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“Civil Tongues"
Opening Convocation
The College of Wooster
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
On this earth, we speak in many tongues, over 6800 at last count. This
makes life always interesting and often challenging. To
address both the challenge and the interest, Wooster like many
colleges sets a foreign language requirement for graduation. The
ability to speak in at least two of these 6800 tongues would not
seem to be too much to ask of a modern college graduate.
Indeed, as emphasized by New York Times columnist Tom
Friedman in his best-selling book, The World is Flat, language
is an essential part of national identity, of course the tool
of the trade in professional communication; and those who can
speak many tongues exemplify the new category of adaptable world
citizens, the “versatilists” he calls them, more able
than the old generalists or specialists to be what he calls “human
Swiss Army knives.” He believes that openness to change,
so critical for success in the modern world, is not at all unrelated
to willingness to learn new languages.
The Biblical explanation for our many tongues comes right up
front, in the Book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel is said
to be the precipitating factor. As the story goes, God became
offended by the hubris of the Babylonians in their attempt to
build a tower that reached into the heavens, this effort presumably
abetted by their being a people united in one community and, in
particular, speaking in only one tongue. The offense was
so great that God immediately “confounded their tongues,” by
scattering the people across many lands and causing them to speak
in different languages.
Now, it is not an unreasonable proposition that the verb babble,
referring to the act of speaking incoherently or uttering meaningless
words and inarticulate sounds, might have been derived from the
name of this offending tower. However, the Oxford English
Dictionary states flatly that no such direct connection can be
traced. So much for the first insightful observation that
I had hoped to make this morning. And so much also for Biblical
citations. This morning’s talk will instead take up
other concerns about tongues, and about distinctions among them. My
interest this morning is to talk with you about civil tongues,
and about tongues that are not so civil.
What might one mean by the phrase, civil tongue? By tongue we shall
mean the speech or language of a people, and the manners and modes
of spoken and written expression. Although we might have
fun with such metaphors as “hold your tongue!” and “bite
your tongue!” we shall not yield to this temptation. The
word civil poses a bit more of a complication. Among
the possibilities here are, first, “of or pertaining to
citizens living together in a community in their ordinary capacity,
as opposed to any military capacity, or religious capacity, or
criminal capacity,” and second, civil in the terms
of polite, courteous, at least not rude. There are more
possibilities, and there are various combinations that may prove
useful for us to consider in our little excursion this morning. Let
us see.
One approach to civil tongues comes through the work of David
Shields, Professor of Southern Letters in the Departments of English
and History at the University of South Carolina, and in particular
his 1997 book, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British
America. Somewhat in the vein of Alexis deToqueville’s
belief that part of America’s genius has been the habit
of forming voluntary associations for all manner of public and
private purposes, Shields’s thesis is that a crucial factor
in America’s pre-national development in the eighteenth
century was what he calls “the great project of civility.” By
this he means the cultivation in many settings of discourse that
exemplified sociability, gentility, and politeness, along with
wit, humor, and correctness. How tempting it might be to
dismiss this as just the snobby practices of transplanted European
aristocrats, until one sees how much more there was to it. Shields
demonstrates how this discourse was critical to the development
of our republic; it consciously avoided the descent into mere “correctness” and “exclusivity” and
proved to be a means of building personal bonds across social
divides, a true bridge over distinctions of social class, a means
for the “horizontal integration” that strengthened
the fabric of society, in the spirit of a new and soon-to-be independent
country.
He demonstrates that these practices were not rigidly uniform
but varied as appropriate to a range of settings: taverns
and coffee-houses, particularly for the men; tea-houses, particularly
for the women; salons and dancing assemblies, for mixed groups;
and clubs of many sorts, notably in colleges. This was the “free
conversation that binds people in community.” And
while this discourse in part idealized the values of friendliness,
liberty, and mannerliness, thus serving personal and private purposes,
it also served the public purposes of creating platforms for political
criticism and for expressing concerns of conscience. These
groupings became “frames” for communal moral action,
seeds most likely, for example, for the much later abolitionist
societies and the elegant and powerful rhetoric they required.
For us, it is particularly interesting that in colleges of the
day, notably Harvard, such clubs split into two general types: those
of a more pious, religious, even self-righteous bent, and those
who sought polite intellectual discourse for its own sake. The
latter type came to be called fraternities.
From genteel and polite tongues, let us now turn to a second
perspective on civil tongues.
The well-known journalist, writer, and NBC correspondent and
anchorman Edwin Newman has long been known for his concern about
language, about our majority native tongue, English, and its use,
particularly its ill use, both in speaking and in writing. In
his first job at age 16, Newman was told by his boss to keep a “civil
tongue.” At the time, he took this to mean only “shut
up and be respectful,” but he later he came to understand
that it means much more than that, that politeness is “only
a part.” And thus, thirty years ago, in 1975, Newman published
a splendid little volume entitled A Civil Tongue. It
was actually a sequel to his 1974 book, Strictly Speaking: Will
America Be the Death of English?
In both of these books, Newman expresses a simple theme different
from Shields’s. On one hand, language can be natural,
clear, and genuine; precision in language can be delightful and,
when necessary, usefully and appropriately devastating. On the
other hand, Newman sees us as choked with banalities, clichŽs,
pomposities, and redundancies. We find ourselves submerged
in language “churned out to create the impression that something
complex and abstruse is taking place.” We find our
speaking and writing bogged down in jargon and puffed up with
false dignity. The danger, of course, is that the use of
language that is nonsense might well lead to the advocacy of,
and then the adoption of, ideas that are equally nonsensical.
