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Why is English discourse in such a parlous state? Maybe it's because verbal knee-jerkery requires no thought. It's so much easier not to think, isn't it? It's so much easier to cookie-cut the rich dough of the English language. It's so much easier to microwave a frozen dinner than to create a meal from scratch. After all, when we were children, we loved to pull the string on the doll that said the same thing over and over, again and again.

That's what fadspeak is -- the unrelenting mix of mimicry and gimmickry. Fadspeak comprises vogue phrases that suddenly appear on everybody's tongues -- phrases that launch a thousand lips. Before you can say, "yada yada yada," these throwaway expressions become instant clichés, perfect for our throwaway society, like paper wedding dresses for throwaway marriages.

Fadspeak clichés lead mayfly lives, counting their duration in months instead of decades. They strut and fret their hour upon the stage of pop culture and then are heard no more.

Now, would I, your faithful language columnist, your ever-creative fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth user-friendly linguist, ever serve you the pap that is fadspeak? I don't think so. That just lowers the bar for what makes good writing.

I'm not talking trash here. I mean, I’ve got you on my radar screen, and I'm your new best friend. I know that what goes around comes around.

Hey, this isn't rocket science or brain surgery. It's simply a no-brainer. I, the mother of all language writers, value original thought and fresh language. So I'm making you an offer you can't refuse. I'm never going to slip into those hackneyed faddish expressions that afflict our precious American language. Sound like a plan?

Don't you just hate it when a writer or speaker gives you that same old same old? Doesn't it just send you on an emotional roller coaster? Don't you just want to scream, "Oh, puh-leeze! In your dreams! Excuuuuse me! You're history! Put a sock in it!"?

As for me, I'm like, "Are you the writer from Hell? Lose the attitude, man. Maybe it's a guy thing, but get real! Get a life! And while you're at it, why don't you knock yourself out and get a vocabulary?"

Anyhoo, fadspeakers and fadwriters are so clueless. They just don't go the whole nine yards. They're afraid to push the envelope, to raise the bar. All they do is give you that been-there-done-that kind of writing. They just play the old tapes again and again. Go figure.

Hel-lo-oh? Duuuh. What's wrong with this picture? Is the light on but nobody's home? Are we on the same page? Are we having fun yet? Are you having some kind of a bad-hair day? Are you having a senior moment? Maybe it's time for a wake-up call? Or maybe a reality check? I don't think so. Not even close.

You wanna talk about it? You wanna get with the program? You got that right.

Whatever.

When I find one of these snippets of fadspeak strewn about a sentence, I'm in your face. I'm your worst nightmare. Strings of pop phrases just make me go ballistic, even to the point of going postal.

Okay, okay. I understand that maybe you just don't want to go there. But I do, and the ball's in your court. Because at the end of the day, is this a great language -- or what?

Gimme a break. Now that I've thrown my hissy fit about fadspeak, I'm outta here.

Yesss!

© Richard Lederer

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I'm pleased to report that my Crazy English has just been reincarnated as a trade paperback book. This edition is not just a reformatting; it's a genuine expansion and improvement.

Crazy English the one book of mine that I've wanted to have a crack of rewriting. That's because the material has become such a ubiquitous presence on the Internet -- "We drive in a parkway, park in a driveway; our nose can run and our feet can smell" -- that it has spawned new vagaries and insights into the language that I hadn't imagined back in 1989. Now I've been able to integrate the best of these progeny into the new edition.

Here's a typical chapter from my reborn Crazy child:

"You'll have to pay $168 for the rear window wiper," the salesman explained.

"But we don't want the rear wiper," my friends protested.

And the salesman said: "We want to keep the sticker price low, but every car comes with the rear window wiper. So you have to buy it. It's a mandatory option."

Mandatory option is a telling example of the kind of pushme-pullyou doublespeak that pervades the language of business and politics these days. It is also a striking instance of an oxymoron.

"Good grief!" you exclaim. "What's an oxymoron?"

