Over the past six months or so, what amounts to a thin, loose thread of comedy-citing musings has wound its way into Cacophony. Credit Alessandro for leading the way, in posts on Reggie Watts, Saturday Night Live, and Patton Oswalt; and David brought attention to some devastatingly hilarious riffs from Louis C.K. a few weeks back. In that spirit, here’s my own small contribution: several months ago, Seth Myers, the “Weekend Update” guy on Saturday Night Live, gave a surprisingly trenchant mini-lecture on language in a sidebar called “Come On, Dictionary.” The piece takes up the case of “refudiate,” a non-word Sarah Palin uttered on TV last summer, then tweeted, and that was later chosen as Word-of-the-Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary (a tongue-in-cheek selection, one assumes, but still…). Here below is a re-aired and slightly cropped version of his one-and-a-half minute rant on the matter (pardon the other stand-up montage stuff that follows; or better, link over here for a cleaner, unedited, NBC-hosted version of the clip):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJQFI9KJcEk
What I love most about the piece—and, I think, what lends it such a gratifying comic zing—is its reversal of the usual poles: here, uber-right-wing Palin is the one invoking and asserting (albeit disingenuously) the liberal openness of language, and Myers, taking her to task, ends up espousing what might be called a conservative position, linguistically-speaking. That is, even if Meyers, on the surface, just seems to be aping Jon Stewart’s shtick, he also comes off sounding a bit like Dr. Johnson or at least, more modestly, William Safire (the late writer best known for his running “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine). Here, the voice of reason, because it isn’t fastidiously trying to be all things to all people—I’m gesturing to Linell’s previous post on David Brooks—sounds bracingly funny rather than irritating. Instead of coming across as a dour grammarian, Myers-on-language sounds winsome and sharp. I think he manages this rhetorical jag precisely because the boundaries he draws are so explicit and concise and more so, underneath that, because he implicitly posits some pretty sound, pragmatic principles: 1) that language is indeed pliable, but that our exploiting of that pliability ought to be governed by attentive craft and by a keen sense of words’ distinctive uses and effects; 2) that creating new words or bending the meanings of old ones is legitimate when the practice is conscientious and efficacious, but illegitimate when it is careless and feckless; and 3) that one ought to humbly own up to verbal bungles, not excuse and dismiss them by flippantly, spuriously appealing to those aforementioned pliabilities of language.
Language might be a game of sorts, but it’s not quite a free-for-all or a pure play of interchangeable bits and surfaces. Neologisms, cannily tweaked usages, and slang, for instance, are most powerful when they give language not just curious texture but greater dynamism; when they ramify and multiply our actual means of communication. The English language, in particular, has shown incredible capacities to splinter and slip and swell in these ways, becoming more multifarious by the minute—a summary feature of English I confess to loving. So yes, Madame Palin, I agree that our common tongue is indeed, as you glibly tweeted, “a living language.” And I also feel—quite strongly, in fact—that we’ve “got to celebrate it!” But the it you mean in that phrase is, in the end, profoundly different from the it I mean.