The American Dialect Society The Language of 'The Catcher in the Rye' Author(s): Donald P. Costello Source: American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Oct., 1959), pp. 172-181 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/454038 . Accessed: 30/01/2011 11:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The American Dialect Society and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Speech. http://www.jstor.org THE LANGUAGE OF 'THE CATCHER IN THE RYE' DONALD P. COSTELLO RooseveltUniversity A STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE ofJ. D. Salinger'sThe Catcher in theRye can be justified not only on the basis of literary interest, but also on the basis of linguistic significance.Today we study The Adventuresof HuckleberryFinn (with which many critics have compared The Catcherin the Rye) not only as a great work of literary art, but as a valuable study in 1884 dialect. In coming decades, The Catcherin the Rye will be studied, I feel, not only as a literary work, but also as an example of teenage vernacularin the 1950s. As such, the book will be a significanthistorical linguistic record of a type of speech rarely made available in permanentform. Its linguistic importance will increase as the American speech it records becomes less current. Most critics who looked at The Catcherin the Rye at the time of its publica- tion thought that its language was a true and authentic rendering of teenage colloquial speech. Reviewers in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the London Times LiterarySupplement, the New Republic, the New York Herald Tribune BookReview, the New York Times, the New Yorker,and the SaturdayReview of Literatureall specificallymentioned the authenticity of the book's language. Various aspects of its language were also discussed in the reviews published in America, the Atlantic,the CatholicWorld, the ChristianScience Monitor, the LibraryJournal, the Manchester Guardian,the Nation, the New Statesmanand Nation, the New York TimesBook Review, Newsweek, the Spectator,and Time.' Of these many reviews, only the writers for the CatholicWorld and the Christian ScienceMonitor denied the authenticity of the book's language, but both of these are religious journalswhich refused to believe that the 'obscenity' was realistic. An examinationof the reviews of The Catcherin the Rye proves that I. See reviews in America, LXXV (August 11, 1951), 463, 464; Atlantic, CLXXXVIII CLXXIV (195i), 8z; CatholicWorld, (i95I), I54; ChicagoSunday Tribune, July 15, '951, Part ChristianScience LXXVI 4, p. 3; Monitor, July 19, 195 1, p. 9; Library journal, (i95 i), 1125; Times [London] Literary Supplement,September 7, 1951, p. 561; Manchester Guard- ian, August o10,195, p. 4; Nation, CLXXIII (Septemberj, 1951), 176; New Republic, CXXV (July i6, 195s), zo, z ; New Statesmanand Nation,XLII (August i8, 1951), 185; New York Herald TribuneBook Review, July 15, 1951, p. 3; New York Times BookReview, July IS, 1951, p. 5; New York Times, July 16, 1951, p. 19; New Yorker,XXVII (August i1, 1951), 71-76; Newsweek, XXXVIII (July 16, 1951), 89, 90; Saturday Review of Lit- erature, XXXIV (July 14, I951), 12, 13; Spectator, CLXXXVII (August 17, I951), 224; Time, LVIII (July 16, 1951), 96, 97. THE LANGUAGE OF 'THE CATCHERIN THE RYE' 173 the language of Holden Caulfield, the book's sixteen-year-old narrator,struck the ear of the contemporaryreader as an accurate rendering of the informal speech of an intelligent, educated, Northeastern American adolescent.2 In addition to commentingon its authenticity, critics have often remarked -uneasily-the 'daring,' 'obscene,' 'blasphemous' features of Holden's lan- guage. Another commonly noted feature of the book's language has been its comic effect. And yet there has never been an extensive investigation of the language itself. That is what this paper proposes to do. Even though Holden's language is authentic teenage speech, recording it was certainly not the major intention of Salinger. He was faced with the artistic task of creating an individual character, not with the linguistic task of reproducing the exact speech of teenagers in general: Yet Holden had to speak a recognizableteenage language, and at the same time had to be identi- fiable as an individual.This difficult task Salinger achieved by giving Holden an extremely trite and typical teenage speech, overlaid with strong personal