by Unknown
Language Maven William Safire Denounces the Telephone as the Subverter of Good English
“It is harder to put your foot in your mouth when you have your pen in your hand.”
Look, this doesn’t compare with Pericles and Patrick Henry, but every anthologist is entitled to the inclusion of one of his own. It was delivered at my alma mater, Syracuse University, on May 13, 1978, and the graduates lapped it up.
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CLASSMATES:
I entered Syracuse University with the class of ’51, dropped out after two years, and am finally receiving my degree with the class of ’78. There is hope for slow learners.
My subject today is “The Decline of the Written Word.” If the speech I have written is disjointed and confusing, you will get my point the hard way.
We have not heard a really eloquent speech out of the White House in a long time. Why? When you ask the speechwriters of Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter, they give you this explanation: they say that “high-flown rhetoric” is not their man’s style.
But that is not responsive. A flowery speech is a bad speech. Simple, straight English prose can be used to build a great speech. There has to be a more profound reason for the reluctance of the presidents of the seventies to write out their thoughts plainly and deliver them in words we can all understand.
If you press the president’s aides—and that’s my job, to press them hard—they’ll admit that their man much prefers to “ad-lib” answers to questions. He’s not good at what they call a “set” speech.
What do they really mean by that? They mean a speech—a written speech, developing an idea—is not what people want to hear. People prefer short takes, Q. and A.; the attention span of most Americans on serious matters is about twenty seconds, the length of a television clip.
In the same way, people do not want to read articles as they once did; today, if you cannot get your message in a paragraph, forget it.
As a result, we’re becoming a short-take society. Our presidency, which Theodore Roosevelt called a “bully pulpit,” has become a forum for twenty-second spots. Our food for thought is junk food.
What has brought this about? I don’t blame President Carter for this—he reflects the trend; he did not start it. I don’t flail out at the usual whipping boy, television.
The reason for the decline of the written word—speeches, written articles—is that we, as a people, are writing less and talking more. Because it takes longer to prepare our thoughts on paper that means we are ad-libbing more, and it also means we are thinking more superficially. An ad-lib has its place, but not ad nauseam.
That’s one of those sweeping statements that pundits are permitted to make. But let me turn reporter for a minute and prove to you that we’re talking more and writing less.
Most people are not writing personal letters any more. Oh, the volume of first-class mail has doubled since 1950, but here’s the way the mail breaks down. Over 80 percent is business related; over 10 percent is greeting card and Christmas card; and only 3 percent is from one person to another to chew the fat.
More and more, we’re relying on commercial poets and cartoonists to express our thoughts for us. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day; how many of us are relying on canned sentiments? I remember my brother once laboriously handmade a card for my mother: on the front was “I’ll never forget you, Mother,” and inside it said, “You gave away my dog.” Okay, he was sore, but at least he was original.
The greatest cultural villain of our times has a motherly image: Ma Bell. The telephone company. Instead of writing, people are calling; instead of communicating, they’re “staying in touch.”
There you are, all about to be holders of college degrees. When was the last time you wrote, or received, a long, thoughtful letter? When was the last time you wrote a passionate love letter? No, that takes time, effort, thought—there’s a much easier way, the telephone. The worst insult is when kids call home, collect, for money; when my kids go to college, the only way they’ll get a nickel out of me is to write for it.
As the percentage of personal mail has dwindled, the number of telephone installations since 1950 has quadrupled. The average person’s need to write has been undermined by simple economics: as the cost of a letter has gone up, the cost of a call has gone down.
During World War I, a first-class letter cost two cents an ounce; in a few weeks, it will be fifteen cents an ounce. In that same sixty years, a New York-to-San Francisco call has gone from twenty dollars for three minutes down to fifty-three cents today, if you’re willing to call at night or on a weekend. The penny postcard is a dime. Letters up almost 800 percent; phone calls down to one-fortieth of the cost to grandpa. No wonder the market share of communication has dropped for letter writers. In the year I was a freshman here, the Postal Service had over a third of the communication business; today, it is one-sixth, and falling.
And it’s going to get worse: phonevision is on the way. We have seen what happened to the interpersonal correspondence of love in the past generation. The purple passages of prose, and tear-stained pages of the love letter—that’s gone now. It has become the heavy breathing, grunts, and “like, I mean, y’know, wow” of the love call. The next stage, with the visual dimension, will not even require a loud sigh: we can just wave at each other to say hello; wiggle our fingers to express affection; raise our eyebrows to ask, “What’s new?,” get a shrug in reply, and sign off with a smile and a wink.