An oxymoron (I reply) is a figure of speech in which two incongruous, contradictory terms are yoked together in a small space. As a matter of fact, good grief is an oxymoron.

Appropriately, the word oxymoron is itself oxymoronic because it is formed from two Greek roots of opposite meaning -- oxys, "sharp, keen," and moros, "foolish," the same root that gives us the word moron. Other examples of foreign word parts oxymoronically drawn to each other are pianoforte ("soft-loud"), monopoly ("one many"), and sophomore ("wise fool"). If you know any sophomoric sophomores, you know how apt that oxymoron is.

I have long been amused by the name of a grocery store in my town, West Street Superette, since super means "large" and -ette means "small." If you have a superette in your town, it is a "large small" store.

Perhaps the best known oxymoron in the United States is one from comedian George Carlin's record Toledo Window Box, the delightful jumbo shrimp. Expand the expression to fresh frozen jumbo shrimp, and you have a double oxymoron.

Once you start collecting oxymora (just as the plural of phenomenon is phenomena, an oxymoron quickly becomes a list of oxymora), these compact two-word paradoxes start popping up everywhere you look. Among the prize specimens in my trophy case are these minor miracles, which, I hope, will go over better than a lead balloon:

Literary oxymora, created accidentally on purpose, include Geoffrey Chaucer's hateful good, Edmund Spenser's proud humility, John Milton's darkness visible, Alexander Pope's "damn with faint praise," Lord Byron's melancholy merriment, James Thomson's expressive silence, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's falsely true, Ernest Hemingway's scalding coolness, and, the most quoted of all, William Shakespeare's "parting is such sweet sorrow." Abraham Lincoln's political opponent, Stephen Douglas, was known as the Little Giant, and, more recently, Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry commented before a Super Bowl that he was feeling confidently scared.

Now, if you are willing to stretch the oxymoronic concept and editorialize unabashedly, you will expand your oxymoronic list considerably. Thus, we can observe natural oxymora, literary oxymora, and opinion oxymora, three categories that are not always mutually exclusive:

Oxymora lurk even in place names, like Little Big Horn, Old New York, and Fork Union, and in single words, like bittersweet, firewater, preposterous, semiboneless, spendthrift, wholesome, and Noyes. If you have trouble understanding that last one, examine its first two and then its last three letters.

Good grief! Oxymora are everywhere!

© Richard Lederer

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We live in a house of language, and our words are the windows through which we look at the world. Many people have begun to wonder if our window on reality has a glass that distorts the view. "Could it be," they ask, "that the window through which we see life is marred by cracks, smudges, blind spots, and filters?"

Women make up the majority of the population in the United States and almost every country in the world. Yet concern has been growing that the English language depicts girls and women as an inferior group of human beings.

What do you picture when you hear or read the following expressions: The Ascent of Man, Neanderthal man, Language separates mankind from the other creatures, Everyone should guard his valuables?

When you see the words mankind, man, and he used to mean all people, they are being used in a generic, or general, sense. Do words like man, mankind, and he include women and children? This question was tested by sociologists who asked three hundred students to select illustrations from pictures that were supplied for chapters in a textbook. One group of students was presented titles such as "Social Man," "Industrial Man," and "Political Man," the other titles such as "Society," "Industrial Life," and "Politics." Results indicated that the word man evoked pictures of males participating in that activity far more than women or children.

Another survey revealed that children from kindergarten through seventh grade interpreted the sentences "Man must work in order to eat" and "Around the world man is happy" to mean male adults, not females and children.

A nonsexist approach is to use human or human being, instead of the generic man, and humanity or humankind for the generic mankind. The English language possesses six basic pronouns:

               	 Singular         	Plural

  first person:     I                     we

  second person:    you                   you

  third person:     he, she, it           they

Of our six pronouns, only one, the third-person singular, identifies the gender of the individual. Many languages avoid sexual designation in their pronouns, as in the Turkish o, which can mean either he or she. Among the candidates proposed to displace the generic third-person singular pronoun in English are co, et, han, hesh, jhe, na, person, s/he, thon, ti (an inversion of the letters in it ), and ws, but none has caught on.