Language is conduct, Newman says, and we ought to behave better. Despite
his concerns, he actually enjoys, as do I, savoring the variety
and indeed the humor of the best of the worst. Let us do
some savoring together.
We are, observes Newman, addicted to redundancies, simple as
they may be:
“The
crowd was shouting in mass unison,”
“The
incident was a unique one of a kind,”
“He
had an unexpected surprise,”
“It
was a fatal slaying.”
We are addicted to jargon, in many areas of endeavor. In
business, for example, a computer agency simply wanting to announce
new policy wrote its customers a letter that began,
“The purpose of this letter is to historize the philosophical
infrastructure [that] the É Company abides regarding applicant
referrals.”
In medicine, a doctor concerned about his relationships with
lawyers wrote,
“I too am concerned with the evolution of viable constructs
by which complex problems at the medical-legal interface can be
effectively resolved for social usefulness;”
and even the National Center for Disease Control, wanting to
report that an epidemic was passing, felt compelled to write that, “there
is a downward slope in the curve of occurrence.”
We are addicted to mixed metaphors, a circumstance perhaps reaching
its high point in politics:
“It is necessary to lay the foundation for whatever difficult
medicine the people will have to swallow;” John Lindsay,
New York mayor.
“This bill will send the ship of state down untrod paths;” V.P.
Henry Wallace.
We are becoming addicted to a quite absurd role reversal in the
cases of pronouns, an interchanging of the predicate nominative
and objective cases. Here’s an example of both in
one sentence. Rather than the correct version of someone
reporting an assault,
“It
was he who hit John and me with the stick,”
we are far too likely these days to hear instead,
“It
was him who hit John and I with the stick.” Ouch!
And we are addicted to puffery, pumped-up and overblown language
of many sorts, even in academic institutions:
In athletics: “He’s got real good quickness,
real good smartness, and real good throwingness; he has a real
strong arm velocity-wise.”
From a dean, turning down a faculty request: “Having
prioritized available funding, your request for staff-support
facilities cannot be actuated at present. Student throughput
indicators show marked declining motivational values in subsequent
periods in elective liberal arts choices.”
And finally, from a president, wanting to cut costs: “We
will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy
to pry improved budgetary prediction and control out of our fiscal
and administrative procedures.” Whew!
Here on the campus of The College of Wooster, we also speak in
many tongues. We may not speak in 6800, but we do speak
in enough to make our life both interesting and challenging. To
be sure, we speak in a decent number of foreign languages, representing
both our curricular intentions and the diversity of our national
origins. At Wooster, one can hear, in class, Arabic, Chinese,
English, French, German, Greek, Latin, Russian, and Spanish, and
outside, among others, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch,
Farsi, Flemish, Gaelic, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Malay, Nepali, Polish, Swahili, Tamil, Thai,
and Vietnamese.
But beyond the category of foreign tongues, we also hear at Wooster
tongues of other sorts, some more closely related to the interests
of David Shields and Edwin Newman. I will leave to my colleagues
in the departments of history and English the task of evaluating
further Shield’s arguments about gentility of discourse
in 18th century British America. I will leave
to my colleagues in the Writing Program, in the Writing Center,
and in many other departments the task of addressing Edwin Newman’s
concerns over civility in tongue. There will, alas, always
be sufficient redundancies, puffery, jargon, and mixed metaphors,
to keep us all busy.
But I cannot leave to my colleagues alone the matter of dealing
with that aspect of civil tongues that is at the heart of what
is fitting and appropriate for citizens in a community such as
this one. I will not abdicate the responsibility to speak
out against speech that insults or demeans this community as a
whole or anyone in it, speech that poisons our common efforts.
One year ago, just prior to the dedication of Bornhuetter Hall,
a group of studentsÑthen unknownÑchose to place some most unfortunate
forms of language, most uncivil language, on the dormitory walls. The
words and symbols ranged from indecipherable to distasteful to
truly offensive, racist, anti-Semitic.
It was natural and imperative for members of the community to
condemn these acts, and some did so in language that was itself
appropriately civil. But, as if the graffiti were not bad
enough, too much of the community discourse that ensued, in settings
both formal and informal, too often also turned out to be distasteful
and offensive, distinctly uncivil in its presuppositions about
who the perpetrators must have been and what should happen to
them: an uncivil rush to judgment accompanied by uncivil tongues. And
even after the perpetrators revealed their identities, and disciplinary
action was taken, although temperatures cooled a bit, some level
of incivility remained.
I believe that this community can and should be above all that. The
community should not have to endure uncivil words on walls or
uncivil tongues in meetings. This community holds an obligation
to itself to conduct itself at a higher level, and to speak at
a higher level, a truly civil level. By this, I certainly
both mean conduct that is polite and mannerly as David Shields
would recognize it, and speech that is natural, clear, and correct
in Newman’s sense. But I mean more than that. I
mean conduct and speech about which no one can have any regret
having been the generator or the receiver. These expectations
should be at the heart of the codes of integrity and responsibility
for which Wooster stands.
With the confidence that the members of this College community
will always strive to speak with civil tongues, the 136th year
of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.
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