“You mean to say you’re being paid for writing STOP and ONE WAY and SLOW?” asked Marlene. She tried to include as much sarcasm as possible in her voice, but Magruder seemed to take no notice.
“A certain economy of style has never been a handicap to a writer,” he said. “On the other hand, while it’s true that traffic signs are a vehicle that permits a pithiness impossible in most forms, I do longer pieces. NEXT TRAIN FOR GRAND CENTRAL ON TRACK FOUR is one of mine—at the Times Square subway station. There’s another one at the Times Square station that you certainly haven’t seen yourself but that I think has a certain flair: THIS IS YOUR MEN’S ROOM; KEEP IT CLEAN. I’ve heard several people talk of that one as the ultimate expression of man’s inability to identify with his group in an urban society.”
That was almost too much for Marlene. She had found herself beginning to believe Magruder—his self-confidence was awesome, and after all, who would have the gall to take credit for ONE WAY if he hadn’t written it?—but bringing in sociological criticism was a challenge to credulity. Just then, Bernie Mohler passed by on his way to the patio and said, “Nice job on SHEA STADIUM PARKING, Roland.”
“What did you have to do with Shea Stadium parking?” asked Marlene.
“That’s it,” said Magruder. “SHEA STADIUM PARKING. It’s on the expressway. Do you like it?”
Before Marlene could answer, a blond girl joined them and asked, “Was that your THIS IS WATER MILL—SLOW DOWN AND ENJOY IT I saw on Highway 27, Roland?”
Magruder frowned. “I’m not going to get involved in that cutesy stuff just to satisfy the Chamber of Commerce types,” he said. “I told the town board that SLOW DOWN says it all, and they could take it or leave it.”
“I thought your NO PARKING ANY TIME said it all,” remarked a tall young man with a neat beard. “I’ve heard a lot of people say so.”
“Thanks very much,” Magruder said, looking down at the floor modestly.
“Oh, did you do that?” Marlene found herself asking.
“It wasn’t much,” said Magruder, still looking at the floor.
“You don’t happen to know who did the big NO sign at Coney Island?” Marlene asked. “The one that has one NO in huge letters and then lists all the things you can’t do in smaller letters next to it?” Marlene realized she had always been interested in the big NO sign.
“I introduced the Big No concept at the city parks several years ago,” said Magruder. “Some people say it’s a remarkable insight into modern American urban life, but I think that kind of talk makes too big a thing of it.”
“Oh, I don’t,” said Marlene. “I think it’s a marvelous expression of the negativism of our situation.”
“Well, that’s enough talking about me,” said Magruder. “Can I get you another drink?”
“I’m really tired of this party anyway,” said Marlene.
“I’ll drive you home,” said Magruder. “We can cruise by a KEEP RIGHT EXCEPT TO PASS sign, if you like. It’s on the highway just in front of my beach house.”
“Well, okay,” said Marlene, “but no stopping.”
“I wrote that,” Magruder said, and they walked out the door together.
1965
Nerds, Dorks, and Weenies
The reason so many Hollywood movies are made about nerds in high school who triumph in some improbable way over the jocks is this: Nearly everybody who makes movies in Hollywood was himself a nerd in high school.
They weren’t called that, of course. The word changes all the time. But they know who they are. So do I. I keep track of these things. I even keep track of the current word for “nerd.” I’m that sort of person.
I wouldn’t ordinarily refer to anyone as a nerd myself, of course. I prefer the term “dork.” It means the same thing, and to me it has always sounded worse. I think there’s a special ring to the phrase “What a dork!” I’m flexible, though. I’ll use any word, as long as it has a dorky sound to it. In fact, “dork” wasn’t the word we used when I was in college. Our word was “weenie.” Now that I think of it, “What a weenie!” has a nice ring to it, too, but that may just be nostalgia on my part.
