Why Americans no longer say what they mean in plain English

In the United States social mobility and democracy have increasingly blunted linguistic markers

IN THE preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw famously wrote that every time an Englishman opens his mouth he makes another Englishman despise him.

This is less true in America, where social mobility and democracy have blunted linguistic markers, while in politics there’s a premium on imaginative language that makes an apathetic public sit up and take notice.

But Democrats are handicapped by their split electorate, explains Timothy Meagher, a fourth generation Irish-American and professor of history at Catholic University. Republicans tend to be white and working or middle class, while Democrats encompass the poor, ethnic minorities and Americans with university degrees.

“The language that appeals to educated Democrats is more formal, more academic,” says Meagher. “College professors love Obama, because his language is beautifully crafted. But other groups can find it alienating.”

Race further complicates Obama’s linguistic choices. In his efforts to be a “regular guy”, the president calls people “folks” and drops his ‘g’s. “If he indulges too much in colloquial English, it sounds like black argot,” says Meagher.

“It’s easier for white politicians to descend into folksiness.” Obama’s intelligence and Ivy League education can be a political weakness that make him appear distant and cold, Meagher explains. “Dropping his ‘g’s can seem hip and cool to blacks and young whites, but older whites, and especially middle-class whites, may hear language that conjures up images of poor blacks. Do white Americans see someone like them, or someone who crosses a boundary? He’s boxed in by American stereotypes.” Vice-president Joe Biden is in a sense the Democrats’ secret linguistic weapon. From a northeastern, working-class, Irish Catholic family, Biden has the common touch, including the occasional swear word.

Republicans have proved more adept – and unscrupulous – than Democrats at wielding colourful imagery. Remember the (fictitious) “death panels” that Sarah Palin and the right claimed were embedded in Obama’s healthcare Bill? As Republicans and Democrats jousted over the debt ceiling this week, Mitch McConnell, the crusty old Senate Minority Leader, accused Democrats of attempting to administer the “poison pill” of tax hikes. The Dems wanted to spend their way out of the deficit, McConnell said, concluding: “What planet are they on?” Republicans have long inserted the words “job-killing” in the title of any Bill proposed by Democrats. Now they’ve rechristened the millionaires and billionaires who have benefited from mega-tax cuts for the past decade “job creators” – flying in the face of evidence that tax cuts have not created jobs.

George O’Brien, a professor of English at Georgetown University who emigrated from Lismore, Co Wexford, in the 1980s, surmises the American attitude towards language thus: “It’s a resource to be used, like ploughing a field or quarrying a mine. Language is not a sacred cow. You can play fast and loose with it, with abandon. You don’t have to ask anyone whether it’s the queen’s English.

“This has two consequences: there’s a licence to invent, but also a paralysing uncertainty as to what appropriate usage might be.”

O’Brien says American politicians are more inventive than their Irish counterparts. For historic reasons, “Irish political speech is more cautious, syntactically and grammatically,” he explains. “It’s very well-shaped. It doesn’t tend to be as demotic. In Ireland, there’s a sense of an official language – the language of the law, of public administration, and that’s different from the language of the street and the home.”

Much of the American English now in vogue comes from black idiom.

"How [the senior citizens' lobby] AARP Can Get Its Groove Back" was the title of an opinion piece in the New York Timesthis week.

The phrase came into wide usage after a 1998 film about African Americans called How Stella Got her Groove Back.

The term “heading south” appears often in economic commentary. It originally referred to more arduous conditions for slaves. The expressions “to have issues with” and “dissing” (from ‘disrespect’) also originate with African Americans.

The financial crisis has contributed to our vocabulary. Wall Street bankers are referred to as “grifters” – a film title referring to con men – and “no-accounts”. I heard “credit event” for the first time during the US visit of Michael Noonan in mid-June.

Unsure of its meaning, I asked Noonan. “It’s defined by the authorities after it occurs. That’s why it’s so difficult; it’s a euphemism,” he said. I’ve since seen “credit event” used interchangeably with the more ominous-sounding “default”.

When the gangster “Whitey” Bulger was arrested this week, I recalled a recent description of a young man establishing a professional reputation.

“He’s made his bones,” a friend told me. The Mafia expression for someone who has risen in rank through killing has evolved to signify career advancement.