Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the machinery of image-transmission is being speeded up, a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, "The words we use are changing faster today – and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian and Japanese as well."

Flexner illustrated this with the arresting suggestion that, of the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The Bard would be a semi-literate.

This implies that if the language had the same number of words in Shakespeare's time as it does today, at least 200,000 words – perhaps several times that many – have dropped out and been replaced in the intervening four centuries. Moreover, Flexner conjectures that a full third of this turnover has occurred within the last fifty years alone. This, if correct, would mean that words are now dropping out of the language and being replaced at a rate at least three times faster than during the base period 1564 to 1914.

This high turnover rate reflects changes in things, processes, and qualities in the environment. Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. Thus, for example, words like "fast-back," "wash-and-wear" or flashcube" were all propelled into the language by advertising in recent years. Other words come from the headlines. "Sit-in" and "swim-in" are recent products of the civil rights movement; "teach-in" a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war; "be-in" and "love-in" products of the hippie subculture. The LSD cult has brought with it a profusion of new words – "acid-head," "psychedelic," etc.

At the level of slang, the turnover rate is so rapid that it has forced dictionary makers to change their criteria for word inclusion. "In 1954," says Flexner, "when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five-year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible. Language, like art, is increasingly becoming a fad proposition. The slang terms 'fab' and 'gear,' for example, didn't last a single year. They entered the teen-age vocabulary in about 1966; by 1967 they were out. You cannot use a time criterion for slang any more.

One fact contributing to the rapid introduction and obsolescence of words is the incredible speed with which a new word can be injected into wide usage. In the late 1950's and early sixties one could actually trace the way in which certain scholarly jargon words such as "rubric" or "subsumed" were picked up from academic journals, used in smallcirculation periodicals like the New York Review of Books or Commentary, then adopted by Esquire with its then circulation of 800,000 to 1,000,000, and finally diffused through the larger society by Time, Newsweek and the larger mass magazines. Today the process has been telescoped. The editors of mass magazines no longer pick up vocabulary from the intermediate intellectual publications alone; they, too, lift directly from the scholarly press in their hurry to be "on top of things."

When Susan Sontag disinterred the word "camp" and used it as the basis of an essay in Partisan Review

in the fall of 1964, Time waited only a few weeks before devoting an article to the word and its rejuvenator. Within a matter of a few additional weeks, the term was cropping up in newspapers and other mass media. Today the word has virtually dropped out of usage. "Teenybopper" is another word that came and went with blinding speed.

A more significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term "black." For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term "Negro" and to capitalize the "N." Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, "black" became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was "in," Negro "out."

Even faster cases of diffusion are on record. "The Beatles," says lexicographer Flexner, "at the height of their fame could make up any word they like, slip it into a record, and within a month it would be part of the language. At one time perhaps no more than fifty people in NASA used the word 'A-OK.' But when an astronaut used it during a televised flight, the word became part of the language in a single day. The same has been true of other space terms, too – lik 'sputnik' or 'all systems go.'"

As new words sweep in, old words vanish. A picture of a nude girl nowadays is no longer a "pin-up" or a "cheesecake shot," but a "playmate." "Hep" has given way to "hip"; "hipster" to "hippie." "Go-go" rushed eagerly into the language at breakneck speed, but it is already gone-gone among those who are truly "with it."

The turnover of language would even appear to involve non-verbal forms of communication as well. We have slang gestures, just as we have slang words – thumbs up or down, thumb to nose, the "shame on you" gesture used by children, the hand moving across the neck to suggest a throat-slitting. Professionals who watch the development of the gestural language suggest that it, too, may be changing more rapidly.

Some gestures that were regarded as semi-obscene have become somewhat more acceptable as sexual values have changed in the society. Others that were used only by a few have achieved wider usage. An example of diffusion, Flexner observes, is the wider use today of that gesture of contempt and defiance – the fist raised and screwed about. The invasion of Italian movies that hit the United States in the fifties and sixties probably contributed to this. Similarly, the upraised finger – the "up yours" gesture – appears to be gaining greater respectability and currency than it once had. At the same time, other gestures have virtually vanished or been endowed with radically changed meaning. The circle formed by the thumb and forefinger to suggest that all goes well appears to be fading out; Churchill's "V for Victory" sign is now used by protesters to signify something emphatically different: "peace" not "victory."

There was a time when a man learned the language of his society and made use of it, with little change, throughout his lifetime. His "relationship" with each learned word or gesture was durable. Today, to an astonishing degree, it is not.

Art, like gesture, is a form of non-verbal expression and a prime channel for the transmission of images. Here the evidences of ephemeralization are, if anything, even more pronounced. If we regard each school of art as though it were a word-based language, we are witnessing the successive replacement not of words, but of whole languages at once. In the past one rarely saw a fundamental change in an art style within a man's lifetime. A style or school endured, as a rule, for generations at a time. Today the pace of turnover in art is vision-blurring – the viewer scarcely has time to "see" a school develop, to learn its language, so to speak, before it vanishes.