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(More customer reviews)First off, let me say that McWhorter's The Power of Babel was one of the best books on language I have read. It is so dense with information presented in a readable, positive style, that I think I'll read it again.
Doing Our Own Thing seems to have been written by McWhorter's evil twin. He assures us near the beginning that this will not be a John Simon-type screed bemoaning the degradation of language in America. Then he goes on to bemoan the degradation of language in America. He manages to be just as pedantic as any language maven about the fact that "Billy and me went to the store" is NOT an ungrammatical sentence, mentioning the same example at regular intervals throughout the book.
Doing Our Own Thing seems like a collection of the author's pet peeves loosely connected to make up a book. McWhorter is concerned about the lack of memorable public speech today and the decline in quality of lyrics, especially in musical theater. He is also annoyed by baggy pants, poetry, and Democrats.
In decrying the decline of American speech today, he claims that no public figure can extemporaneously concoct complex sentences and thoughts. Everyone speaks like a regular guy, or worse, like someone a regular guy can feel superior to. But I can recall Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton giving speeches, that while not memorable in a William Jennings Bryan or even John F. Kennedy style, were complex, yet clear. Bill Clinton's speech at the memorial service for the two security guards who were killed at the House of Representatives was eloquent, for instance.
McWhorter mentions screenwriter David Mamet as someone who is in touch with real speech and can write dialogue that is both authentic and dramatic. This was a particular surprise to me, since I recently saw Heist on video, a Mamet film, and was distracted from the plot several times by painful dialogue. Not only did all of the characters speak with the same voice, they said things like "cute as a bucketful of kittens" and "as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton." If that is authentic speech, then I must be hanging out with a different crowd than McWhorter.
And so it would seem. McWhorter mentions, more than once, that he likes to go to piano bars where you can not only listen to show tunes, but sing along. He notes that there are few straight men at these bars, and for that reason, he finds them an excellent place to meet women. Indeed.
It is not surprising that someone who loves language enough to have made it his life's work would be upset at what he perceives to be the decline of his first langauge. But sometimes his complaints have little to do with language at all. He shows us a soap ad from 1929 that has six panels and quite a bit more text than the typical print ad today. Then McWhorter wonders whether ordinary people in 1929 would have used words like "dainty," which appear in the ad (as he uses the word "exquisite" to describe this very ad). Perhaps a better observation is that few ads these days are as wordy because they need to get our attention fast. When was the last time you saw a 60-second commercial on TV? They used to exist, but now advertisers know they only have 15 seconds to get our attention. Is that a language problem, or something else?
Doing Our Own Thing is definitely readable and there is enough here to get you thinking (not unlike talk radio), but if you want to read a good book about language, I recommend Power of Babel instead.
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