Jun 8, 2007

I can never say goodbye

Malcolm Fleschner / Humor Columnist

Is English under attack in this country? Sadly, the inescapable answer is yes. Or, perhaps, "si." And don't even get me started on all those United Nations diplomats with silly earpieces listening to interpreters. "Hey," I want to yell at them, "you're in America now - learn English!"

Clearly, we're not far off from a language Gestapo that will send anyone caught speaking English in public off to internment camps. Sure, laugh all you want - they laughed at me when I first suggested that terrorists were embedding secret messages in the panels of Mary Worth. Of course, in that instance they were right to laugh, but not this time.

Surprisingly, today's most egregious assault on the English language comes not from Spanish, but its Italian cousin, Italian. Of course I'm speaking of the tendency, among a certain "hip" crowd, to conclude phone conversations with a breezy "ciao" instead of the traditional "goodbye."

Frankly, I'm at a loss to explain why "goodbye" has fallen out of favor. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, there's been a lot of telephone-related confusion in the hipster community:

Caller #1: Well, it's been nice chatting about independent film, oxygen bars and Rufus Wainwright music. Goodbye.

Caller #2: Um, sure, yeah. Wait, did you say 'goodbye' or 'good guy?' Because I do think of myself as a good guy, and it would be nice to get a little recognition for once. Hello? Hello? Um, OK, goodbye.

And where does it all end? Soon, to stay on the cutting cultural edge, will we all be expected to answer the phone with an enthusiastic "Arrivederci!" too? From there we'll steadily move through all the other languages, of course, until eventually we'll have no choice but to begin and end our phone calls speaking in Klingon. And I thought the U.N. was bad!

Like it or not, for the sake of societal stability, the public has come to expect certain standards, like the long-established use of "goodbye," to remain unchanged. I think this urge for continuity may explain why so many people reacted strongly last year when the International Astronomical Union decided to downgrade Pluto's status from the solar system's ninth planet to merely one of a few "dwarf" planets orbiting the sun.

Upon hearing the news, many of us rightfully wondered what egregious offense Pluto had committed to get booted off the planetary roster. When pressed, astronomers admitted that Pluto had not illegally bet on baseball games, leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent or repeatedly shouted the "N" word at audience members during a standup comedy routine.

So what was Pluto's problem? To be honest, I'm still not sure, although apparently it had something to do with the discovery of other heavenly objects as big as or larger than Pluto orbiting in the same general area of space. There were also rumors swirling that Pluto may have said something off-color about a college women's basketball team.

But to those of us non-eggheads, this explanation sounded like yet another situation where so-called "experts" had decided to abandon a perfectly good piece of historical or scientific information we'd all learned and come to accept, simply because new "facts" had cropped up. Other recent examples of this phenomenon include suggestions that:

_ Columbus wasn't really the first European to discover America
_ Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain in the world - something called "K2" is
_ Slavery wasn't the primary cause of the Civil War
_ Reality television does not, in fact, depict "reality"

Every so often someone even tries to tell us that William Shakespeare didn't write his own plays! "Well then, who did?" we want to know. "Some other guy who wore tights and had remarkably similar handwriting?"

This, of course, is precisely the problem when authorities try to change settled matters like the definition of what is and is not a planet - the general public begins to wonder what other well-established truths may soon be called into question.

"You know that color you've always thought of as 'red'? Yeah, well it turns out it's actually 'blue.' Oh, and the greatest movie of all time isn't "Citizen Kane" any more. Now it's 'Weekend at Bernie's.'"

My point, to the extent I have one, is that in an out-of-control world that seems to be in a constant state of flux, many of us would just prefer that a few of the things we've always believed to be true stay that way, no matter what new "evidence" may crop up. And that's why, rather than doing the hip thing and adopting "ciao" as a telephone signoff, I'm going to keep on saying "goodbye." But not to my beloved Pluto, of course.

What's the next established "fact" to be invalidated by science? E-mail your thoughts to Malcolm@CultureShlock.com