A few years ago, I was told that the new word for weenie was “dweeb,” as in “he’s a total dweeb.” Apparently, a total dweeb is the only kind of dweeb you can be. There’s no dweeb spectrum. You can’t be “just a little bit dweebish” any more than you can be “a tad dorky.” In these matters, it’s ordinarily all or nothing. Although I have to say that once, many years ago, I did hear someone described as having “weenielike tendencies.”
Last summer, I went to England to see what they were calling nerds these days over there. That’s not what I told the immigration officer when he asked the purpose of my visit, of course. I said, “Tourism.”
My main consultant was a young man I’ll call Danny Jowell. When I asked Danny what the English called a nerd, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. He told me that an English nerd is a wally.
I was stunned. Wally is a perfectly respectable first name. Then I decided that it just shows you how strange the English are: If they were going to use a word that’s precisely the same as a first name, they have plenty of names over there that sound more nerdlike than Wally. Nigel, for instance. In fact, I rather like “nigel” as the word for nerd. It trips off the tongue: What a nigel!
Meanwhile, I’ve tried out “wally” over here, and everyone seems to think it sounds pretty dumb. Of course, the people I went to college with think anything but “weenie” sounds dumb. They’re kind of set in their ways. In the early seventies, I revisited the campus, and naturally I was interested in what the new word for “weenie” was. I knew it was a period of uncharacteristic tolerance among undergraduates, so I expected them to use whatever word it was in a tolerant way, as in “I ran into a rather interesting dweeb today.” What I found instead was that they had become so tolerant they didn’t have a word for “weenie.”
When I returned from my visit, the first question I was asked by a classmate of mine was, “What’s their word for ‘weenie’?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “They don’t seem to have a word for ‘weenie.’ ”
“In that case,” he said. “They’re all weenies.”
1990
Holistic Heuristics
I’ve decided to skip “holistic.” I don’t know what it means, and I don’t want to know. That may seen extreme, but I followed the same policy toward “gestalt” and the twist, and lived to tell the tale.
“Aren’t you even curious about what it means?” my wife, Alice, the family intellectual, asked me one day.
“No, I think I’ll just give it a skip,” I said. “Thanks, anyway.”
Alice had just finished comparing the East and West Coast definitions of “holistic” with a friend of ours who was visiting from California. Our friend—I’ll call him Tab, although his name is, in fact, Bernard—had mentioned meeting the woman he now lives with in a hot tub that belonged to someone who practiced holistic psychology. (Now that I think of it, Tab may have said that the host practiced organic orthodontia; I only remember that it was one of the healing arts.) I should probably explain that a hot tub is a huge wooden vat in someone’s backyard—back where the barbecue set used to be a long time ago. In California, I gathered from Tab, people who are only casually acquainted take off all of their clothes, climb into a hot tub together, and make up new words.
“How about ‘heuristics’?” Alice asked.
“Is that the same word?” I said, thinking she might have hit me with a Boston pronunciation, just for laughs.
“Different word,” Alice said. “But also very big these days.”
“I think I’ll give that one a skip, too,” I said. “Fair’s fair.”
I’m quick to acknowledge that, through no efforts of my own, I’m in a better position than most citizens to be cavalier about these matters. Having a family intellectual available, I can always arrange to have words like “holistic” or “heuris
tics” translated if it should prove absolutely necessary—if they turn up on a road sign, for instance, or on a menu or on a visa application.
I should make it clear that I have no objection to new words. I am, for instance, a regular user of the word “yucky”—which, as far as I can tell, was invented out of whole cloth by Oscar the Grouch. I have even invented a new word myself now and then—on long evenings, when there’s nothing much on the tube. I was particularly proud of finding a new word to replace awkward phrases like “the woman he now lives with”—“CeeCee” was my word, from the old newsmagazine euphemism “constant companion”—but then Alice told me that “CeeCee” sounded like a breath mint.
