Book Review: Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English

Abstract

Book Review: Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English. Transaction Large Print, 2010. ISBN: 978-1412813273 (Paperback). 240 Pages. $33.95[Article copies available for fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www. transiormativestudies, ors O2013 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]In what amounts an act of public service, Transaction Publishers continues publish Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking (1974) in large print edition. The book is entertaining and instructive in the vein of such classics as George Orwell's Politics and the English Language and Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. Newman ridicules cliches, euphemisms, incorrect usage, pseudo-scientific terminology, and turgid political speech while providing fascinating introduction politics in the United States during the seventies.Newman (1919-2010) was reporter at NBC from 1961 1984. He appears in many television programs available on YouTube, which include his address bereaved nation on the day of President Kennedy's assassination, an interview with Marshall McLuhan, documentary on the 1964 World Fair, and two presidential debates he moderated. Newman also appeared in comic sketch on Saturday Night Live in which he corrects the grammar of caller on suicide prevention hotline.In Strictly Speaking, Newman skewers such time-worn phrases as whopping wage increases (When does wage increase begin whop? he wonders) and (But who ever heard of an easy truce, or comfortable one?) (27, 30-31). Newman also points out journalistic framing devices: As automatic as uneasy before truce was Marxist before the title of the late President Allende of Chile. You would have thought Marxist President was the position Allende had run for and been elected to (32).Some of the cliches highlighted by Newman (i. e., eyeball confrontation and paper tiger) (35) are mercifully obsolete. He also pillories the professional jargon of newscasters who speak of major thunderstorm activity instead of major thunderstorms and of psychologists who consider children be in a play situation rather than at play. (30) The vocabulary of the social sciences (misspecification, disaggregates, etc.) appears have earned, at least in the mind of Newman, its users special place in Hell.Nonetheless, sloppy constructions, such as partially surrounded and totally unique, may well endure as long as the English language. For Newman, insipid language resembles background elevator music that incessantly encroaches on us [and] thumps and tinkles away, mechanical, without color, inflection, vigor, charm, or distinction unlike the wisecracks, accurate descriptions, precise formulations of ideas [that] brighten the world (21). In sequel, A Civil Tongue (1976), he elaborates further:A civil tongue... means me language is not bogged down in jargon, not puffed up with false dignity, not studded with trick phrases have lost their meaning. It is not falsely exciting, is not patronizing, does not conceal the smallness and triteness of ideas by clothing them in language ever more grandiose, does not seek out increasingly complicated constructions, does not weigh us down with the gelatinous verbiage of Washington and the social sciences... It is direct, specific, concrete, vigorous, colorful, subtle, and imaginative when it should be, and as lucid and eloquent as we are able make it. It is something revel in and enjoy. (6)In Strictly Speaking, Newman relates language democracy, observing those for whom words have lost their value are likely find ideas have also lost their value. (6) However, Newman understands good language usage has its limits, wondering, for example, whether grammarians were less fooled by the Gulf of Tonkin affair - the fabricated incident President Johnson used escalate the war in Vietnam - than were other people (8). …