ON LANGUAGE BY WILLIAM SAFIRE

Cramming it together as the wave of the Future.

ush Limbaugh, the radio philosopher, was appalled. Thousands of his listeners were sending in messages protesting the increased number of commercials on his program. Because he was talking the same amount of time every day, and the show ran the same three hours, how could this be?

Then a surreptitious form of editing was revealed to him. "A new kind of digital technology," wrote Alex Kuczynski in The New York Times, "was literally snipping out the silent pockets between words, shortening the pauses and generally speeding up the pace of Mr. Limbaugh's speech." The irate commentator stormed, "I think it is potential doom for the radio industry." Since then, he tells me: "I have amended that. They will reduce the pauses judiciously, no more than a minute and a half per hour. I want to see if the nuances are affected -- after all, a pause can be pregnant."

Decades ago I did something similar to Humphrey Bogart. He had a habit, as do many of us, of punctuating his ad-lib phrases with "uh." (This has since been replaced with "I mean" and "y'know," which serve the same function of demonstrating a presence while not saying anything.) When Bogie had a couple of drinks, the uh's came thick and fast. In the 50's, after taping an interview with him for the Armed Forces Network, I did him a favor and laboriously snipped all those stammering self-interruptions out of the tape. When our talk was broadcast, he was surprised at how articulate he sounded.

In most cases, I would do the same today as a courtesy to interviewee and listener. I'll even clean up a grammatical error when taking notes for a written interview, thereby preserving a source and avoiding [sic-sic-sic] wiseguyism. But secret snipping for commercial gain is another kettle of fishiness. Not only is it sneaky, but the silent squeeze also weakens discourse by removing dramatic pauses.

A related danger is not a result of nefarious squeezing by money-grubbing timesavers, but of the hurried laziness of speakers. Let's not be stiffs about this: in pronunciation, the English language has always tended toward contraction. Old-timers cannot recall ever having heard business, colonel or Wednesday pronounced with three syllables. Chocolate, which geezers recall as CHOCK-a-lit, has become CHAW-klit; its central syllable melted away in our mouths. In a 1949 article in The New Yorker (now The Nyawka), John Davenport commented on "Slurvian," the language of what linguists call syncope (SING-kuh-pee). In this laid-back lingo, syrup becomes surp, Americans Merkins, and "no, Ma'am" gnome. His forn, for "foreign," was picked up by the Central Intelligence Agency, and now "no foreign distribution" is stamped NOFORN.

In our time, such speeding up must not go unremarked. In today's compulsive compression, other majestic and sonorous words are losing their central syllables. In "The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999, $15), Charles Harrington Elster argues that "syncopated pronunciations tend to improve the fluidity of speech" and cites VEJ-tuh-bul for vegetable, FAM-lee for family and DY-pur for diaper. (Only babies say "change my DI-a-per.")

This has not taken place in a vacuum. (That word was once pronounced VAK-u-um, but our natures abhorred it, and it's now VAK-yoom.) However, Elster still cites as objectionable to cultivated speakers such squeezings as AK-rit for accurate, YOO-zhul for usual, claps for collapse and VUR-bij for verbiage. (I would add an ASS-ter-ik.) He takes a pop at me for countenancing an r-less TEM-puh-chur, and he's right: from now on, I'll take my "TEM-pra-chur."

In this political season, two locutions have come under the sustained pressure of the squeezers. One is President, the three-syllabled office much coveted by campaigning candidates. I never minded Lyndon Johnson's Southern pronunciation of the last syllable in his warm "I am yo' Presidint"; that is a legitimate dialect variation. However, the near-universal adoption of Prezdent seems to me to diminish the office.

A special target for the squirrels of squeeze has been Social Security. This generation, promised six full syllables with no cutbacks, was willing to accept "Soshasecurity." But what of the candidates who promise the salvation of "Sosh-security" or preserving untouched the indexed benefits of "Sosa-CURE-ity"? Dwayna M. Wisdom of Union City, N.J., notes other variations from "SoSecurity" to "Soshacurity."

How can anyone pledge expanded benefits to a contracted program? Cock a wary ear to the way the candidates squeeze this revered phrase in coming debates. Then cast your vote for Prezdent.

 

DON'T PRESUME

Asked by one of his fellow candidates if he would commit to choose a pro-life running mate, George W. Bush replied, "I think it's incredibly presumptive for someone who has yet to earn his party's nomination to be picking vice presidents."

The cable commentator Laura Ingraham promptly picked up the error, pointing out that the word Governor Bush had in mind was presumptuous.

It's a fairly common error, with both words based on the verb presume, from the Latin praesumere, "to take in advance." That would now be put as "to take for granted," as in "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." (If less certain, the newsman Henry Stanley would have used assume, "to suppose." How did I get in darkest Africa?)

Presumptive means "probable," based on a reasonable assumption, as in "Bush and Gore have been, for a year, the presumptive standard-bearers." The meaning of presumptuous departs sharply from that, to "arrogant, assuming the unwarranted" -- the presuming in that formulation to be unreasonable, not to mention uppity and pushy.

Few suffixes split the meaning so drastically from the root word. A subtler difference was examined some years ago, when a State Department spokesman denounced as contemptible an article of mine sneering at some feckless action of the then-Secretary. An alert reporter followed up with "Don't you mean contemptuous?" To which the quick-thinking diplomat replied, "That, too."

February 06, 2000