Reading my old copy of “Dictionary of American Slang” (DAS), compiled by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Flexner in 1960, put me in mind of a line from T.S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”: “And youth is cruel, and has no remorse, And smiles at situations which it cannot see.  I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.”  That 1960-vintage slang echoed many words grown-ups uttered in my stripling days.  Those terms were hot stuff in my parents’ younger days when they began devising new expressions designed to confound the old fogies, just like all generations before and since.  Browsing the Word Lists in the DAS appendix enabled voices from my distant past to articulate forgotten expressions. Some lists were amusing to varying degrees, like “Children’s Bathroom Vocabulary”  (only 15 ranging from “boom-boom” to “wee-wee”) and “Synonyms for Drunk” (around 350, from “alkied” and “all geezed up” to “woozy” and “Zig-zagg.”   What really set me off down memory lane were the  “Reduplication” lists.  According to Collins Dictionary, “reduplication” is “repetition of a sound or syllable in a word,” and the DAS has three categories, or “orders.”  First order reduplications repeat the first word, as in “lu-lu,” “hubba-hubba” and “tum-tum.”  In the third order the initial (or “radical”) vowel is altered, as in “flim-flam” and “wishy-washy.”  But the second order, in which the second word’s first consonant is changed, swarmed with my old folks’ lingo that’s seldom heard nowadays: “boogie-woogie,” “fuddy-duddy,” “heebie-jeebies,” “hanky-panky.”

            Reflecting on how fresh tides of youthful verbal enthusiasm regularly wash ashore, brought to mind the Great Vowel Shift.  Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer website has a good description of how we got from Chaucer’s pronunciation of English to our modern tongue.  “The main difference between Chaucer’s language and our own is in the pronunciation of the ‘long’ vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r’s, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as ‘kn,’ that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the ‘long’ vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.”  That didn’t happen overnight; it began in the twelfth century and continued until the eighteenth century, with most changes occurring in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when “the sounds of the long-stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made).”

In Old and Middle English vowels were pronounced as they were in Latin.  “For example, Middle English ‘long e’ in Chaucer’s ‘sheep’ had the value of Latin e’ (and sounded like Modern English ‘shape’ …. The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century the ‘e’ in ‘sheep’ sounded like that in Modern English ‘sheep’ or ‘meet’.”  It became fashionable to use our mouths differently.  “To understand how English changed (not why; no one knows) one must first note that vowels are articulated in particular parts of the mouth; we make the sound in Modern English ‘deep’ with our tongue forward and high in the mouth, and the sound in Modern English ‘boat with our tongue lowered and drawn toward the back of the mouth and the jaw relatively low (open). Say ‘ee’ (or ‘beet’) and ‘o’ (or ‘boat) in succession and you may be able to feel the movement of your tongue from front to back.”

Languages have been mutating since the first humans uttered guttural mutterings, and there’s no end to it.  In “Something Odd Happening with Irregular Verbs,” a Daily Writing Tips article by Maeve Maddox, she wrote, “In Old English—the principal language spoken in England from the mid-fifth century until the Norman Conquest in 1066—English verbs were of two main kinds: Weak and Strong.  OE weak verbs formed their past tense endings with dental suffixes that have survived into modern English as our -ed endings,” as in “walk-walked.”  Past tense verbs ending in “-ed” are called “regular verbs.,” while OE “strong verbs” “formed their past tenses by changing vowels in other ways,” such as “awake-awoke,” “bleed-bled,” and “ride-rode.”  Maddox added, “Many of the strong verbs morphed into weak verbs even before the end of the OE period. Then, during the Middle Ages, when the elite spoke French, and English was the language of the uneducated classes, many more strong verbs acquired -ed past endings.”  Apparently, those uneducated classes are rearing their lexicographical heads again.  “It’s not surprising that rarely used irregular verbs like slay might acquire regular -ed endings, but it’s unthinkable that the handful of irregular verbs we use on a daily basis, words like go and come, will ever take on forms like ‘goed’ and ‘comed’.  Nevertheless, even these well-established verbs may be on the cusp of change.  Frequent targets of irregular irregularities are go, come, begin, run, fall, drink, and sing.” 

Now, according to “Gen Alpha Is Here. Can You Understand Their Slang?,” a fresh crop of whippersnappers is gearing up to bemuse their millennial forebears and the rest of us.  In it NYTimes writer Madison Kircher asked, “Do you know what a gyat is? What about a rizzler?”  Turns out that “gyat (rhymes with ‘yacht,’ with a hard ‘g’ and a firm emphasis on ‘yat’).

‘There’s no cute way to say it — it’s just a word for a big butt,’ said Alta, a 13-year-old eighth grader in Pennsylvania.,” who added “I don’t say ‘gyat’ to people, though, unless they’re my friend.  And we say it to our mom.”  A rizzler, on the other hand, “‘is a good person,’ according to Malcolm, a 10-year-old in Washington state.  ‘Having rizz is when you have good game,’ Alta said. ‘Being a rizzler is like when you’re a pro at flirting with people.’ (Rizz is short for charisma.)”. And they’re not through upsetting the verbal applecart.  Kircher added that “Gen Alpha is still being born, according to demographers. Its birth years span from 2010 to 2025.”

            It’s up for grabs whether Gen Alpha will experience public libraries as we know them when they’re adults.  The modern free public libraries that are spread across our nation were invented in American in the 1800s, and were dedicated to being places where anyone could freely acquire a solid education, relying on librarians to gather as many points of view from reliable sources about as many topics as possible.  Today state, and especially federal, governments are instituting state censorship of books and even words, and it’s reaching epic proportions.  Vibrant issues, historical facts, and even useful and important words are being forbidden while historical and scientific distortions are allowed.  Last week a NYTimes article, “Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library?,” described how an “order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office resulted in a purge of books critical of racism but preserved volumes defending white power …. Two copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves. Gone is ‘Memorializing the Holocaust,’ Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed,” and “‘The Bell Curve,’ which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.” 

            400 books have been removed from the Naval Academy library so far, including Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and Adm. James G. Stavridis, an author, academy alumnus and former commander of all U.S. forces in Europe, said “‘But as I understand it, they were just among the hundreds of thousands of books in the Nimitz Library which a student might opt to check out. What are we afraid of keeping from them in the library?’

One of the admiral’s recent books specifically cited Ms. Angelou’s memoir as a valuable resource for helping military leaders understand the diversity of viewpoints that make up the armed forces.”  The Admiral added “Book banning can be a canary in a coal mine and could predict a stifling of free speech and thought.  Books that challenge us make us stronger. We need officers who are educated, not indoctrinated.”

The same censorship is transpiring throughout the federal government and many of the southern states, and it’s spreading. It’s a designed and systematic hollowing-out of our nation’s historical, cultural, and scientific legacy, and what’s left aren’t real libraries at all; they’re repositories of refined propaganda.  They’re as fake as Charles Dickens’ library.  Dickens followed a Victorian fad of having fake textless books made with amusing titles on their spines and filled his library with them.  They often involved wordplay (“Noah’s Arkitecture,” “Bowowodom, A Poem”), were humorously multi-volume (the 3-volume “Five Minutes in China” and the 9-volume “Cat’s Lives”), and famous Victorians like “Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar” (he was an Arctic explorer).  Dickens’ books were a form of trompe l’oeil, which Collins Dictionary defines as “a technique in art in which objects are painted their normal size in a very realistic way, to make people think that the objects are solid and real,” much like the government and the politicians who go along with them envision all our nation’s libraries.