The Death of Wit, or: My Heroes Have Always Been Commies

 Today's published pratfall comes from an entirely decent thriller called The Eleventh Plague. by John S. Marr and John Baldwin. Marr is an eminent public health official, and the the biowar aspects of this novel (written when  anthrax was an esoteric subject, which dates it quite a bit) are well done. And the plot--a terrorist recreating--more or less--the Ten Plagues on Egypt is as good a spine for a thriller as you could want.

The line that leapt out at me, though, is one that probably won't leap out at many. And it's worth Mulling over.

"All right," said the general, "Let's move our collective asses! We've got things to do!"

Now it's nice to know that the that so many of this ultra-secret task force are ex-Soviets. Does my heart good. And it's nice that the gummint would hire a general who was still a Marxist.

Actually, it's a real easy howler to gloss right over. And that's worth contemplating. 

If you're a philologist (and I am, in a fit of redundancy, these days an amateur one) it's possible to look with fascination as language changes, even if the change itself seems ugly and slovenly. Even such a horror as 'thru' shows the motion of pronunciation away from the common ancestor that gives German durch. And for every time I hear someone say that English spelling makes no sense, it's good to contemplate that there really are people alive today who pronounce where and wear differently, or do and dew. Voiceless semi-vowels! Palatalized consonants! and all part of a vast shifting process that leaves its tracks in the spelling of words.

*sigh*.

But it's in the realm of phraseology, of semantics and semiotics, where the changes are most easy to understand, happen the quickest, and where our own thought processes are most obviously at work. In fact, anytime anybody gets adventuresome with a metaphor *looks around* they have the potential to shift the tapestry of language its own self.

Matter of fact, people are being clever all the time, and they pour their cleverness into the  great stream of usage. Sometimes a piece of wit sticks in usage as "The movie industry was knocked on its collective ass last week..." and it starts to become regular usage.

Even among people who don't get the joke.

Now Mr. Baldwin may in fact be able to tell you what the element of wit is in that phrase if you ask him, and just say that even Homer nods. (d'oh!). And we can all sit around and wonder where the editors have gone to in this world. But it's also through the semi-consciousness of people that shifts build up and change. And truth to tell, it wasn't that delightful to begin with: so as that little flicker gutters down, we're left with a peculiar, and maybe eventually incomprehensible piece of usage.

I have one piece of usage that I absolutely hate, but against which I've admitted defeat. It's 'The Lion's Share." Dammit, it's a delightful and applicable Aesop's fable pointing out that The lion's share is not most of it, it's ALL of it. (Dammit.) But that little injection--far superior to 'collective ass'--wore off pretty quickly, 'and as the wit vanished, you still had a piece of usage that got reinterpreted without the joke. So now everybody from the New York Times to the Christian Science Monitor uses "The Lion's Share" to mean the biggest chunk. And in our target phrase, 'collective' has just plain lost its meaning.  If you can take the word out, and the sentence means the same thing, that's a strong indicator. 

The fascinating thing is that our language is littered with the death of wit. Not a whit of irony remains after a short period of usage, and you know what? I could care less. Because we grow by that process.

It's not just wit--it can sometimes be a fine distinction of a piece of intellectual rigor that gradually loses it's colorful candy shell. My principle mentor at the University of Chicago, Kenneth Northcott, always made a big deal of the difference between choice and option. If you have two options, you have one choice. If you have one option, you have no choice. Makes sense, right? When you think about it? But the fight is lost: the two terms are now used interchangeably, and people actually say, "You're out of options.' That should mean that you're dead, but it doesn't. 

(As the only real Inspector Clouseau said, when his horrified host whimpered, "but--but that's a priceless Steinwway!":  "Not any more.")

But the paradoxical thing is that, as wit and cleverness and thought sloughs away, the language grows, and becomes richer. More puzzling, but richer. The French for 'What is it?" Qu'est-ce que c'est? (pronounced with beautiful rationality as Keskuhsay?) is "What is that what that is?" And "What is that?" is Quest-ce que c'est que ça? Which is more or less What is that what that is, that's that there?" (Ça is a condensation of celà, which is 'that there.' là, at least, kind of elegant.) (And the idiomatic way to say "I am here" is to say "Je suis là.' which is literally "I am there.") Or in German, the word for 'glove' is Handschuh, meaning, surprisingly, "Hand-shoe." Cute, huh? But the word for sock? Fusshandschuh--"Foot-glove". Or...

So, ultimately, we build better than we know, and even ignorance works to a more wonderful thing. 

According to the Gospel of John, The Word was before the world, with God, and was God. It's funny that no  mention is made of what language the Word was in. My best guess used to be Basque, but now I think that the omission was deliberate, because God is entirely too smart to be any good at language. That has been, and remains, up to us.