The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters Read online

  And, lexicographically speaking, we would be right, for every word of over two syllables used in that last sentence first entered the English language in 1952, the year I was born. You might have had some of those thoughts in 1951 or earlier, but you would not, apparently, have been able to express them in precisely those terms. The words that were to define “modern life” for my generation arrived on the scene just as we did.

  Or so says my OED on CD-ROM, a toy I acquired mainly to pursue this kind of tantalizing if pointless personal-cum-sociological inquiry. Of course, the game requires that you place firm faith in the OED’s dating procedures, and that’s not always easy to do when you can almost remember using the word before they found it in print. Still, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and agree to accept the OED’s 1952 dates as readily as you do those for, say, 1592, you can draw some amazing conclusions about the extent to which language not only reflects but actually forecasts our daily existence.

  I use the plural possessive “our” advisedly, for nothing makes you more aware of your inclusion in a cultural generation than looking at your birth-year words in this way. (Or at least my birth-year words: I tried the experiment for several friends born in the 1940s and 1960s, and the results weren’t nearly as interesting.) What I had thought was personal experience, peculiar to me, turns out to have belonged to my entire age bracket. We did not just employ our birthright words, on an individual basis—we became them, as a group.

  A related notion struck me a few years back when I attended a design and architecture show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Billed as an exhibit about the 1950s, the show contained a disproportionate number of items I had associated with my particular family life. In one corner were the molded plywood Charles Eames chairs from our living room; in another the brightly hued formica countertops from our kitchen. They even had a scale model of an Eichler house, complete with back patio and sliding glass doors. I had thought I was from a very unusual background, but there at the Whitney I found my childhood writ large, and it turned out to be all of America’s.

  The 1952 words listed by the OED rang a similar note of uncanny familiarity. They were the linguistic architecture, you might say, surrounding the early years of everyone my age. But in this case the situation was even stranger. It was as if the house we were collectively to occupy had been built at the time of our birth and had waited—completely furnished, not a speck of dust in sight, every appliance fully operational—for us to move in years later, as we grew toward adulthood. Who would have guessed, for example, that the word hallucinogenic entered the language as early as 1952? The Summer of Love, after all, didn’t take place until 1967. It’s odd to think that all those Day-Glo-colored, acid-tripinspired posters, all those strobe-lighted happenings and Timothy-Leary-esque pronouncements, were gathered there in embryo, like wishes breathed over our collective cradle, waiting until we were old enough to take advantage of them.

  Strange, too, that hallucinogenic should appear in the dictionary the same year as beat generation, the about-to-be-new already prepared to take over from the not-yet-old; or, in a similar vein, that desegregate should arise alongside apolitical, or Ms. come hand-in-hand with wolfwhistle. Did anyone, in 1952, even imagine asking to be called Ms. instead of Mrs. or Miss? And yet there it is, drawn from a publication called The Simple Letter put out by the National Office Management Association in Philadelphia. “Use abbreviation Ms. for all women addressees,” the Letter proposes with wide-eyed if restrained enthusiasm. “This modern style solves an age-old problem.” Eventually, maybe. But that was the last we were to hear of this solution until about 1970, when the OED locates it again in, of all places, the Daily Telegraph.

  I have to say that the OED’s choice of sources for its newly evolving words sometimes verges on the idiosyncratic, if not the downright eccentric. The Economist, for instance, would seem from the number of its citations to be on the cutting edge of lexical adventurousness. We also get early quotations from the Guardian, the New York Times, and the venerable London Times—periodicals not usually known for their instant investment in neologisms. On the other hand, the OED readily acknowledges that the really new words often come from poets, novelists, and essayists. In 1952, Ernest Hemingway was the first to weigh in with rubberiness, Mary McCarthy provided apolitical, Norman Mailer came up with porno (natch), the film critic Stanley Kauffmann originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as “a resonant noise as of a tennis racket striking a ball” and categorizes, with hilarious understatement, as “rare”). In general, 1952 was a good year for onomatopoeia: in addition to the Betjeman noise, it gave us boing, clonk, whomp, and thunk (this last only in the sense of “a sound of an impact, either dull or plangent”; in its earlier non-onomatopoetic sense, as the past tense or noun form of the verb think, it had already been used by James Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake).

