Whassup? Don't ask

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers didn't teach PJ O'Rourke anything new about American slang; indignant and intolerant of language, Leslie Saran's book is a humourless failure

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English. They seem to be greater in number, wider in diffusion and more frequent in application than ever before. Why – or even whether – this is true, Leslie Savan does not tell us in her book on the subject. Savan doesn't so much as bother to survey the range of catchphrases in currency. I am a middle-aged man living in rural New Hampshire without cable or DSL. I didn't learn any fresh ripostes, topical quashers or new verbal conveniences from Slam Dunks and No-Brainers except "What is the dilio?" I take this to mean "What is transpiring here?" I tried it on my children. They looked at me blankly.

Slam Dunks is neither prescriptive nor descriptive, nor is it in fact about language at all. It is about Leslie Savan's opinions of language: "from the high-strung Hel-lo?! to the laidback hey, from the withering whatever to the triumphant Yesss!, an army of brave new words is occupying our social life... The catchwords, phrases, inflections and quickie concepts that Americans seem unable to communicate without have grown into a verbal kudzu." Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic. A little information makes any book about language a pleasure. Very little information is found in Slam Dunks. Much effort is expended citing the use of catchphrases. Not much effort is expended discovering their sources or tracing their disseminations. Savan quotes from Charles Mackay's brief chapter on slang in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, but she doesn't seem to have read it. Certainly she didn't absorb Mackay's sense of how "the favorite slang phrase... throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour." Savan is apparently ignorant of Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases. Here she would have found that a Macaulay Culkin Home Alone squelch she particularly deplores has a 100-year-old fun and frolicsomeness antecedent. And Savan writes that "exactly when cool jelled into the word we know today is difficult to say." It is not difficult to say upon looking into The Oxford English Dictionary. "Assured and unabashed in demeanor . . . calmly and deliberately audacious or impudent" dates to the 1820s. But the OED is not in Savan's bibliography, which contains "Jones, Gerard. 'Honey, I'm Home!: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream' " and "Moore, Michael. 'Dude, Where's My Country?' "

Savan, a former advertising critic for The Village Voice and the author of The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture, has renamed the catchphrase, calling it "pop." She is a populist in politics, as she repeatedly makes clear for no very clear reason. Yet the idiom of the populace is not popular with her. Savan inveighs against "the thought-foreclosing aspect of pop language," laments that it tends "to surface when our own individual personality needs a charge from the group one," and complains that "it's a sort of air guitar for the lips, seeking not so much communication as a confirmation that . . . hey, we're cool." Why it is so wrong to quit fussing and get rhythm, I'm not sure. But perhaps Slam Dunks is the sort of book written for the sort of person to whom no one has ever said, "Oh shut up, take me in your arms, and let's dance".

It is a function of language to foreclose thought. Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "All uttered thought is of the nature of an excretion. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print as soon as it has matured."

But Savan has allowed indignation to interrupt the ripening process. She is indignant about the co-option of catchphrases by advertisers, as though the people in the profession of speaking to everyone could be expected to ignore how everyone speaks. She is especially indignant when a commercial's catchphrase originated among a minority group that experiences "squalid poverty and ill-requited labour". But Budweiser's appropriation of "Whassup?!" is probably the least damaging thing alcohol has ever done to the poor.

Savan is very indignant about the prevalence of "Yesss!" with its accompanying pump of the arm. This combination of word and gesture strikes me as almost a social grace – a quick, efficient method of getting the rude but inexorable business of self-congratulation out of the way. Is an extended brag to be preferred? "I am the mighty hunter who has found the TV remote! No wireless control device escapes my tireless pursuit of quarry among the davenport cushions! When the angels couched in heaven change channels to watch Scrubs, God has to call me!"

And Savan is extremely indignant about "I don't think so!" This is said often by my grade-school-aged daughters and hence – language being the imitative art it is – by me. The girls will put forth some proposal, such as deferring homework until the five minutes between breakfast and leaving for school. Under these circumstances I've found that they would rather hear what I don't think than a tedious elucidation of what I do.

Besides foreclosing thought, another function of language is eluding communication. Political leaders are expert at saying nothing. Savan reserves her strongest indignation for our current political leadership. In a book about catchphrases, pique at George W Bush would be misplaced, considering the likelihood of his getting any catchphrase right. Rather, Savan vents her ire with an anecdote about Dick Cheney taken from the Bob Woodward book Plan of Attack. During preparations for the Iraq war, the Saudi ambassador supposedly worried that Saddam Hussein might, yet again, survive the fray. Wanting at least tacit Saudi support, Cheney is said to have said, "Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast." And Bandar is alleged to have replied, "I am convinced now that this is something I can take to my Prince Abdullah."

Here was a brilliant use of depleted meaningfulness. Consider Cheney's alternatives:

"We'll render him powerless, the way he was after the first gulf war".

"We'll hunt him down and kill him, same as Osama bin Laden".

"We'll make sure he's tried by a jury of his peers, like OJ Simpson".

Unamused by language and intolerant of it, Savan cannot bring herself to care enough about language to attend to how it works. "Now that road rage has a handy label," she writes, "we may believe that violence on the road occurs more often than it actually does." And now that "orange" is a word, we may believe that more things are this color.

Leslie Savan should give up on language and devote herself to a mode of expression that is far more "pop" than catchphrases, the memoir. She has the skills requisite to the genre. In her chapter titled, I quote verbatim, "Digit Talk in the Unit States of America," there is a passage of startling, naked self-revelation:

"I engage in digital reading. Instead of reading something on the computer screen, I'll do a search for the words I'm looking for, and thereby stay ignorant of the context... I could read the paragraph, but so habituated have I become to treating words as units on the monitor that focusing on larger units like paragraphs seems a waste of my pressurised time."

On the other hand, maybe Savan isn't wasting her pressurised time. Perhaps there is a niche for Savan as a language maven. Facing too-glib colleagues, wisenheimer children and the general public with all its flip responses, who has not wanted to take the pleasure out of language? © New York Times