Silurian News May 2014
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Society of the Silurians LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD BANQUET The Players Club 16 Gramercy Park South Wednesday, December 10, 2014 Honoring Sandy Socolow Drinks: 6 p.m. • Dinner: 7:15 p.m. Published by The Society of The Silurians, Inc., an organization Meet Old Friends and Award Winner (212) 532-0887 of veteran New York City journalists founded in 1924 Members and One Guest $100 Each Non-Members $120 NOVEMBER 2014 Sandy Socolow: A Lifetime of Setting the Standard BY MYRON KANDEL said the organization’s board cited Socolow nightly newscasts for Mike Wallace on anford (Sandy) Socolow was the for a journalistic lifetime of excellence, in- the Dumont network and later that year brilliant journalist behind the tegrity and outstanding accomplishment, as joined CBS News, where he remained for Sscenes for the “most trusted man well as for his leadership in upholding the more than three decades, serving as a in America,” as the executive producer standards of the news profession. writer, producer and Washington and Lon- for many years of “The CBS Evening Socolow, now 86, started his journalism don bureau chief, as well as Cronkite’s News With Walter Cronkite.” But his dis- career at Stuyvesant High School and then executive producer. When Dan Rather tinguished news career extended far be- edited the City College newspaper The took over that anchor’s seat, Socolow was yond that highly honored program, in the Campus. He joined The New York Times asked to stay on for more than a year to process earning him the accolade from as a copy boy in 1949, and then accepted lead a smooth transition. He later worked his colleagues as the conscience of the Uncle Sam’s invitation to join the Army dur- with Cronkite on various projects and also network. ing the Korean War. He went to Officer spent two years heading a new TV project For the entirety of his work, Sandy Candidate’s School and wound up in To- for the Christian Science Monitor. He has Socolow has been named to receive the kyo producing United Nations Command continued to maintain a fierce devotion to 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award of the broadcasts aimed at Chinese and Korean protecting the standards of broadcast jour- Society of the Silurians. The first such audiences. Upon completing his military nalism. (Socolow on the current state award was given to Cronkite in 1969, and service, he managed to get discharged over of journalism, page 3.) it has gone to five other CBS news stal- there and was hired by the International (For a more detailed account of Sandy’s warts: Fred Friendly, Joseph Wershba, News Service (which later became the “I” storied career, see the full-length profile Don Hewitt, Mike Wallace and Charles in UPI) to be a roving war and foreign cor- of him in the March 2014 issue of The Osgood. respondent in the Far East. Silurian News available on our Web site Silurian president Allan Dodds Frank Back home in 1957, he began writing Sanford (Sandy) Socolow at Silurians.org.) The Decline and, Like, Fall of American English BY CLARK WHELTON trouble finding talented, literate students n the mid-1980s, American English from Columbia, NYU, Pace University, was overwhelmed by a linguistic and the senior colleges of New York’s City Imutation that transferred the bur- University system. But suddenly it be- den of verbal communication from came difficult to recruit articulate speaker to listener. This semblance of undergrads who could write. Even En- speech substituted sound effects and self- glish majors from an Ivy League campus quotations for vocabulary, clarity and had withered vocabularies and a hazy grammar. Its shapeless syntax defended grasp of grammar. Many didn’t know a those who spoke it against the risk of say- noun from verb. ing something insensitive or socially in- Strangest of all, they struggled might- correct. It was a mode of non-expres- ily to avoid expressing thoughts directly. sion that jumped from campus jargon to In place of plain speech they employed national discourse with astonishing speed. various forms of verbal evasion, such as Without fear of contradiction, I can say, run-on sentences, facial tics, self-quoting like, wow, this new way of speaking was and playbacks of past conversations. “He so, like, you know, whoa! l mean, it was asked if I wanted to go the movies and I like, omigod, totally awesome, and stuff. said yes,” became, “So he goes, like, ‘You This rapid descent into verbal bedlam want to like go to the movies’ and stuff, came to my attention in the 1980s when I and I’m like, ‘Yeah, O.K.’” Uptalking, an was interviewing intern candidates for interrogative rise in vocal inflection that