  But not all the words that entered our dictionary for the first time in 1952 were new to the world. Some were just persistent border-crossers. Among these were tapenade (which, like hallucinogenic, had to wait decades to escape from the specialist manuals into more general menu-driven use), wok (whose earliest English incarnation was spelled wock), and don (in the Italian sense of a Mafia leader). I originally thought scuba must belong in this company (its linguistic texture, not to mention its subject matter, struck me as distinctively Hawaiian, or perhaps Mediterranean), but this now-common noun turns out to have started life as an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Interpol too is an abbreviation (for International Criminal Police Commission), and why it took from its founding in 1923 to the early 1950s to get itself into the OED is one of those mysteries that its own agents are perhaps best qualified to solve. It is, for me, one of several words in this set that evoke with particular intensity the America of my youth—the America of Alfred Hitchcock thrills and Joseph McCarthy terrors, of tumble-driers, split-level homes, and car or bicycle decals.

  Like decal, which first appeared in a journal called Electronic Engineering, a number of the era’s trademark phrases took a while to emerge from the ghetto of technical obscurity. Xerox literally began as a trademark (listed by the U.S. Patent Office in 1952), and so did Posturepedic, but in the 1960s both were showing up regularly in newspaper ads and articles; and by 1977, when the Posturepedic mattress slipped casually into literature (in Cyra McFadden’s The Serial, a send-up of Marin County’s sybarites), the xerox copy had become so ubiquitous as to lose, at least in daily usage, its proprietary capital. Some terms, however, never made it past that early stage. Vinylon, for instance, failed to get beyond the pages of the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology and the Textile Research Journal, though its inventors obviously hoped it would rival its two parents, vinyl and nylon, as a household word. Stuccadore, while it seems an efficient way to classify workers in stucco, hasn’t been heard from since 1978. The one I’m sorriest to have lost is peepiecreepie, which I think perfectly describes the sad, appealing, murderous voyeur in Michael Powell’s famous thriller, Peeping Tom, though the OED instead defines it as “a portable television camera used for close shots on location.”

  Television was a new phenomenon in 1952, and computers were barely visible on the horizon. Yet a number of the words we have come to associate with these machines—downtime, out of series, correlational, and others of that ilk—were ready and waiting to be used. Of these, the most interesting is scheduler, which now has both a television meaning (a recent New York Times article referred to network schedulers as the “stuntmen” of the industry, because they pull off so many hair-raising tricks in their efforts to defeat rival programming) and a computer meaning (the OED’s second definition is “a machine, esp. a computer, that can arrange a number of planned activities in the order in which they should take place”). What strikes me as significant about this noun is the way it finally attributes agency to what had been view
ed since the mid-nineteenth century as a passively experienced condition. Though the word schedule (meaning something written on paper) had been around for centuries, its time-table sense didn’t arise until shortly after the development of passenger trains, and that’s when the verb came into being as well. Beginning with its first appearance in 1862, virtually all the examples cited by the OED put the verb in its passive form: trains, trials, and tennis matches are all scheduled by undesignated, mysterious agents, and even an archbishop who “is scheduled to speak at the Academy of Music” seems to have no contact with the Higher Powers that do the scheduling. Only with the computer age do we discover the thing that actually does the scheduling; and only when this action has been assigned to machines can we, in due course, also attribute it to people.

