A faint twittering sound...

I worked as a copywriter for a software company during those heady delusional years during Clinton's reign and the Internet bubble debacle. Eventually, I wound up reporting to a 26 year old Londoner with a Maori ankle tattoo, a deep sense of entitlement, and a fancy Brit education. One afternoon, I got a call to meet with her and a couple of gear-heads over some scrap of text she wanted rewritten.

Once we were all cosily jammed into a tiny room, our eight knees touching, she read whatever chunk of prose it was, then stopped abruptly, shaded her eyes, and moaned, "Dear God, look what these Americans have done to the language." The gear-heads stayed silent but glanced over at me, the resident wordie, to see if I had anything to say about that. I didn't. The English language didn't needed my heated defense then, if ever. She was a twit, but I didn't need to say so since it was factually obvious. And she was a misinformed twit about the language because there are numberless versions of English--all respectable and recognized.

With the death of William Buckley, several warm-bath tributes have rolled out, indulgently praising his enormous and pedantic vocabulary. I was never a fan. Personally, I thought Buckley was a twit himself. For one thing, he was too hard to understand unless you wanted to sit in front of Crossfire with a dictionary on your lap. When his megawords combined with his very odd accent, what emerged was a kind of linguistic glue that never explained very much.

I'm an unabashed fan of American English. I love its clarity, precision and exactness. For those who sneer at it, seeing a lack of grace in plain speech, I'd point out that American English is far more sensual than British English and, certainly, in terms of poetics, it is realms away from Buckley-speak. The more the syllables, the less concrete a word tends to be, and the further away from all things earthbound. To convey the actual taste and feel of the living world, only simple words will do, words like dirt, tang, shine, wet, rough, silk, crisp, burn, and dark.