We need not degenerate further from written English to verbal grunts, and then to sign language. We need to become modern reactionaries; I consider myself a neo-Neanderthal and my happiest moment of the year comes as daylight savings ends in October, when I can turn back the clock.
How do we save ourselves from the tyranny of the telephone? How do we liberate our language from the addiction to the ad-lib?
If this were an off-the-cuff presentation, I would drift off into a fuzzy evasion like “There are no easy answers.” But one thing I have learned in preparing my first commencement address, and the main advice I shall burden you with today is this: there are plenty of easy answers. The big trick is to think about them and write them down.
There are four steps to the salvation of the English language, and thus to the rejuvenation of clear thinking in your working lives.
First, remember that first drafts are usually stupid. If you shoot off your mouth with your first draft—that is, if you say what you think before you’ve had a chance to think—your stupidity shines forth for all to hear. But, if you write your first draft—of a letter, a memo, a description of some transcendental experience that comes to you while jogging—then you fall on your face in absolute privacy. You get the chance to change it all around. It is harder to put your foot in your mouth when you have your pen in your hand.
Second, reject the notion that honesty and candor demand that you “let it all hang out.” That’s not honesty; that’s intellectual laziness. Tuck some of it in; edit some of it out. Talking on your feet, spinning thoughts off the top of your head, and just rapping along in a laid-back way have been glorified as “expressing your natural self.” But you did not get an education to become natural; you got an education to become civilized. Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to “get in touch with your feelings,” fine—talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down and then cut out the confusing parts.
Third, never forget that you own the telephone; the telephone does not own you. Most people cannot bear to listen to a phone ring without answering it. It’s easy to not answer a letter, but it’s hard to not answer a phone. Let me pass along a solution that has changed my life. When I was in the Nixon administration, my telephone was tapped—I had been associating with known journalists. So I took an interest in the instrument itself.
Turn it upside down; you will notice a lever that says “louder.” Turn it away from the direction of louder. That is the direction of emancipation. If somebody needs to see you, he’ll come over. If others need to tell you what they think, or even express how they feel, they can write. There are those who will call you a recluse—but it is better to listen to your own different drummer than to go through life with a ringing in your ears.
My fourth point will impress upon you the significance of the written word. Those of you who have been secretly taking notes, out of a four-year habit, will recall that I spoke of “four steps” to the salvation of the English language. Here it is: there is no fourth step. I had the fourth step in mind when I began, but I forgot it.
Now, if I were ad-libbing, I would remember I had promised four points, and I would do what so many stump speakers do—toss in the all-purpose last point, which usually begins, “There are no easy answers.” But, in writing down what you think, you can go back and fix it—instead of having to phumph around with a phony fourth point, you can change your introduction to “there are three steps.” Perhaps you wonder why I did not do so. Not out of any excess of honesty, or unwillingness to make a simple fix—I just wanted you to see the fourth step take shape before your very eyes.
Is the decline of the written word inevitable? Will the historians of the future deal merely in oral history? I hope not. I hope that oral history will limit itself to the discovery of toothpaste and the invention of mouthwash. I don’t want to witness the decomposing of the art of composition, or be present when we get in touch with our feelings and lose contact with our minds.
I’m a conservative in politics, which means I believe that we as a people have to lead our leaders, to show them how we want to be led.
Accordingly, I think we have to send a message to the podium from the audience: we’re ready for more than Q. and A. We’re ready for five or ten minutes of sustained explication. A “fireside chat” will not turn out our fires. On the contrary—if a speaker will take the time to prepare, we are prepared to pay in the coin of our attention.
That, of course, is contrary to the trend, against the grain. It can come only from people who care enough to compose, who get in the habit of reading rather than listening, of being in communication instead of only in contact.
When Great Britain was fighting World War II alone, an American president did something that would be considered cornball today: FDR sent Churchill a poem, along with a letter, that read:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Churchill took the message—delivered to him by Wendell Willkie, who had just been defeated by FDR—and selected a poem in answer. At that moment, looking east, England faced invasion; looking to the west across the Atlantic, Churchill saw potential help. The poem he sent concluded with the words:
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
High-flown rhetoric? Perhaps. And perhaps poetry, which had an honorable place in a 1961 inauguration, is too rich for some tastes today.
And now I remember the fourth step. I like to think we can demand some sense of an occasion, some uplift, some inspiration from our leaders. Not empty words and phony promises—but words full of meaning, binding thoughts together with purpose, holding promise of understandable progress. If we ask for it, we’ll get it—if we fail to ask, we’ll get more Q. and A.