Mayor Ed Koch’s speechwriting office makes statements sound like questions, in New York City. Until 1985 I had no added another element of imprecision to the mix. The would-be interns seemed to be defending themselves against their own words. I called this elusive dialect “Vagueness.” At first I wondered if Vagueness had escaped from the zoo of post-hippy slang. For example, the overuse of “like” as a speech particle goes all the way back to the hipster-beatnik days of the 1950s. But slang usually has a sharp edge. Vague- ness was amorphous, almost impossible to pin down. Operating as a kind of gram- matical anti-matter, Vagueness camou- flaged meaning with vocal intonations and Robert Grossman ambiguity. It had to be decoded by the listener. Nonetheless, by 1987, juvenile speaking standard American English but, with a lack of verbal skill, intern candi- speech patterns that had once been for some perverse reason, had decided dates in the late 1980s displayed serious drummed out of kids in junior high school not to. Extended interviews revealed that shortcomings in composition. They sim- Remembrances of Arthur Gelb, were not only in control in college, they most of the students had no idea how to ply didn’t know how to write. The basics by Ralph Blumenthal. Page 3. were in vogue. It wasn’t as though City carry on a lucid conversation. of sentence structure and punctuation Hall intern candidates were capable of There was another problem. Along Continued on Page 2 Silurians PAGE 2 SILURIAN NEWS NOVEMBER 2014 President’s Report Fall 2014 The Decline and, Like, Fall of American English BY ALLAN DODDS FRANK Continued from Page 1 eluded them. Such a puzzling diminution obust. That’s the word to describe in communications skills could not have the year the Society of the simply appeared out of nowhere. If col- RSilurians is having. Our speakers have been terrific, our treasury healthy, our lege students were not embarrassed newspaper and website reinvigorated, and about speaking gibberish at a job inter- for the first time since at least 2005, our view, if young women were not self-con- paid-up membership has hit the 300 mark. scious about using fashionably rasping Planning for the next round of Silurian voices (technically known as “vocal fry,” Awards for Excellence in Journalism also is but which is probably a contemporary already underway, with the aim of exceed- ing last year’s number of entries and record version of baby talk), they had obviously award’s dinner attendance. Members are reached voting age without being cor- encouraged to help us make the upcoming rected for writing and talking like chil- contest and next spring’s dinner bigger and dren. Vagueness, in other words, must better than ever. To volunteer, please con- have been incubating for years. tact Awards Chair and board member Carol But when did this decline in commu- Lawson by emailing her at [email protected]. nication skills begin, and why? In 1988, The contest should be much easier to judge this year, now that we have figured out how a professor at Vassar told me that by the to conduct it with entries submitted online. time they arrived on campus, his incom- Please read this excellent issue of the ing freshmen had already been Silurian News cover to cover, then cogitate “juvenilized.” He blamed their poor lan- about how you might contribute a story to guage ability on high schools that, for editor Bernard Kirsch, who is now in his some mysterious reason, had stopped Ahhh, those S.A.T.’s second superb year at the helm. Many teaching grammar and speech. His stu- thanks also go to our webmaster Fred Herzog for his stalwart work in getting mes- dents had no idea how to even diagram who possess excellent verbal skills.” high schools, not the other way around.” sages to all members and keeping the a sentence. But why, I wondered, would There it was: the Vagueness microbe If Steven Cahn is right, then the un- website looking better and better. Board secondary schools do something so self- in focus. Interns with “excellent verbal dergraduates I interviewed in the late member Barbara Lovenheim has stepped up destructive? Why make it harder for skills” had become harder to find in the 1980s - who were born after 1964 - were to oversee soliciting news items about mem- their students to get into college? It late 1980s because there were, in fact, educated in the era of plunging S.A.T. bers for the website in tandem with board wasn’t until two decades later that an far fewer of them. Something, it appeared, scores, the era when colleges radically member Bill Diehl, who is coordinating the answer began to emerge. really had gone wrong in American high downgraded the difficulty of getting a aggregation of news items about the world of journalism.