What slang says about the way we think.

It is a commonplace that what people say is often less important than how they say it. Like many sayings, though, this one has suffered from being widely known: it is now too common to warrant much consideration. But it is often profitable to consider the way people talk when they are relaxed, or in a word, slang.

Every few years a new piece of slang hits the streets. Some of it comes from television shows or movies: Hasta la vista, baby! springs to mind. But other slang is more difficult to trace, and I will suggest that it can reveal things about the way that the people who use it are thinking.

What I mean by this would be best illustrated by an example. Fifty years ago, a shocked young person might have exclaimed "My goodness", or "Gosh". Today one has only to walk down the street to hear modern teenagers saying "Oh my God...!" about the most trivial things. Now it is obvious that the earlier two statements are nothing more than ways of disguising the last one. But why did the fifties prefer these euphemisms to the expression itself?

The reason lies in Christian teaching on the topic. In the book of Exodus (20:7), God tells the Israelites that "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord shall not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Those euphemisms of the fifties were designed to obey that command.

Today, though, we have put all that behind us. We no longer shrink from invoking the name of God for commonplace matters. Now few people would deny that in the past fifty years there has been a real shift in the public's opinion of the Christian Church. Back then, being a decent person entailed going to church. According to much of the media, the situation has reversed itself completely.

It is unlikely to be merely coincidence that these expressions appear when they do, as they do. Rather, I would suggest, they are symptoms of a more widespread change in opinion about God. This is not to say that every teenager who shouts "Oh my God!" is not a Christian, nor that everyone who said "Gosh" was. Rather, these expressions are indicators of a general feeling, a feeling which those who use them often, but not always, share.

One of the newest slang expressions I have heard is the "--ever" addendum. It has several mutations, but it is usually found affixed to a complete statement. "That was the best party--ever!" or "I just wrote the worst exam--ever!" are the sorts of cases in which it typically appears. But, at least as far as I can tell, this expression has become very common very quickly, and this should show, according to my previous argument, that something in it appeals to an idea already in people's minds. In other words, we have the symptom: from it we must deduce the ailment.

Well in order to produce a diagnosis we must have a clear understanding of the symptom itself. What exactly does the addition of "--ever!" do to a statement? In logical terms the statement undergoes a profound change. For it becomes a statement about the general and not the particular. John's exam was not just the worst in relation to other exams that he or his friends had written; rather it was the worst that had been written by any person, at any time. Again in a purely logical sense this makes an implication about John: namely that unless he is lying, he has verified every other instance of a failed exam and has somehow determined that out of them all, his was the worst.

Now there are two ways in which John might have this ability. He might be omniscient, a trait usually assigned to God. For he would have to know all of history, even some unrecorded bits, to make this statement accurately. The other possibility is that it is not a historical, but a philosophical claim. This exam is the worst ever, because the goodness or badness of things is measured by their impact on John. Like the sophist Protagoras, John is the 'measure of all things', and in this case historical things in particular.

Now it is not likely that anyone who uses this expression has ever troubled himself to work out its logical implications. But neither did those who said 'gosh' instead of 'God', at least not in any conscious sense. What then is the disease behind this symptom?

I think we can .safely assume that the large majority of those who speak this way do not believe themselves to be God or gods. Do they then think that they are the measure of history?

Those of us who spend much time around a campus cannot avoid meeting many historians who proudly rewrite history. They claim that history is formed by the historian, and is therefore essentially relative. According to them, they are the measure of their own version of history. These people, at least, can say with perfect consistency, that this or that event was the greatest - ever. So perhaps we have only struck upon the sickness of relativism.

I think this is unlikely, because most teenagers who use this sort of expression are too sensible to be relativists. At least, few of them would think relatively about history as it pertained to them, for instance whether they had truly gotten their driver's license. But a more likely identity of the disease is a simple lack of interest in history of any kind. Certainly, man has not always been as interested in his own story as he is today, and it may be that the interest in history is beginning to wane. As public education focuses more and more on the individual, it becomes increasingly less important to see how people did things in the past. If creativity and a sense of self-worth are the most important attributes of modern man, then history has very little to offer him.

The idea behind the slang is, therefore, an absence of an idea. The exam was the worst ever because there is no 'ever' to speak of. Just as the rise of "Oh my God!" follows a decline of belief in God, the talk about "ever" comes with a loss of belief in history. John is not an idealist, but a historical agnostic. There is another commonplace which says that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This might be worth remembering.