  If 1952 marked an era of regimentation (off-limits is another new phrase from that year), it also had its frivolous side. Bernard Malamud gave us the adjective nyloned to describe a sexy woman’s stocking-clad legs. People under thirteen years of age went from being children to being subteens, with their own consumer clout and their own dating patterns. Partyness came in as a noun—but wait, no, that’s another trend entirely, for partyness was apparently a direct transliteration from Lenin’s partiinost, referring to a Marxist sense of allegiance to the Party. This was no doubt the kind of language Mr. Milton A. Smith was trying to defeat when, in his capacity as assistant general counsel for the American Chamber of Commerce, he coined the word bafflegab to describe confusing official jargon. Unfortunately for Mr. Smith, his word succumbed to its own disease, leaving the perfectly good gobbledygook (introduced a few years earlier, in 1944) to do its work.

  Some of my birthright words seem impossible to have done without for the first half of the twentieth century. How is it that automate only emerged in 1952, when machines had already been doing human labor for decades if not centuries? And how did we manage to do without tee-off, given that golfing and its verb to tee had been around since the eighteenth century? Why did rubberiness have to wait for Hemingway, when Galsworthy came up with rubbery in 1907 and rubber itself, as a shortened form of the plant product India-rubber, dates back to 1855? If gabby has been an adjective since 1719, and gab a noun since 1300, why did we need Stanley Kauffmann to give us gabbiness?

  Other words, though, I wish we had done without. Even before checking the citations, I got chills when I read the word megaton. (My chills, however, can’t always be trusted: I also got them from the word pre-nuclear, but that turns out to be a grammatical term, with no reference whatsoever to bombs.) Provirus, with its antiphonal pre-echo of the AIDS-connected retrovirus, also made me nervous. But the word that, when I looked it up, yielded the deepest and most unexpected melancholy was the odd little word hoochie. At first I assumed it was another onomatopoetic sound, or else (in concert with coochie, perhaps) part of a sweetly dated phrase, like the charming peepie-creepie. But when I read the definition, I discovered it was military slang for an insubstantial or temporary shelter or dwelling, probably of Asian origin: in other words, a hootch. That word I recognized. So I was no longer surprised—only saddened, appalled, ashamed even after all these years—when I got to the 1969 citation from Time magazine: “Calley’s men in less than 20 minutes ignited ‘hootches’ and chased all the villagers … into groups, and shot everyone.” That too is part of my generation’s collective vocabulary.

  MR. JONES

  n the Palo Alto of my childhood, all the public schools were named after California Indian tribes or educational administrators from Stanford. I went to Ohlones Elementary School, Ray Lyman Wilbur Junior High School, and Cubberley (I don’t remember his first two names) Senior High School. Anyone from Palo Alto could have told you this probably meant my father worked in the electronics industry— that’s the part of town those schools encompassed—and indeed he did, though he happened to commute to San Jose rather than working locally at Philco or Varian or one of the other forerunners of what eventually became Silicon Valley. If I had gone instead to Terman and Gunn, the probabilities would have favored my being a Stanford professor’s child; at Jordan and “Paly,” I would most likely have come from an old Palo Alto professional family. Since my mother and sister and I stayed on in the same house after my parents split up, I was able, through somewhat devious means, to continue blending in with my surroundings. That is, to questions about what my father did for a living I could give a credible and appropriate answer (“He works for IBM”), even though he was no longer actually present.

  At the time, our public school district was reputed to be one of the best in the country (Bethesda, Maryland, I recall, was another). From the point of view of those who keep such statistics, this meant that we got higher-than-average test scores, learned New Math before the rest of the nation, and so on. But to me, both then and in retrospect, it meant that I had a series of memorable, unconventional teachers.

