The McWhorter book is about how language is being debased these days, as you would expect from the title.  McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.  Here, setting the stage, he compares Lincoln and Bush. 

 

Gettysburg: "That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." 

 

Cincinnati: "We have our marching orders, my fellow Americans. Let's roll."  Ah yes. 

 

Of course our public discourse - heard on television and radio, and read in the morning newspapers - has lost its formal nature; instead, it sounds like everyday talking.  So?

McWhorter argues that this kind of writing and speaking "compromises our facility with the word and dilutes our collective intellect."  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

McWhorter ties the use of elevated English to a basic respect for standards - "a matter of basic courtesy, just as today we still often clean up when company is coming."  Of course this begs a question - does he think "language decline" is bad in itself or because it indicates a weakening of social structure? 

Perhaps he puts the cart before the horse in another way when he claims that people have lost their patriotism, their belief in the legitimacy of the American experiment, and their trust in America's leaders, and therefore they cannot cherish their country's language.  Naturally, the left-wing radicals of the sixties are to blame for this - rock music, rap, and poetry without rhymes.   Yeah, yeah.

Oddly McWhorter speaks highly of the natural pride other cultures possess in their own elevated forms of language - the Russian of Pushkin, for example, which "modern Russians can quote without difficulty."  I'm not sure about that myself. 

 

He sees the problem here being that with our cultural diversity and our skepticism of authority, Americans have "bequeathed themselves" only a simplified English that they cannot love "anymore than [they] do a screwdriver."   Would it then be better - would we have more eloquent, elevated discourse - if we were all white male free-market Republicans?  Perhaps so.  That's a hell of a price to pay for soaring prose.

On to Philip Furia and his biography of Johnny Mercer...

Johnny Mercer (1909-1976) had a way with words, but not elevated words - just common words for basic emotions.  He is the lyricist who wrote the words to such standards as "That Old Black Magic," "Dream," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "And I Thought About You," "Blues in the Night," "Too Marvelous for Words," "Moon River," and "Laura," among many, many others.   He was also one of the founders of Capitol Records, a company that defined "class" in popular music from the forties to the sixties, with such singers as Nat Cole, Margaret Whiting and Frank Sinatra.  Well, that was "class" back then.

Furia titles his book Skylark, but for those of us who play a bit, we don't remember the lyrics so much as we remember the underlying Hoagy Carmichael song - a great melody, an intricate structure and a damned near impossible bridge with startling chord changes. 

 

Well, Mercer worked with composers like Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Arlen.  Big guns.  A native of Savannah, Georgia, Mercer could write in a down-home Georgia black-dialect manner (at a time when dialect songs were still generally acceptable) or turn out witty Cole Porter kinds of stuff.   William Gavin, a reviewer from Toronto, writing of Mercer, puts it this way: "He often wrote in a style of monosyllabic sophistication, using small, ordinary words crafted exquisitely to create surprising, often lovely, unhackneyed images (e.g., '...sad as a gypsy serenading the moon...')."  McWhorter would not approve at all.

As for the "life" here, Gavin sums him up: