The Vocabulary of Time Magazine Revisited

Abstract

MORE THAN a generation ago in American Speech, Joseph J. Firebaugh (1940) noted linguistic creativity of Time magazine, outlined history of that creativity, and analyzed Time use of esoteric blends and compounds, ascribing free-wheeling ways with words to a Menckenian irreverence toward authority but also to its respect for success, and asserting that magazine's moulding of language to expression of a definite social philosophy would insure Time respectful attention of future students of American language. Other students of Time vocabulary have shown less respect than Firebaugh. In New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs (1936) published a barbed parody of Timestyle, which, as John Kobler (1968, pp. 70-78) has said, had a chastening influence, in particular bringing about a sharp decline in one stylistic mannerism of magazine: frequent use of inverted phrase structure-parodied by Gibbs with Backward ran sentences until reeled mind. Almost twenty years later in New Yorker, Geoffrey Hellman (1955, p. 36) regretted febrility of a prose in which, instead of walking, famous personages stride, pad about, amble, lumber, elbow, careen, roll to starboard, vault, or bounce around and, instead of speaking, groan, coo, snarl, taunt, thunder, chortle, crack, intone, growl, drawl, sneer, grumble, rumble, blurt, smirk, purr, husk, rasp, bubble, beam, smile, grin, drone, roar amid guffaws, sigh, worry, and spit entire sentences and even paragraphs. Hitting especially seldombreached anonymity of Time writers, Garry Wills (1957, p. 36) declared in National Review, We have a thing which Pope could imagine only in an epic realm of duncedom-a phrase-factory. Andrew Kopkind (1968, p. 25) felt that, during his days as a Time writer, the obsessive puns and excessivejokes were a pathological symptom of extreme alienation of reporters and writers from their work. On other hand, Henry Luce III in a weekly Letter from publisher (19 Oct. 1970, p. 13) asserted that at Time, particularly, correspondents and writers constantly seek to enrich idiom, and he briefly reviewed magazine's attempts toward that end: Such mainstays of vernacular as tycoon, kudos, pundit and socialite all gained currency from their use in Time. Our movie reviewers borrowed cinema from