It's What It's

February 19, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Do you ever wonder about contractions?  I find myself thinking about them a great deal of the time, which might tell you something about me and my priorities.  I don’t know.

     I recently re-watched a movie from a few years back, True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges among others.  It was a remake of the 1960s John Wayne movie, probably no more True than the first one, but with a little more Grit added by the Coen Brothers.  One of the things I noticed about the dialogue was the almost complete absence of the contractions we take for granted in regular speech.  First I thought that perhaps this was a mistaken idea by the Coens of how people talked during the last quarter or so of the 19th Century, or just a stylistic flourish to make the speech patterns of these rough-shod frontier folks more quaint and rhetorically appealing, as if all of them, from the proper church lady to the uneducated outlaw, had attended to their manner of speaking under the tutelage of some stern pedagogue wielding a hickory switch.  But just today I learned that the Coen Brothers had been true to the dialog from the novel on which the movies were based, by a writer named Charles Portis, who just died.  So it was the invention of the writer, and not of the Coen Brothers.  Jeff Bridges, as Rooster Cogburn, drunk by the campfire, says, speaking of the malefactor Tom Chaney, "If he is not in a shallow grave, somewhere between here and Fort Smith, he is gone.... The trail is cold, if ever there was one!  I am a foolish old man who has been drawn into a wild goose chase by a harpy in trousers--and a nincompoop!"  It's a fine piece of monologue, both funny and stilted, and devoid of contractions, which is as good a way to keep the attention of the audience as any, I suppose.  But what such dialogue accomplishes in terms of arresting and charming cadences it surrenders in verisimilitude.

     When one reads an old novel--say, one written in the middle of the 19^th Century--one does notice that contractions were not as prevalent in narrative and expository prose as they’re likely to be today.  Still, there is evidence that they were in as common usage then as they are now, based on the dialogue in those same novels.  Perhaps the particular contractions are different—shan’t, for instance, for shall not, or mustn’t, for must not, or daren’t for dare not, or be-n't for is not—but they were being used all the time in ordinary conversation among people both high-born and lowly.  Even Shakespeare, four hundred years ago, used contractions constantly, favoring words like 'tis for it is, and that's for that is.  Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy alone, uses no fewer than eight contractions.  True, some of those were for the sake of making his speech fit into the framework of iambic pentameter, but still, they were used, and I'm sure quite common among everyday speakers of the language. 

     Curiously, "ain’t" was perfectly acceptable until fairly recently, and was used by duchesses and blacksmiths alike.  I don’t know precisely when it became declasse, but anyone my age or younger knows that it’s considered substandard usage now, marking and indeed stigmatizing the uneducated as certainly as anything they might wear, eat, dwell in, or vote for.  That’s a pity too, since ain’t is one of the most versatile contractions around, standing for is not, are not, am not, and probably a few other word combinations I can’t think of now.

     Notwithstanding the True Grit take on the olden days, the history and course of any language illustrates the tendency of the people who speak it to make it flow more quickly, rather than less so, and to convey more meaning with fewer words, rather than with more.  Call it efficiency, or if you're a snob call it laziness.  If you're a linguist, call it elision.  There's an almost gravitational movement in the direction of scrunching words together rather than drawing them out.  Instead of saying "God be with you" every time we part from one another, we say "goodbye."  That one's so old that no one remembers when it was otherwise, but it certainly was at one time.      

     We now convey more with short words like "like" in combination with the verb to be than ever before.  "He was like, oh my god, and I was like, duh!" could be more eloquently written, but not with so few words:  "He expressed surprise at what I told him, and I responded that he should not be surprised at all."  Of course the president wouldn't use such argot in a speech (okay, maybe this president would, but real presidents wouldn't).  My point is that all this word compression, as well as the tendency to use the smallest and simplest words, and to give them more meaning, in place of more complex or multi-syllabic ones, is a natural linguistic tendency in everyday speech.

     Still, there is something more arresting or hortatory in speech that does not use contractions.  It somehow begs to be understood more and taken more seriously.  Great orations, from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the inaugural addresses of presidents, seldom contain contractions.  At some level, in spite of the more relaxed forms our everyday speech takes, we value contractions less than we do their more drawn out counterparts.  When God gave Moses the stone tablets, the commandments started with Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, rather than the simpler Don't, even though the first written use of the word "don't" is thought to have occurred around the time of the King James translation of the Bible.  It just seemed more official serious, like your mother standing with her hands on her hips and saying, "You WILL clean your room before you go out to play."  Even now, if you were to day "Don't move," it wouldn't carry quite the same force as "Do not move," would it?

     So besides compressing the language, contractions seem to round off its sharper and more commanding edges.  Even so, the frequency with which we use them in more or less official writing is gradually increasing.  How do I know this? you might ask.  Well, how's this:  on older typewriters, such as the manual one on which I learned to type back in eighth grade, the apostrophe, that indispensable component of the contraction, was located on the upper case of the "8" up on the number row, keeping company with the open and closed parentheses, the ampersand, the dollar sign, and other lesser figures.  Today, it has graduated to the middle row, just to the right of the colon and semicolon key, within easy reach of your right little finger, and in the lower case, to boot.  That shows you that somebody saw the need to put that sucker somewhere more convenient, if you ask me.

     Well, I don't quite know where I'm going with this, or quite how to end it.  It's just something I had on my mind.  Like everything in language, contractions follow their own path of progress, with or without our approval.  Ultimately, it's what it's.