idiosyncrasies. There are two major speech habits which are Holden's own, which are endlessly repeated throughout the book, and which are, neverthe- less, typical enough of teenage speech so that Holden can be both typical and individual in his use of them. It is certainly common for teenagers to end thoughts with a loosely dangling 'and all,' just as it is common for them to add an insistent 'I really did,' 'It really was.' But Holden uses these phrases to such an overpowering degree that they become a clear part of the flavor of the book; they become, more, a part of Holden himself, and actually help to characterizehim. Holden's 'and all' and its twins, 'or something,' 'or anything,' serve no real, consistent linguistic function. They simply give a sense of looseness of expression and looseness of thought. Often they signify that Holden knows there is more that could be said about the issue at hand, but he is not going to bother going into it: 2. If additionalevidence of the authenticityof the book's languageis required,one need only look at the phenomenalregard with which The Catcherin the Rye is held by today's college students,who were about Holden's age at the time the book was written. In its March 9, 1957, issue, the Nationpublished a symposiumwhich attemptedto discover the majorinfluences upon the college studentsof today. Many teacherspointed out the impact of Salinger.Carlos Baker,of Princeton,stated: 'There is still, as there has been for years, a cult of Thomas Wolfe. They have all read J. D. Salinger,Wolfe's closest competitor.' Stanley Kunitz, of Queens College, wrote: 'The only novelist I have heardpraised vocif- erously is J. D. Salinger.'Harvey Curtis Webster, of the University of Louisville, listed Salingeras one of the 'stimulators.'R. J. Kaufman,of the University of Rochester,called The Catcherin theRye 'a book which has complexly arousednearly all of them.' See 'The Careful Young Men,' Nation, CLXXXIV (March 9, 1957), 199-2 14. I have never heard any Salinger partisanamong college students doubt the authenticityof the languageof their compatriot,Holden. 174 AMERICAN SPEECH ... how my parentswere occupiedand all before they had me (5.)3 S. they're nice and all (5.) I'm not going to tell you my whole goddamautobiography or anything (5.) . .. splendid'andclear-thinking and all (6.) But just as often the use of suchexpressions is purelyarbitrary, with no dis- cernible meaning: .. he's my brotherand all (5.) ... was in the RevolutionaryWar and all (6.) It was December and all (7.) ... no gloves or anything(7.) ... right in the pocket and all (7.) Donald Barr, writing in the Commonweal,finds this habit indicative of Holden's tendency to generalize, to find the all in the one: Salingerhas an ear not only for idiosyncrasiesof dictionand syntax, but for mentalprocesses. Holden Caulfield'sphrase is 'and all'-'She looked so damn nice, the way she kept going aroundand aroundin her blue coat and all'--as if each experiencewore a halo. His fallacy is ab uno disceomnes; he abstractsand generalizeswildly.4 Heiserman and Miller, in the WesternHumanities Review, comment specif- ically upon Holden's second most obvious idiosyncrasy: 'In a phony world Holden feels compelled to reenforce his sincerity and truthfulness constantly with, "It really is" or "It really did.' "s S. N. Behrman, in the New Yorker, finds a double function of these 'perpetual insistences of Holden's.' Behrman thinks they 'reveal his age, even when he is thinking much older,' and, more important, 'he is so aware of the danger of slipping into phoniness himself that he has to repeat over and over "I really mean it," "It really does." '6 Holden uses this idiosyncrasy of insistence almost every time that he makes an affirmation. Allied to Holden's habit of insistence is his 'if you want to know the truth.' Heiserman and Miller are able to find characterizationin this habit too: The skepticisminherent in that casualphrase, 'if you want to know the truth,' suggesting that as a matter of fact in the world of Holden Caulfieldvery few people do, characterizes this sixteen-year-old'crazy mixed up kid' more sharplyand vividly than pages of character 'analysis'possibly could.7 3. Whenever The Catcherin theRye is substantiallyquoted in this paper,a page number will be includedin the text immediatelyafter the quotation.The edition to which the page numbersrefer is the Signetpaperback reprint.