519. Out of Time?

You’re obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time.
               —Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Out of Time is a Rolling Stones song, on their 1966 album Aftermath. In 1971, our senior year of high school, we played and sang along with it again and again on the funky record player in Andrew and Michael’s tree house (TMA #4, The Tree House).  Aftermath was one of the 33 rpm records that inaugurated the album era, replacing 45 rpm “singles”, and was also the first Rolling Stones album for which Mick Jagger and Keith Richards composed all the tracks, rather than simply covering songs by other artists (mostly African American blues singers). The song is about an old girlfriend who has returned from a time away only to find that she has been replaced and is sadly out of touch. Like so many songs of the era (The Times They are A-Changin’ and Roll Over Beethoven, just to mention a couple), its message to old fuddy-duddies was, Get with it or get out of the way. But 50 years later, I am in danger of becoming one of those old fuddy-duddies myself, someone who makes people roll their eyes when she speaks. I have to decide either to get with it or to make my peace with becoming increasingly irrelevant.

I wouldn’t have had to explain all of the above back in 1971, because everyone would have understood. It was our time, after all or, at least, so we felt. In July of that year the U.S. Congress ratified the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18 from 21. It is illuminating to read Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy’s March, 1970 case for the change, in which, among other points, he argued that it was wrong for young Americans to be able to be drafted to fight and die in Vietnam when they couldn’t even vote. He also argued that young people were better educated, more mature, and more politically active than their parents and grandparents had been at the same age, and they needed recognition and representation. (Sadly, half a century later, it is questionable whether 18-year-olds have taken advantage of the opportunity, since in the 2020 presidential elections the 18-24 year old age group had the lowest rate of voting, at only 51.4 percent, while those in the 65-74 age group had the highest rate, at 76 percent.) But I digress. My point is that at the time, our music, our slang, our political views all occupied center stage. Although the youth didn’t run the country politically, we did own the culture. We felt that we had our fingers on the pulse of the times, and that everybody else was hopelessly out of touch.

I’ve confessed elsewhere (TMA #140, Music Alone Shall Live) to being decades out of touch with popular music—and with popular culture in general, if truth be told. Constant contact with undergraduates in the classroom has given me at least a minimal name recognition of the music, television, and movies of the 18-24 age group, and—my subject today—of the language they use. It has been my job to teach them Standard English and to help them use language that is appropriate to different settings. While I believed that the language they used with their friends was valid on its own terms, I also felt that they needed to learn how and when to code-switch, changing their writing as appropriate in different media, from texting to formal essays and reports, and everything in-between. But increasingly, I found myself performing the role of the pedantic English teacher, and feared that I was actually becoming one of those old fuddy-duddies in their eyes. It was time for me to get with it or get out of the way.

Something that shocked me recently, and gave me a serious wake-up call, was a complaint by one of my husband’s siblings that my written language in emails and texts was pompous and gave them the distinct impression that I felt superior to them. My first reaction was high-handed indignation: this was just how I spoke, how I had always spoken. Was I to be expected to adjust the language that came naturally to me—to amputate myself, in a sense—just to make other people feel better? Shouldn’t they love and appreciate me as I was? But after some soul-searching, I have realized that my proper response demanded of me exactly what I have been teaching my students all these years: to recognize that there are different audiences as well as different forms and formats that demand different styles of writing and language usage. Using a formal letter format (Dear So-and-So) to introduce oneself in a text message just looks ridiculous. And yet I’ve been doing exactly that in what must be an infuriatingly self-righteous way.

As my sister reminded me in a recent conversation, adjusting one’s language to suit the setting, situation, and audience is not necessarily dumbing down—a term that betrays precisely the kind of superior attitude that diminishes and devalues all but users of the dominant form of Standard English. My sister, who has been working to bring her department’s public documents in line with The Plain Writing Act of 2010 (requiring that “federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use”), noted that making one’s language more culturally and linguistically accessible is not dumbing it down, but becoming smarter about being understood and getting one’s message across, which is, after all, the purpose of writing in the first place.

Take idioms, for instance—figures of speech. When writing for Tell Me Another, a personal blog to be sure, but also a public forum, I am ever-conscious of the probable unfamiliarity of many of the terms I use. Rather than code-switching to something more current in American speech, I tend to hyperlink to a definition of the term. To take one or two at random, I have hyperlinked Britishisms like going “back to the year dot” or South Asian English expressions like wanting to give someone “one tight slap” (both culturally specific and politically incorrect). I also regularly hyperlink dated or culturally specific words to their explanations, words like “corrasable” or “satchel.” But, at least until now, I have been steadfast about continuing to use the language I use, even if it meant that I was fast becoming a relic.

When I talk to age-mates, people who have grown up with me or who come from shared cultures and subcultures, I don’t have to explain myself. What a joy, to know that one will be understood! In such intimate company one can use language that would not fly with a general audience. Most of the time, however, one has to perform a version of oneself that is more broadly acceptable—and rightly so. As a kind of compromise, I have tended to put new usage in quotes (inverted commas, as my older self might have said) as in, My students are having “issues” with my reading assignment. Or alternatively, I might have followed it with a parenthetical “as they say” in order to distance myself from it, whether culturally or generationally, as in, The poor are being disproportionately “impacted” (as they say) by the new government’s policy. Impacted, like wisdom teeth? I ask you.

In the end, has this been an exercise in self-improvement or self-justification? Yes, I am increasingly at risk of getting out of touch, and I’m running out of time. No, I have my reasons for wanting to continue to write as I do. Is there anything at all that I have taken on board (as they say)? Well, yes. I recognize that if I want to reach a particular audience I have to use language that is intelligible to them (duh). If I must use obscure language, then I must define it. If I want to convey the necessity of code-switching in our increasing plural societies, then I must model that code-switching in my own writing. And I must practice what I preach by tailoring the length and style of my writing to the format and the audience. I do not want to go gentle into that good night. I must “burn and rave at close of day”. Although I insist on making a noise, I don’t want to be made a laughing stock or, worse still, to become irrelevant. I want to hook my readers, make them shout out, with Chuck Berry, “gotta hear it again today.” But I may just have to accept that to most, I will never be anything more than a pedantic English teacher. Gotta own that.

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