used to be one of the most agreeable words in the language. Its appropriation by a notably morose group is an act of piracy."