7.10/The Lived Worlds/The Body in the City

Speech Register and Lexical Dating, 1989–2001

A Procedure Attached to the Name

Most of the decade’s new-sounding language acquired no such paperwork, and dated itself by less official means. On January 10, 1989, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch stopped to explain a two-word phrase to its readers. The subject was Manute Bol, the Sudanese center then playing for the Golden State Warriors, and the phrase was one his teammates had picked up from him. “When he throws a bad pass,” the paper reported, “he’ll say, ‘My bad’ instead of ‘My fault,’ and now all the other players say the same thing.”⁴ The construction was strange enough to a general readership that a newspaper treated it as news: an admission of error with the possessive front-loaded and the noun bare, no verb, no apology attached. It had been in print before — a 1986 guide to pickup basketball already glossed “my bad” as the thing a player said after a bad pass, the earliest use the Oxford English Dictionary records.⁵ By 1989 it was moving off the court and into rooms where basketball was not being played, and a paper in St. Louis judged that some of its readers had not heard it yet.

This was the ordinary route by which the decade’s newest-sounding language arrived: not new at all, but old on the playground and in Black vernacular, surfacing into the general press years after it was fixed among the people who spoke it first. The slang a young New Yorker used in 1990 to sound of the moment was, almost without exception, the slang with the longest documented history. “Diss,” in its hip-hop sense, ran back to the early 1980s; “props,” meaning due respect, was in print by 1990; “chill,” in the relax-and-stop sense, reached back to the end of the 1970s; the dismissive “whatever” was catalogued in a 1989 dictionary of college slang and reached a national audience through Clueless in 1995.⁶ “24-7,” continuous and without pause, first appeared in People in 1985, describing the college basketball player Jerry Reynolds, said to practice around the clock.⁷ Each of these felt, to the person deploying it, like a marker of the current year. Each had in fact been fixed in print years, sometimes a full decade, earlier.

Arrivals and Absences

A second channel ran through the self-help and recovery publishing that sold in enormous quantities across the period and deposited its vocabulary in ordinary speech. Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More, published in 1986, put “boundaries” and “detachment” into general circulation as terms for the management of one’s own emotional life; the psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend gave the first word its own bestseller, Boundaries, in 1992.⁸⁹ Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989, took “proactive” — a word that had lived mostly in management theory — and made it the title of its first habit, from which it entered the speech of every office that circulated the book.¹⁰ In 1995 the communication coach Lillian Glass published Toxic People and applied “toxic” to a person rather than a substance, defining a toxic relationship as one in which people “don’t support each other” and “one seeks to undermine the other.”¹¹ The word was available in that sense from 1995 forward, and not before it.

The dating is firm; the diffusion is not. That a term appeared in a book selling in the millions establishes that the word was in the air. It does not establish that a fifty-two-year-old staff writer used it, unmarked and unselfconscious, in a Tuesday meeting. The evidence for the vocabulary’s existence is a shelf of bestsellers; the evidence for its passage into neutral, everyday professional speech is absent from the retrievable record. The safe reconstruction holds the two apart. A recovery-adjacent New Yorker in 1993 said “boundaries” and meant the therapeutic thing by it. A manager in 1990 said “proactive” and half-heard the seminar it came from. The words carried a faint sound of their origin — the meeting room, the support group, the airport paperback — and a listener could still hear it. They were available and they were marked, and the marking had not yet worn off.

Advertising deposited its own words the same way. The corporate “reach out,” meaning to make contact with someone, came directly from the Bell System’s long-running campaign “Reach out, reach out and touch someone,” on the air since 1979.¹² Used in an office as a synonym for a phone call or a letter, it still announced its origin, and a careful listener registered it as advertising language put to administrative work — usable, and conspicuous while it was still new to the room.

After the Hearing

The shock of the October 1991 hearings, contemporaneous accounts agreed, was not chiefly partisan. It was that words of that kind were being said aloud at all, in that room, to a national audience.²

What followed is documented at the level of the aggregate; what is not documented, at the level that would let anyone reproduce it, is the speech of the white-collar room before the hearings against the speech of the same room after them. The received account holds that offices were coarser before October 1991 and more careful after it, and the account is plausible; the complaint statistics are real and the surveys that followed were real.¹³ The verbatim before-and-after — what was said at the water cooler in 1990 and what was no longer said in 1992 — was not preserved in any form a later reader can retrieve. The shift is visible in the numbers and inaudible in the transcript, because no transcript was kept of the thing that changed.

