Once upon a time, still the best way to start a story, a few journalism students were discussing the power of words. It was a graduate class, which made the talk especially serious, or deep, or compelling. Or maybe the right word is gazing, as in navel.
The discussion ground its way toward a special category of words: Bad.
As is bad words you wouldn't want your mother to hear. Or your children to utter. Except for one student, a woman with a boy child. Didn't bother her, she said, if the boy child were to utter *&%$, or !@#$, or whatever else Sgt. Snorkel was saying to Beetle Bailey in the funny papers.
After all, the journalism graduate student mother said, "they're only words."
O.M.G. Girlfriend. Only words? How can a journalist, whose job it is to convey the world as it really is by using words, be so flippant about, of all things, words?
As Ricky said to Lucy: You got some splainin' to do.
She didn't. Neither did she wind up in journalism. Maybe something else, something like hospital administration, where important words tend toward paradigm. If she did wind up in journalism, no doubt it was as a stuffed shirt who described her newspaper as a product.
As if a newspaper were a laundry detergent rather than a daily snapshot, explanation and celebration of the human condition.
Such an attitude, the view that a newspaper is a product, is one that can only be described as offensive and inappropriate. Both of which are, frankly, offensive and inappropriate when describing any human interaction or activity.
Such is the state of our American language. We've got either one million or 240,000 words, or somewhere in between, depending on the source or how words are counted. Consider obstreperous. That's one word, an adjective. Are the adverb obstreperously and the noun obstreperousness words of their own, or mere derivatives?
With all these useful and specific words, the vaguely catch-all offensive and inappropriate have risen to the top of the heap in our public conversation. Rather than call a spade a spade, call it offensive or inappropriate.
Not necessarily wrong, or misguided, or ill-advised, or harmful. And certainly not a menace to society. Now those seen as offensive and inappropriate are cast into hell's seventh level of public discourse, a level that's getting mighty crowded.
Lucky us, we've still got commerce, the language of which is sunny and optimistic, a mixture of blarney, energy and a friendly wink.
Like New and Improved! Yesterday our ketchup was, well, ketchup. Today it's New and Improved! Better flavor. Richer color. Comes out of the bottle as smooth as a baby's bottom.
Yes, folks, yesterday's dingy whites are a thing of the past. Our detergent is New and Improved! As are our lives, with sheets that veritably glow in the dark.
Then there's Under New Management! Never mind who ran this greasy spoon before. That botulism outbreak? History. Fuggedaboutit. This place is now Under New Management! and the future is limitless. Let the striving begin.
One more, if you please. Folks looking for a new car might come across a certain salesman in this town who both employs and exemplifies a phrase that is quintessentially and absolutely American.
We make the magic!
This salesman--let's say he's not from around here. More like from around the Middle East. Or North Africa. Somewhere a long way from around here. No doubt he has a story.
That story's current chapter is at a car dealership, a business that's as American as a pickup truck, of which there were at least two dozen lined up in a gleaming row. Pick one, he said, and never mind the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price, or that head-spinning figure on the window.
We make the magic!
He's in the right place, this immigrant car salesman, this America, where all things are possible, and we've got the words to make the magic.
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Frank Fellone is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's deputy editor.
Editorial on 03/09/2015