I believe we can arrest the decline of the written word, thereby achieving a renaissance of clarity. And not by eastern establishment windows only. The hope is on this side of the Potomac, the Charles, and the Hudson rivers—westward, look, the land is bright.
Financier Felix G. Rohatyn Examines a Fragile Economy
“When a democratic society does not meet the test of fairness… freedom is in jeopardy. Whether the attack comes from the left or from the right is irrelevant; both extremes are equally lethal.”
When Felix G. Rohatyn rose to address the graduating class of his alma mater, Middlebury College, in Vermont, his speech in May 1982 drew heavily on his own experience as a leader in business and public affairs. Rohatyn, born in Austria in 1928, came to the United States during World War II and was naturalized in 1950. An investment banker and chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (New York City’s fiscal watchdog agency), Rohatyn was largely responsible for helping New York City survive its financial crisis of the midseventies.
These experiences led into Rohatyn’s discussion of the economy in 1982, as it began pulling out of severe recession. Called “The Fragile System,” Democrat Rohatyn’s speech focused on the challenges facing our nation’s economy in the boom times of the Reagan era.
With the anaphora of “There is no reason” to enumerate seven needed changes in policy, Rohatyn posits a reformation of the American economy. A listing of the nation’s worries, combined with his recollections of the handling of New York City’s fiscal crisis, underscores his direct address to the class of 1982, particularly in his perorational avoidance of sentiment in a nice “I do not envy you, but I do not feel sorry for you.”
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IT HAS BEEN more than thirty years since I graduated, without the slightest distinction, from a small, idyllic, some might say ivory tower college in Vermont called Middlebury. I had come to the United States in 1942, a refugee from Nazi-occupied France. America meant freedom and opportunity for me; Franklin Roosevelt was America; Middlebury was part of a heady postwar period, of belonging somewhere, of becoming a U.S. citizen, of having a future. A small, bouncy, bald professor named Benjamin Wissler taught me the difference between a fact and an assumption, between reasoning and guessing. Even though, soon after graduation, I was drafted for the Korean War and graduated from that experience as a sergeant of infantry, also without distinction, nothing during that period dimmed my conviction that in the U.S. tomorrow would be better than today, as would every tomorrow thereafter. Insofar as I am concerned, America has far exceeded my personal expectations. No European country would have given a Jewish refugee, of Polish extraction, the opportunities in business and in public affairs that this country has given me.
And yet it would be disingenuous and unrealistic not to recognize that the world as a whole and the U.S. in particular, are profoundly changed from my graduating year of 1949.
A friend of mine, one of the more civilized corporate chairmen, said to me recently, “I no longer give commencement addresses; the graduates are entitled to an upbeat speech, and I am no longer capable of delivering it.” It gave me pause because I certainly do not have an upbeat speech; however, a realistic assessment of where we are cannot be equated with hopelessness. We saved New York City from bankruptcy against much greater odds than those facing this country today. But we did it by being ruthlessly realistic about the mess we were dealing with and by assuming, quite correctly, that when things look very bad, they usually turn out to be worse than they look….
The United States is more than a nation; it is a continent. Within this continent lie our greatest challenges and the most serious threat to our democratic form of government: income and class disparities on the one hand, regional disparities on the other. The Reagan administration’s approach to these issues was to state that tax policy should not be used to effect social change and that citizens should vote with their feet. As a result, a completely laudable attempt to improve American productivity by stimulating investment has resulted in an economic program incoherent in its application.
Budget cuts have been largely concentrated on lower-income programs such as food stamps and welfare and have not, so far, touched the large, middle-income support programs, indexed to the cost of living, such as Social Security and pensions. Massive
tax cuts, coupled with enormous and apparently indiscriminate increases in military spending, have created the perspective of enormous federal deficits for years to come. The growth in the economy which was expected to pay for these programs is, time and again, choked off by high interest rates.
At the same time, a strong regional tide is running away from this part of the country. Unless vigorous actions are taken soon, older America, the Northeast and Midwest—tied to traditional industries like autos, steel, glass and rubber, seriously wounded by Japanese competition—will not provide the jobs, the schools, the taxbase to maintain the physical plant of its cities, and the minimum requirements of its citizens. Half this country will be basking in the sun, swimming in oil and defense contracts, while the other half will sink further and further into physical decay, social stress, and despair.
The basic test of a functioning democracy is its ability to create new wealth and see to its fair distribution. When a democratic society does not meet the test of fairness, when, as in the present state, no attempt seems to be made at fairness, freedom is in jeopardy. Whether the attack comes from the left or from the right is irrelevant; both extremes are equally lethal….