Some of the decade’s most common experiences had no single word to carry them, and the absence shaped the sentences people built instead. A man who stopped answering, who let a courtship end by simply going silent, left the woman he had courted with only the plain report of what he had done: he never called back, he stopped returning my calls, he just disappeared. The condition was ordinary and the account of it was a sentence, not a term. So too the experience of being steadily told that one’s own perception was wrong until one half-believed it — described, when it was described at all, as being made to feel crazy, as mind games, as somebody messing with your head. No single word had been assigned to carry them; in the period they were spoken in circumlocution, three or four words doing the work a term would otherwise have done.

“Trauma,” meanwhile, still meant what it had long meant. The clinical category had been formalized in 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder entered the American diagnostic manual,¹³ and through the period the boundary largely held: a trauma was a grave event — a war, an assault, a death witnessed — and not the ordinary friction of a bad week. The looser usage, in which a minor disappointment could be called traumatic, was not yet the common register. A New Yorker in 1994 who called something traumatic was, most often, reporting that something serious had happened.

The Tell

Accent dated a speaker as reliably as vocabulary dated a sentence, and it dated a New Yorker along two axes at once: age and class. The classic marker of New York City speech, the dropped or vocalized r — the r absent from “park” and “fourth floor” — was in documented retreat across the period, and the retreat sorted people. The linguist William Labov had established, in fieldwork from the 1960s, that the r-less pronunciation was already receding and already stratified by class; three decades on, in a study of sixty-five speakers on the Lower East Side, the linguist Kara Becker recorded a mean rate of r-production of sixty-eight percent, “with young people, women, and middle-class speakers leading in the production of /r/.”¹⁴ Michael Newman, surveying the city’s speech, found that most of its historically stigmatized features had “receded or disappeared.”¹⁵ The classic New York sound was concentrated in the old, the male, and the working class. The young and the upwardly mobile were more rhotic, closer to the unmarked national standard, further from the borough their parents spoke.

This made accent a piece of involuntary autobiography. A voice on the phone placed its owner before it placed anything the owner said. An older man from the outer boroughs carried the old vowels; a woman two decades younger, raised in the same borough but educated out of it, carried fewer. Neither had chosen the tell, and neither could hear it in themselves. The retreat was not total and not uniform — it favored the young and the mobile and left the rest — but its direction across the period was one direction, and a room of mixed ages was a room of mixed r’s, the decade of each speaker’s formation legible in the vowels to anyone trained to listen and to no one who was not.

The Floor’s Trade

Every trade dated itself through its own words, and the magazine floor’s shop-talk carried its own fixable origins. “Lede,” the deliberately misspelled opening of a story, had been a working term since the 1960s. “Gotcha journalism,” for the interview conducted to catch its subject out rather than to inform, was first cited in 1988. “Charticle,” the hybrid of chart and article that carried its argument in a graphic, appeared in Forbes in September 1996.¹⁶ The floor spoke this vocabulary as a native language, and like all native speakers heard none of it as dated.

Above the trade terms sat a house register the period’s media talked about incessantly: irony, the knowing and self-aware tone credited to Spy, the Manhattan monthly that ran from 1986 to 1998 and specialized in the mocking epithet — the one it fixed to a Manhattan real-estate developer, “short-fingered vulgarian,” it repeated from its January 1988 issue onward.¹⁷ The essayist David Foster Wallace, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, diagnosed a pervasive ironic detachment as the defining register of the culture and argued that it had begun to inhibit more than it enabled.¹⁸ The diagnosis was influential and the style was real on the page. Whether ordinary New Yorkers spoke to each other ironically, off the page, in unrecorded conversation, is a claim the sources do not reach. The irony that is documented is a media style, produced by a small number of magazines and writers and observed by critics; the vernacular underneath it is a separate question the record leaves open.

One speech genre the period invented outright was the outgoing answering-machine message. As machines got cheap, the recorded greeting became a small performed form, complete with conventions and rhymes. Its canonical artifact arrived on Seinfeld in 1997, when George Costanza set his greeting to a television theme song: “Believe it or not, George isn’t at home.”¹⁹ A 1994 comedy sketch called the answering machine “the most important creative outlet of the 1990s.”²⁰ The machine gave the disembodied voice a script and a few seconds of airtime, and people wrote for it.