A nonsexist strategy is to include both sexes in your sentence: "Each student should bring his or her books," or to make the entire statement plural, as in "All students should bring their books."

Read and hear this: "Whan that April with his showres soote/The droughte of March hath perced to the roote . . .." These are the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English. The history of English, like that of all living languages and living things, is the history of constant change. We limit the potential of males and females alike when we use sexist language.

In 1953 the National Weather Service began conferring female first names on all hurricanes, categorizing those devastating winds as female. When I was a boy, we bandied about a little riddle: "Why do they give hurricanes female names?"
"Because otherwise, they'd be himicanes!"
Har har, Chuckle, chuckle,

Today that riddle doesn't make sense anymore. That's because, in 1979, the Service started identifying hurricanes by both male and female names alternately: Alma, Bertram, Charlotte, Donald, Elaine, and so on. That one small step for humankind shows that we human beings are language inventors endowed with the capacity to create genuinely inclusive nouns and pronouns to refer to ourselves.

© Richard Lederer

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Wholly Cow! -- and That's No Bull!
March 23, 1998

The Texas cattlemen are still beefing and stewing about the decision in favor of Oprah, who managed to win free. The motto for the Texas Cattle Association is "Do unto udders as you would have udders do unto you." The favorite magazine of the group is Breeder's Digest. Their favorite book is The Dairy of Anne Frank.

The most popular tune for the cows themselves is Do It My Whey. The game the cows most enjoy playing is moosical chairs. Their favorite magazine? Mad. Their most popular television show? Maverick, of course.

You'll be amazed at how many times the cattle get your tongue till the cows come home. Here follows a cattle list that is bound to cattle-ize you into action, which is a lot better than being cattle-leptic. I'm sure that you haven't herd them all -- and that's no bum steer.

Sharpen your pun cells, everybody. And remember that a good pun is like a good steak -- a rare medium well done.

Have you heard about the five young bulls who were standing in the pasture discussing what they wanted to be when they grew up?

The first said he wanted to go to Rome and become a papal bull.
The second said he wanted to go to New York and become a bull on Wall Street.
The third wanted to go to the windy city to become a Chicago Bull.
The fourth said he wanted to go to Beijing and be a bull in a China shop.
The fifth said he was just going to stay in the pasture for heifer and heifer and heifer.

Have you heard about the bunch of cattle put into a satellite? It was called the herd shot round the world.

Here's one of the most elegant puns fired from the canon of traditional punnery:
Have you heard about the man who bequeathed his male offspring a cattle ranch and named it Focus because it was the place where the sun's rays meet -- and the sons raise meat!

Is it easy to milk a cow? Yes, any little jerk can do it. But if the little jerk gets too enthusiastic, the result could turn out to be beyond the pail.

Forgetful cows give milk of amnesia. Pampered cows give spoiled milk. Nervous cows give milk shakes.

What happens to a cow when it gives birth? It gets de-calf-inated.

What happened to the cow who ate too many blueberries? It mooed indigo.

What's the difference between an angry crowd and a cow with a sore throat? One boos madly, and the other moos badly.

What's the difference between the War of the Roses and dark cows? One is a crown battle and the other is brown cattle.

What do cattle athletes take to make themselves stronger? Steeroids.

What do you call a sleeping steer? A bulldozer.
What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.
What do you call a cow with two legs? Lean beef.

Finally, I'll offer my favorite bovine tail:
An anarchist was walking down a country road with a bomb hidden in his trench coat. He saw another man approaching him, and, fearing that this other person was a government agent, the anarchist rolled the bomb into a nearby pasture.
A bull walked up to the rolling object, sniffed it and swallowed it whole. What is the resulting situation in a single word?
Abominable.
And what single word describes the situation five seconds later?
Noble.

As we close the gate on this bull session, ruminate on this: Too err is human. To udder cattle puns is bovine.

© Richard Lederer

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