Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times

After typing the title of this review, I wonderful nervously (tongue partly in cheek) whether the terms "entertaining", "fun", and "thought-provoking" may -- by virtue of their respective trajectories in the venacular -- be laden with nuances of which I am not (at some peril?) aware. No one, with the possible exception of professional linguists, has time to ponder every word he utters or writes. As GN so ably -- and entertainingly(!) -- reminds us, however, we would all be wise to choose our words carefully. It matters deeply whether we invoke language in a vacuum, with no regard for context or history. The indiscriminate application, in private and public discourse, of labels like "fascist" and "genocide", are acute cases in point. I have always considered myself sensitive to language. Reading GN, I am reminded how much more I must study, ponder, and self-reflect before I can really make the claim. The tiny essays in GN are enormous food for thought.

Like with his first book, The Way We Talk Now, this one is filled with the wit, wisdom and a keen eye for the English language that anyone who listens to NRP's Fresh Air has come to expect from Geoffrey Nunberg. Across the range of politics, business, pop culture and technology he not only has an amazing ability to recognize trends in language, place them in their historical contexts and tease profundity out of them. Nunberg does this in recognizing that words are not just tools which we use to chip out some semblance of meaning from life but rather the words we use work on us as well shaping us as we use them to shape our world.

While I very much enjoyed his first book this one seems to be the stronger of the two. In part this may be because Going Necular represents a more mature Nunberg but also because it pulls from a wider range of material than just his Fresh Air commentaries like his first one did.

My only complaint about this book is the dates that are offered for those pieces which were first Fresh Air commentaries are often inconsistent with there actual dates - at first I thought the differences in the dates might be due to the differences in when they were drafted verses when they aired... but this doesn't seem to be the case since sometimes the dates published in Going Necular are before the actual air date and sometimes they are after. This is only annoying because it seems like such an easy to avoid and consistent error - but admittedly that is a small grievance with an otherwise exceptional book.

I don't get the chance to listen to NPR as often as I'd like, so the pieces in this book--a Christmas present--were new to me. Nunberg sneaks up on issues we think we've heard everything about and lights them up in new ways. The pieces, written for radio, are short, compressed, and full of surprises. He's not one of those smug, boring grammar-guru linguists (e.g. "Abusers of the semicolon should be shot on sight!") He uses linguistics as a means to pose deep questions about the world.

I am usually disappointed when the interview part of NPR's Fresh Air show ends and the tail end commentary or review fills out the show's hour...except when Geoffrey Nunberg gives one of his little radio essays on language. For that reason I was eager to read this book, but I was frustrated to find that Going Nucular is simply a collection of those radio essays, with a few newspaper columns thrown in. I had heard most of what I was now reading, and since all of the essays were written since 2001, they were mostly fresh in my mind. Not that they weren't interesting, but they simply weren't new. I suspect other regular Fresh Air listeners will have a similar reaction. After finishing the book I scanned the cover and could not find any indication that the book was a collection of old essays, which I found sort of ironic being that the Nunberg is a communication expert.

The Word Man Cometh! That would have been a better title for this book. Professor Nunberg loves words and loves thinking about what it means when people use certain ones . . . rather than others.

In the last 60 years in the United States, we have seen a substantial increase in the kind of political language that George Orwell satirized in 1984. When it's very overt, we all get the message. When it's a little more subtle, we may be manipulated without realizing it. Professor Nunberg is very sensitive to that problem, and this book will help protect your unconscious mind for unperceived assaults.

Stanford professor of linguistics Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg has taken a number of his "Fresh Air" commentaries and brief articles from leading publications in the last few years, and grouped them into somewhat related areas. He begins with Culture at Large, moves on to War Drums, sidles over to Politics as Usual, looks next at Symbols, before considering Media Words, then lampoons Business Cycles and Tech Talk before finishing with words to help us while we're Watching Our Language.

Foes of President Bush and conservative talk show commentators will probably enjoy the book the most. The title piece looks at the great difficulty the president has in pronouncing "nuclear" when he's referring to atomic issues . . . and takes a sideways swipe at his possible motivations in conceivably making this mistake deliberately.

But the book has more charm than that. In many cases, he shares with us the arrival and departure of various words into common use while giving us a sense of what it all means. An early essay on how "plastics" when from positive to negative is a good example. I was pleased that he also took on the label of "Caucasian" which I have never understood the reason for. In sympathy with the youngsters who compete in spelling bees at the national level, he wonders what it proves that some can and cannot spell words that hardly anyone knows and which don't spell much like they sound. He also has kind words for the use of "ain't" and what purposes it can serve.

Some of the usual targets take their shots too, such as postmodernists.

Business authors, reporters and leaders will probably not stop blushing for two decades from the unerring rapier of commonsense aimed at their inflated use of language.

There's even a nice look at whether and when adverbs make sense to add.

It was with great relief that I found that he isn't all that comfortable with the grammar police, noting how many times the required constructions look, read and sound awful!

I suspect that this would have been a better book if limited to just one area -- like the current presidential campaign . . . but it's more than rewarding as it is. I hope Professor Nunberg will consider creating something special next year to deepen the points he has made here.