What I have a resistance to is not new words but words that come into a vogue that may not last as long as the one for the twist—disappearing from the vocabulary of the sophisticates just about the time that a slow reactor like me has learned the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast definitions. I realize that passing up words like “holistic” may strike some people as laziness or even philistinism, but I have always liked to think of it as a sort of negative act of character. The speed of trends being what it is these days, after all, about the only way a citizen can exhibit an independent spirit is to remain totally inert.
When I’m trying to impress Alice, for instance, I remind her that I have resolutely ignored drinking fashions for twenty-five years, steadily knocking back Scotch whisky the entire time. They turned to wine; I drank Scotch. They smoked pot; I drank Scotch. They ordered Perrier water; I drank Scotch. They snorted cocaine while naked in a hot tub; I drank Scotch. I like to think that late on some Saturday nights Alice can point to me—slumped in the corner, sodden with Scotch—and say, “There sits a man of principle.”
1978
I Say!
According to The New York Times, a survey taken recently in Western Europe indicates that Europeans don’t much like the English. No news there. The organization responsible for the survey—the European Economic Community—says that the hostility toward Great Britain is the result of a dispute now going on over the EEC’s spending practices and agricultural program, but I don’t think that’s it at all. I think that Europeans are hostile toward the English because the English have some irritating habits—the habit, for instance, of ending sentences with questions that sound like reprimands. You say it’s difficult for you to tell because you haven’t read the survey? Well, you’ll have to read it then, won’t you. See how snotty that sounds? It sounds as if the person who said it expects you to say, “Well, yes, I suppose I will have to read it, and it was terribly stupid of me not to have realized that before.” Think how snotty it would sound in an English accent. Think how snotty it would sound to a Frenchman whose understanding of English may be imperfect and who might have thought that the Englishman was saying, “Quit standing on my foot—would you?” It sounds snotty, but the English actually don’t mean anything by it. They don’t know any other way to talk.
Why do the English talk so funny? For one thing, they’re all hard of hearing. All Englishmen are hard of hearing. That’s why they end a lot of sentences with questions—just to check and make sure the other fellow heard what they were saying. (When you think about it that way, it’s not snotty; it’s actually rather thoughtful.) That’s why they’re always saying “I say!” It gives the other fellow a warning that they’re about to say something, and then he knows to tune in. This used to be a secret—that all Englishmen are hard of hearing. All the English knew, of course, but they wouldn’t let it out to foreigners. I’m the one who found out about it. I found out watching Harold Pinter plays.
The people in Harold Pinter plays are very hard of hearing. That is what professors of drama mean, I suppose, when they talk about how a dramatist has a heightened sense of reality: He takes people who are just hard of hearing and he makes them very hard of hearing. People in Pinter plays are always repeating themselves because the other character didn’t hear them the first time:
“Hello.”
“What?”
“Hello.”
“I thought you said goodbye.”
“No. Hello.”
“What?”
“Goodbye.”
Even after I uncovered the secret of Harold Pinter, I tried to keep it to myself. I had learned my lesson several years before, when I revealed that the Italian movies everybody considered so profound would seem silly to anyone who understood Italian. I wasn’t claiming that I understood Italian; in fact, Italian often sounds to me as if the speaker is telling a lot of other people to quit standing on his foot. I was just saying that Americans who went to see an Italian movie that had been called profound concentrated hard on getting the subtitles read before the scene changed, figured that a lot of nuances must have been lost in reducing great hunks of dialogue into one line of type, and didn’t stop to consider the possibility that the movie was simply silly. Then a couple of the profound Italian directors made their first movies in English, and all the critics said the movies were silly. I thought the critics would then realize that all the movies they had said were profound would also have seemed silly if only they had understood the dialogue, but instead they said that even a profound director can’t hit every time at bat. I also thought a lot of people would come up to me and apologize for having called me a philistine and a hopeless lout, but nobody did. So when people asked what I thought of Harold Pinter plays—even after I knew the secret—I just said, “Very English. His plays are very English.”
