Words are, like, totally snapshots of our, like, culture and stuff. Take, for example, Chirag Mehta’s U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. It should come as no surprise that in George W. Bush’s speeches, “terrorist” is the size of the giant Twinkie over Manhattan in Ghostbusters, but what struck me was the dwindling use of “wise” in these, our modern times. You see a lot of wise guys when the U.S. was still in short pants, and it persists right up until JFK, then...nothing. Wisdom, shmisdom. That shit is for owls and old bearded dudes with gnarly canes.
And what about “youth?” John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington — they all rolled with the “youth.” John Quincy Adams? “Youth”ful. Plenty of the fathers who founded thought it important to reach out to the whippersnappers. But then the youth grew their hair long and started listening to that devil music and talking to them was, I swear, just like talking to a wall.
This tagcloud also reminded me of a recent New Yorker review of a few new Thomas Paine biographies. Now there was a guy. Atheist! Rebel! Populist! There was indeed a time when you could be all three. It was a time that Thomas Paine inadvertently named. It was The Age of Reason. Okay, yes, women were corseted babymakers with no right to inherit property. And let’s not get started on slavery. (Except where Paine is concerned: He never owned any slaves or profited from slavery.) But once upon a time, people wanted to read political pamphlets written by other people who wanted them to be read. In plain English. With enough belly fire to get Joe Colonial off his knickered ass and fight for his right to party.
Paine thought keeping the poor masses under the thumb of the church was a load of horseshit, too, and that’s pretty much what got him banished from two countries. Check it:
”Paine’s religious opinions were those of three-fourths of the men of letters of the last age,” Joel Barlow observed, probably overstating the case only slightly. Paine’s views were hardly original; what was new was his audience. While other Enlightenment writers wrote for one another, Paine wrote, as always, for everyone. His contemporaries believed that radical philosophical speculation — especially critiques of religion — was to be shared only with men of education (and, it was assumed, judgment). The poor could not be trusted with such notions; freed of church-based morality, they would run amok. Paine disagreed, profoundly. To say that he was vilified for doing this is to miss the point. He was destroyed.
Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Paine may have lived in an age where people actually wanted to vote and read and bring down The Man, but the big G. was dangled over everyone’s head as a way to prevent them from doing so. And as words like BLESS get bigger in the tag cloud, the whole thing starts all over again. Dubya would have put an orange sack over Paine’s head and attached his kiwis to electrodes after reading “The Age of Reason.”
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.