Book Review: Do You Speak American?

Do You Speak American?
By Robert MacNeil and William Cran
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 231 pages, $23.95

For years now, journalist Robert MacNeil has been tracking idiomatic American English as a hunter stalks its prey. He knows he will never actually bag a trophy because our language is in constant motion and won't stand still long enough to be captured. But the hunt itself is tremendously fun. Just when MacNeil may think he has modern American English in his sights, the language takes on aspects of Cajun, Spanglish, Surfer Dude, Valley Girl, hip-hop, Instant Messaging or teckie and it changes its spots, morphing into a different creature completely. Unlike many of his colleagues, such as William Safire and Edwin Newman to name a couple, MacNeil refrains from being judgmental about the evolution and instead observes it as a naturally organic process.

In the 1980s, MacNeil hosted a Public Broadcasting Station television series in collaboration with the BBC called The Story of English. A companion book of the same titled co-authored with William Cran accompanied that series. Realizing it was time to revisit the language jungle, he recently embarked upon another PBS broadcast, this time provocatively titled Do You Speak American? The companion book of the new broadcast, also co-authored with Cran, has now been published. This concise, straightforward book is in many ways better than the broadcast.

The filmed version of MacNeil traveling across the United States from east to west in search of modern English usage suffered from too many empty sequences of him driving one rental vehicle after another through county after county, interstate after interstate. Watching the program, we realize we are not so much interested in how MacNeil got to his destination as we are hungry to know what he learned once he got there. Reading the book version, we are not subjected to so much filler and we get to the meat faster.

It is a fair assessment, and not just California prejudice, to say that the spice of the study gets added when MacNeil arrives in the Golden State. A discussion of why Bostonians don't pronounce their "r"s (as in, "Pahk ya cah ova thea") is bland in comparison to the cauldron of invented words and new inflections that are constantly boiling over in California, especially Southern California. In the 1980s, MacNeil first encountered Malibu's own Surf Punks, a local band and social phenomenon, and he documented their litany of vocabulary which sprouted words like tubular, rad, dude, totally and buff. Returning to "Surf City" for Do You Speak American, MacNeil discovered that such words have now transcended surf culture and have been appropriated in broader modern usage.

Southern California proves to be a hot house for growing euphemisms and synonyms, as MacNeil learns in his interview with Amy Heckerling, the writer-director of the seminal film Clueless. Heckerling easily provides about twenty-five alternative words meaning "good" (i.e., wicked, rocks, sweet) and a different but equally prolific list of alternatives for "bad" (i.e., blows, bites, wack). This doesn't begin to touch the loads of meaning behind such sparse phrases as "not even," "as if" and "ohmygod."

MacNeil concludes, "We are endlessly creative, and that innovation in all fields constantly generates fresh language, considered slang or jargon when new, but soon made respectable or it disappears." He does not foresee a standardization of American English. "Despite the amazing uniformity of our national tastes in clothing, fast-food chains, movies, and television," he writes, "we preserve our regional flavor, and so does language."