  Mr. Schneider, for instance, was my math teacher in seventh and eighth grades. Six foot six and bulky of build, with horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, he taught mathematics with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader and the force of a heavy-equipment operator. Once, I remember, he told us that the quadratic equation had saved his life. “When I went into the Air Force, I had to take an exam,” he said. “And because I could remember the quadratic equation, I got most of the answers in the math section right. And because of that, I ended up a navigator instead of a tail-gunner. And that’s why I’m here to tell the tale.” I don’t remember what war Mr. Schneider was in—it must have been the Korean—but I still remember (a + b) (a + b) = a2 + 2ab + b2. The chances of my ever having to qualify for a navigator’s position have always been rather remote, and they grow more so as I grow older, but Mr. Schneider succeeded in putting the fear of God into me.

  In high school there was Mr. Chanteloupe, the apple-cheeked history teacher who was notable mainly for his Catholicism (most teachers didn’t admit to a religion) and for his open support of the war in Vietnam. And there was Mr. Jadwin, the Montgomery Clift lookalike who taught sophomore and junior English, supervised the literary magazine, and labored under the crushes of all the sensitive girls. My own favorite was Mr. Gamez, a Spanish teacher who had been born in California—his grandmother, he told us, had been born in California—but who nonetheless sported a heavy Mexican accent. He was a good Spanish teacher (a number of us did well enough on our Spanish exams to test out of college language requirements), but mainly he was a character. If we misbehaved in class, he would glare down on us—lifting up on tiptoe to clear his five-foot-two frame over the podium—and say, “You can only get away with this because you’re young, with fresh skins and bright eyes and shiny hair. If you were little old ladies, no one would let you behave this way.” (Advanced Spanish, for some reason, consisted entirely of girls, though the school as a whole was evenly coed.) On boring days he would get us through the hour by performing flamenco dances at the front of the classroom; he had, he implied, been a flamenco dancer at one time. Once he took a group of us into San Francisco by train for an evening of Basque food and flamenco dancing. “Look!” he said excitedly as we came out onto the streets of North Beach at 10:30 P.M. “Lights! People! Real city life!” This was in marked contrast to downtown Palo Alto, which closed up at about 8:00, and near which Mr. Gamez had a two-room apartment, decorated completely in hot pink, on the upper floor of a condemned building. He had almost no expenses—he took the bus instead of owning a car, a virtually unheard-of economy among the employed in Palo Alto—and invested all his extra income in Mexican real estate.

  For some reason I have no fond memories of secondary-school female teachers. Whether this is due to the selection process of the Palo Alto school system, or to that of my own memory, I can’t say. But after the maternal warmth of my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Robinson, there is only a bleak expanse inhabited by the likes of Mrs. Sullivan, a music, French, and self-proclaimed elocution teacher whose iron-gray pompadour formed a stern cliff face abutting her forehead:
she made us memorize John Masefield’s “I Must Go Down to the Seas Again,” taught us saccharine songs from The Sound of Music, and had a habit of gripping you so hard by the shoulder that her talons seemed to leave permanent marks. Or Mrs. French, who incompetently taught us “homemaking,” boasted of her hand-sewn Hong Kong buttonholes, and insisted that Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy were only beautiful through the proper application of makeup and hairgrooming, while Elizabeth Taylor, though naturally beautiful, suffered from insuperable flaws of character. Or Mrs. McGilvray, who dragged us through an entire year of Western Civilization classes by reading aloud for the whole class period from Will and Ariel Durant, so that if you knew older students who’d taken the course the year before, or even five years before, you could just borrow their notes and daydream. Or the English teacher—her name is lost deep in my subconscious, and even her face has now faded away—who one day snatched me out of a group walking down the slick “redtop” corridor of Wilbur Junior High, pinned me against the green stucco walls, and hissed, “Why do you hate me? Tell me, why do you?” Or Miss Hurst, whose dislike of me and of calculus was so severe that, though I did well in high school math contests (even scoring higher on one exam than Larry Kells, the nasalvoiced school genius), I never took another math course after hers. Or … but why go on? We’ve all had bad teachers. It’s one of the expected, essential elements of education, as I tried to tell myself (with no consoling effect) when my eleven-year-old son ran up against one of these petty monsters a couple of years ago.