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Show ALL DUNN by Roy Dunn written, using nothing but slogans. slo-gans. Slogans as a substitute for thought are part of the habit of being American. The young radicals who want to overthrow everything on the grounds that everything is crazy are just as dependent upon slogans as the old defenders who believe the radicals are crazy. At the inauguration in Washington, Wash-ington, the young "crazies" were shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" and other conversation stoppers dear to their movement. move-ment. And why not? "Ho, Ho, Ho. Chi Minh is an amusing thing to shout, no matter which side of the war issue you are on. It is American to shout amusing things instead of talking, talk-ing, and the language has developed de-veloped so as to encourage tixfi fun. We are afflicted with a language that causes our mouths to rob our ears. But like my Mamma always said, once I learned to talk, I never shut up. Seems like Im always talking when I should be listening. A good listener is always in demand and maybe this accounts for the reason that Im never in demand. Usually, wives are good listeners, lis-teners, but the reason they are is that they have some little built-in valves in their ears. They can (and do) fhut off these little valves at will. Shucks, just the other day I was telling Audrey about a very hard trip I had on the railroad, and what all went wrong. I had been talking steadily for at least thirty minutes when she broke in: "Rachel has left Russ again." Dadgummit! She had never heard a word I said for she had been listening to "Another World" on the tube all the time. Like I said, wives are good listeners. SEE YAALL LATER HOWDY FOLKS Feller told me the other day that I used awfully poor English and that if I intended to continue trying to write, I should do something to improve my English, Eng-lish, or just simply quit trying to write. Well, maybe so, I dunno. Dadgummit, when I got something some-thing to say I can't see why it makes any difference how you say it, just as long as you get the point across. My Mamma Mam-ma tells me that I never learned learn-ed how to talk until I was seven sev-en years old, and haven't shut up since. And I've always said that I learned to read out of a "Captain Billy's Whizbang" magazine. Audrey was a school teacher and when we got married, she started right off, to teach me how to talk properly and not murder the King's English. In those days I might have said, "Where's it at?" To which she would answer, "It's behind the "AT." But shucks, she finally gave up, deciding it wasn't worth the effort for it took her something like twenty years to teach me how to say "manure." Seems like President Nixon wants us to "lower our voices" and "stop shouting at each other" oth-er" so we can hear what we are saying. I reckon this is pretty good advice but is easier eas-ier to give than it is to heed. I think the trouble all lies in our language. American is an awful loud language. Languages Langua-ges are divided into two broad groups which Lord Raglan called "speaking languages" and "shouting languages." French is a speaking language, lan-guage, while Italian is a shouting shout-ing language, for example. As used in England and most of the Commonwealth, English is a speaking language, but the Americans took this same language and created a new form of English that is a shouting shou-ting language. And believe me, you gotta shout if you want to make your wants known in this hectic society we live in. You'd be left at the gate if you didn't. When literate people use bad grammer, they do it because of the desire to overpower thought with noise. This, of course, is one of the tricks of the advertising adver-tising business. "WINSTON TASTES GOOD LIKE A CIGARETTE CIG-ARETTE SHOULD" is fun to have shouted at you. "WINSTON "WIN-STON TASTES GOOD AS A CIGARETTE SHOULD" on the other hand, instantly alerts a natural suspicion. "Who says so? How good should a cigarette cigar-ette taste anyhow?" I've smoked smok-ed them all my life and they have always tasted bad. Slogans are designed to do away with the precise mental response you might have if you heard a precise statement made in a soft voice. Shout out, loud and strong and the masses will line up to buy your product, pro-duct, even if they know It might injure their health. America has always been a creator of slogans. "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" "Back to Normalcy!" Nor-malcy!" "I like Ike!" "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to intergrate!" "Tell it like it is!" "Black Power!" A history of American folly could be |