Eloquence Lost

At age fifteen I discovered the language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adventurers. In my local mall was a Coles outlet, selling classic novels for a dollar each. The print was tiny and the binding the shade of cardboard. The novels seemed chosen by the publisher mostly for their brevity, and maybe with an eye to readers who liked their literature ripping. For a year or so I read only the likes of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Kipling’s Captains Courageous, and Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

They were wondrous and thrilling, these worlds, and never more so than when the characters opened their mouths. Everyone spoke with such refinement – and, often, at such length. Even the most rough-hewn sorts, their dialogue littered with “arrghs” and “ayes” and other piratical grunts, possessed a verbal quality I had not encountered in my own life.

That quality was eloquence, and I was, in fact, already too late to hear much of it out of the mouths of the living. Eloquence once referred to formal discourse. Of late, the term has come to be more generally defined as fluent and graceful talk, particularly of the kind that persuades. Grounded in spoken language that derived its cadence and grammar from the written word, eloquence was rooted in a widespread admiration for oratory. By the mid-1970s, when I was first taking an interest in such speech, those traditions were on the wane.

Now they have nearly disappeared, and the way we talk is much changed for it. Valley Girl-speak, popularized by the eponymous 1982 Frank Zappa song, is enshrined as North American lingo. Young people, with their penchant for slang and verbal dysfluencies – those pauses we, like, insert into our speech while seeking the, um, right word – are often tagged as the worst language offenders. But it is increasingly acceptable for adults to speak in the same manner. Forty-year-old men refer to each other as “dude,” and grown women can deliver a “whatever” with a snap that is the match of any character in the teen drama The O.C.

Whether or not the fate of eloquence is cause for lament may depend on what kind of language you favour. That, in turn, may reflect the way your mind has been conditioned, both to listen and to speak.

Nearly two decades ago, Neil Postman tracked the demise of what he called the “typographical mind.” In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman used the famous 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as an instance of a vanished culture. Audiences of ordinary citizens, including one crowd estimated at fifteen thousand, sat on benches for hours listening to Lincoln and Douglas debate slavery and abolition. They were able to do so, Postman said, because their intellects had been conditioned by the rigours of written language.

They had the training and the patience. “Language as pure print,” he called it.

But the age of typography has long been supplanted by the age of television. Starting in the 1950s, public business, be it politics, religion, or even education, had to be recast to work on TV, a medium that promotes, in Postman’s view, “incoherence and triviality.” Intellects shifted as well, along with conventions of speech. This is language as pure pixels, in effect.

Hence the sound bite and the sentence fragment, and the shyness about sounding too high and mighty before the camera. The linguist John McWhorter, taking up Postman’s argument, believes eloquence was doomed the 28 moment public figures abandoned “speech” in favour of “talk.” McWhorter writes in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care that, at one time, “talking was for conversation. In public or on paper, one used a different kind of language, just as we use forks and knives instead of eating with our hands.” Now all of us, including politicians, seem content to eat with our hands, everywhere.

Our low regard for rhetoric may make traditional eloquence impossible. “Mere rhetoric” is the favoured putdown, implying that any verbal conceit or flourish cloaks a lack of substance or even sincerity. Politicians strike folksy notes as a result, preferring to err on the side of faux humble.

The contemporary mellifluousness of Bill Clinton, for instance, engendered as much suspicion among Americans as it did praise. In contrast, George W. Bush’s admirers apparently find his limited verbal facility a sign of trust-worthiness. Ask most people for a list of great orators, and they inevitably draw from either the language-as-print era, or the infancy of language-as-pixels: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It may be that we get the public orators we deserve.

Closer to home, Rex Murphy did chide Canadian politicians earlier this year for their dull, formulaic exchanges in a televised election debate. “It’s a strange rhetorical competition that is ashamed of rhetoric,” the broadcaster and columnist wrote, “a strange public-speaking contest that is embarrassed by eloquence.” But then Murphy, an uncommonly eloquent man with a penchant for periodic sentences and ten-buck words, is himself a bit of an anomaly.

John McWhorter suspects Americans have become too colloquial to ever be eloquent. The suspicion can surely be extended to their northern neighbours. Our cultures, as he puts it, “thrill most to English yoked to orally based charisma,” be it in the form of rap music, spoken-word poetry, or literary authors with writing styles that draw heavily from the vernacular, such as DBC Pierre, the winner of last year’s Booker Prize. A flare for the verbally transgressive is paralleled by a growing indifference to, and discomfort with, the “stringent artifice of written language.”

At the same time, we are also now in the thrall of new technologies whose impact rivals that of television’s in the Sixties and Seventies. Critics fear that cell phones and text messaging are further dumbing down conversations. Language, then, as pure digital? “Every change in our principal means of communication changes how we communicate,” notes the scholar Derrick de Kerckhove. Youth culture is certainly being influenced by digital language, a lingo notable for its spotty grammar and preference for codes and signs over an alphabet. Should hypertext ever migrate into the mouths of its adherents, it will produce some curious slang indeed.

Like it or not, that slang will probably be appropriate for our informal, impatient, post-literate age. The language will suit the way we live, and the way we talk – or don’t talk, perhaps – about our lives.

As many have noted, every generation tends to believe that language is in decline. McWhorter, at least, is careful to point out that we know little about how ordinary people spoke in the pre-microphone past. Listening to a recording of, say, a New York cab driver in the 1940s, as McWhorter did in his research for the book, suggests that too much nostalgia for a supposedly more refined era would be a mistake. “Youse fellas,” McWhorter quotes the cabbie as saying, “ya always got da same habit.”

It is true, though, that the cab driver a half-century ago still wanted his elected representatives to express themselves using elevated language and high rhetoric. For a variety of reasons, we no longer expect, or even wish, politicians to perform that function. Nor do many of us look any longer to pulpits for inspiration of any kind.

Maybe there is a link here between speech and subject. Could eloquence come more easily when topics involve honour and valour, faith and responsibility? You don’t hear those matters discussed much anymore, in either public or private life. But then, I am speaking as an example of a cross between a pure-print and a pure-pixels mind, conditioned as much by the old books I read as by the television I grew up watching.