We all laughed with George Carlin. Journalists should have taken him more seriously. He had better instincts than many.Carlin had an ear for usage. Write for the ear, we teach, not the eye. But too few do, producing a stilted tone instead of conversation.
And he thought. He thought about society. He started in radio. He ended in books.
His mastery of words and how to use them rose to the level of philosophy or at least of philology, the love of language and its meaning.
That’s because Carlin always sought the underlying sense and not just superficial correctness, the level where most users of the language stop drilling.
“Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway,” he asked.
That equals my favorite conundrum of how a vacuum bottle knows to keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Comedians play a special role in our society. They are court jesters where the republic is monarch. They tell us what we need to hear in a way that overcomes our reluctance to listen.
Carlin will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for humor posthumously to underscore his specialness.
Now there’s a pair to tickle St. Peter’s funny bone, Carlin and Twain. Add Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers to the circle. They all represent the poetic truth: “Scratch a humorist, and you’ll find a bitter man.”
Carlin put the thought differently: “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
So, Carlin said about Ronald Reagan’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras: “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”
I am not alone in my respect for the ability to assess others’ use, abuse and misuse of language. The official wordsmith of The New York Times Magazine, William Safire, paid tribute after Carlin died at 71.
Safire saw a perverse value in “the seven words you can’t use on television” routine by Carlin. By devaluing the shock value of those adolescent obscenities, Safire thought, the performer had done a service to the language.
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html
It took 98 years after his death to get the coverage.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.
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