Here's the Thing about Stuff

Back in the late 1980s, when Reagan left the White House and it was evident he was in decline, a journalist reported that others had noted the mental failing much earlier because the president began using the word stuff, dropping it in more often rather than developing the rest of the sentence. Instead of being precise and clear, he used the word as a shortcut, making his sentences sound informal rather than incomplete. This, apparently, is a sign of declining mental skills, and an early sign of dementia.

Well, that got my attention. With a grandmother who died with Alzheimer's, and later a mother in the early stages before she died, I took note of the signs I could look for in my own speech. When the use of the word stuff and others like it turned out to be one of them, I hopped on that bandwagon and have been riding it ever since. I have long been uncomfortable with the sloppy use of the word thing, and avoid it whenever possible, so now I had two words that made me cringe when I heard them skidding into place in a sentence.

Changes in contemporary American vocabulary are obvious to anyone who reads an old newspaper from the 1950s or earlier. I'm not convinced this is a sign of the shrinking of our language skills, but it is certainly an indication of their changing. Our writing and speech are much simpler, more casual, blunter in many cases, more often laced with slang. Linguists may argue about the size of the English vocabulary--half a million words or fewer than two hundred thousand if most of the inflections are skimmed off--but in daily transactions our chosen words are few. The ever-present stuff and thing may be a sign of change and nothing more.

A professor in graduate school, in the 1970s, remarked a few times on the tiny vocabulary of a particular Slavic language. I haven't been able to track it down, but I did come across a language thought to have the fewest vocabulary items. Toki Pona is a language created by Sonja Lang, and has 123 words. It takes usually about thirty hours to learn and the speaker must rely heavily on creating metaphors to get his or her point across. I can't say it appeals to me. Even though language grows through metaphor and borrowing  from other languages (one of the reasons English vocab is so large and rich), I think I'd be frustrated at not having more words to play with, especially technical terms. This particular language strikes me as replete with versions of stuff and thing.

A writer who captures a character's linguistic oddities--speech patterns and rhythms, vocabulary and inflection--wins my eternal admiration. This doesn't mean the author demonstrates a vast vocabulary; only that she captures the peculiarities of an individual in words. The first time I read George Higgins I felt like I was in the room with his characters and at any moment they'd be menacing me as though I were in the story.

The news about Reagan may have startled me out of a complacency I didn't know I had. But in the end it made me a more conscientious writer, alert to moments of laziness in thinking and writing that can be corrected and thus perhaps improve the work in ways not imagined. Whatever challenges me to be more alert is good, regardless of the original motivation.