Of course, the dispute at the headquarters of the European Economic Community must have been exacerbated by the special way that people who go into the British diplomatic service talk—particularly their habit of putting together packages of adverbs and adjectives that don’t match, like “perfectly awful” and “frightfully nice.” I know they don’t mean anything by it, but it can’t be much fun to listen to all the time. The French representative to the EEC must get the feeling that he’s constantly being served a chocolate parfait with béarnaise sauce.
“I say!” the representative of the United Kingdom says, although the warning is quite unnecessary, since the French hear better than anyone (that’s why they talk so fast).
“Please don’t,” the French representative says. “At least not so soon before lunch.”
At this point, I assume, the Italian representative has the wit to speak only in subtitles.
It can’t help that what the English want to discuss in the EEC is the agricultural program. While the French or Belgian or Italian representative is politely negotiating an agreement for exporting vegetables to the United Kingdom, he is secretly seething with the knowledge that the English are going to overcook them. This must be the sort of thing diplomats are referring to when they talk about hidden agendas. The French representative is supposedly talking in purely economic terms about the exportation of asparagus, but the memory of what the British had done to a French asparagus he once encountered in Brighton is causing him to negotiate through clenched teeth. The British representative sails along without noticing.
“I say! That would be terribly good,” he says, as the agreement is reached.
“But is it the green asparagus or the white asparagus that you want, monsieur?” the French representative says.
“Well, that’s up to you,” the Englishman says. “Isn’t it.”
1984
Pardon My French
According to the newspapers, people in France are worried that the French language may be losing out to English. I’m not worried about that at all. As it happens, I don’t speak the French language. So as far as I’m concerned, the faster the French language loses out to English the better. It doesn’t even have to be very good English that French loses out to. I look forward to the day when I get in a Paris taxi and the taxi driver says to me, “To where does it be that we’re coming to, buster?”
I would tell him to take me to the Pasteur Institute, which recently horrified even the president of
France by changing the names of its scientific journals from French to English. Once I got there, I would say, in the manner of a British headmaster congratulating the winning rugby team, “Good on you, Pasteur Institute! Good on you!” Then I would tell them, in American, “Atta way to chuck, Pasteur Institute, baby. You’re the kid, Pasteur Institute.” Then I would give everyone at the Pasteur Institute a high five—what used to be called an haute cinq over there before the French language started losing out to English.
Then I would get back in my cab and go to the nearest bar, where I would say, in my best English, “Gimme a beer, mac, and step on it.” When the bartender answered, in English, I would refrain from criticizing his accent, despite all the times that French taxi drivers pretended not to understand my directions in the days when the French still spoke French. I’m above that sort of thing, although just barely.
Understand my directions? Yes, I’ll admit it: I use a little French whenever I’m over there. Not verbs. I don’t do verbs. I used to do a few. In fact, I knew some pretty complicated verbs—what I believe the French intellectuals call Sunday-go-to-meeting verbs. For instance, if I wanted to know where the beach was, which I often did, I could say “Ou se trouve la plage?”—which, literally translated, is “Where does it find itself the beach?” But that seemed silly to me. A beach knows where it is.
The head of the Pasteur Institute said that the institute simply had to face up to the fact that the international language of science is now English. He said that in 1988 the institute received 249 manuscripts, half of them from French-speaking countries, and only 6 percent were written in French. Good. I think if we really work on it, we might be able to get that down to about 2 percent.
I suppose you could argue even then that an absence of French content is no argument for changing the name of a scholarly journal. Think of all the restaurants in the United States that have French names even though the only thing French about them is the Kraft’s French dressing they use at the salad bar. I suppose you could argue that, but I’m not about to, because I’m all for this decision. In fact, I feel like dropping into the Pasteur Institute right now and saying, in English, “Stick to your guns, Pasteur Institute.”
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 24