Culled for musical theater anecdotes, Doing Our Own Thing could be a sizable essay on one heterosexual man's love of show tunes. In intention and result, it's a discussion of American English's transition from a written to an oral language, a change that's been happening gradually from the early part of the last century. It's an upsetting book, actually. John (we've left off formal titles) quotes a sixth grade textbook dating up to the 1920s, "When I am in a serious humor, I often walk by myself in WestminsterAbbey," from 1960, "I decided, after my first voyage, to spend the rest of my days at Bagdad," and 1996, "Tachawin had packed the parfleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois." John says, "We read it thankful that we are too old to bother with a text so dingdong dull," and then he translates the passage without the vocabulary words, "Justin had packed the leather cases with clothing and food and strapped them to two trailing poles with a skin stretched between them." Dingdong dull is an awesome and apt description of a passive construction written for diversity not content. That is the thesis of Doing Our Own Thing, that American English (and British) is being written in less elegant, less complex ways; that people no longer care for (or acknowledge) rhetoric; they cannot use a formal, written variant of language in, for example, letters (which they don't write anymore) or books (which would never sell) or schools (where English is suspect as a tool of oppression); that adults today (including me) have never known a world where a command of English was explicitly valued (blame the Baby Boomers); and that written and formal English will continue to be expressed through traditionally oral and informal idioms. And English will rarely be valued for its own beauty and craft. Terrible, right? In a long chapter on the death of poetry, John points out that no culture has ever had less national poetry than the US today, and that people eat up, say, Annie Proulx's prose poetics because they are so starved of poetry in its own terms; poetry today has thrown off its suspectly artful language to become that arrhythmic, clunky, difficult to digest prose we all make fun of. Reading to the end, I felt like I was standing at Fort Snelling looking over the Minnesota River, with the man dressed as Josiah Snelling saying, "Everything from here west to the Rockies was prairie," and you look out past the freeway and know that no matter what happens, that prairie will never come back. Doing Our Own Thing, bleak as it can be, is fun. John's a polyglot, and the area he covers is vast and comic. Read this book.

http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-futile-attempt-at-comparative.html