Scintillating Scribbling

Here’s a proposition for you: the American vernacular that emerged between roughly 1920 and 1970 was the second great peak of the English language, right up there with the era of Shakespeare and Donne. The Elizabethans had the printing press and the English Bible and reams of Ovid and Cicero beaten into them by country schoolmasters. Americans had immigration and mass media, which took Black street slang and Yiddish irony and showbiz argot and Park Avenue elocution and crashed it all together, creating the high-low bebop register found (in various combinations) in the work of Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Cab Calloway, Slim Gailliard, His Girl Friday, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Guys and Dolls, Dorothy Parker, Mad magazine—you get the idea. Other worlds and times might have had the edge on the nonverbal aspects of art, and it’s understandable that one might prefer Dickens or Dostoevsky to these priapic midcentury Yankees. But when it comes to not what you say but how you say it, when it comes to rhythm and slang, assonance and resonance, velocity and compression, words, words, beautiful words, all I can say is: buy American, baby.