Give a Listen to a New Kind of ‘Talkin”

About a year ago, my wife asked me if I’d noticed a new use of the verb talk.

“People talk things,” she said. “Not about things. They talk things.”

I thought I knew what she meant. “You mean like the guys on TV who say, ‘Let’s talk quality!’ and ‘Let’s talk value!’?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m talking about friends of mine--people at work. They say things like, ‘I’m talking ugly!’ and ‘I’m talking gorgeous!’ ”

I had a sudden mental image of David Brenner. He’s a very funny man, and I think he’s one of the many comics we see on the tube who use that relatively new and strange locution. Maybe Brenner never said, “I’m talkin’ gorgeous,” or anything like it. Maybe my mental image was a short circuit. But there it is. Anyway, he’d be only one of a large number of modern comics, all of whom are very funny, warm, and amiable, who employ the “I’m talkin’ . . .” cliche.

You know the style: “My wife is a very large woman. I’m talkin’ fat! I’m talkin’ a three-day honeymoon trip around her shoreline! But her old man is loaded. I’m talkin’ rich! And he’s got a mansion! I’m talkin’ big! And his own 18-hole golf course! Inside the house!

It isn’t surprising that this comedic style has caught on with the public. We tend unintentionally to mimic the people we find likeable and entertaining. So our friends and co-workers say things like, “I met her new man. I’m talkin’ divine!”

The new version of “I’m talking” doesn’t really mean “I’m talking.” “To talk big,” for instance, has a meaning going back at least to 1741, when Conyers Middleton wrote in his “Life of Cicero,” “Pompey . . . always talked big to keep up their spirits.” Today, “You talk mighty big for a 97-pound weakling” is clear enough, and big in those phrases is used adverbially.

The new “I’m talking big” doesn’t echo that sense at all. It is a substitute for “I mean!” or “I’m not kidding!” or “No two ways about it!” which is an elaborate way of saying unequivocally. “I’m talkin’ big!” now means, “I mean big, and you better believe it!”

I can’t resist a digression. That Conyers Middleton fellow was not one of my ancestors, I feel sure. If he had been, one of my female cousins would certainly have so discovered, and I’d have heard about it long ago. The gist of my digression, though, is that I looked him up in the Oxford Companion to English Literature and learned that he was protobibliothecarius of the Cambridge University library. Protobibliothecarius has just become one of my favorite sesquipedalian words. A word to make William Buckley’s eyeballs reel wildly and come up “JACKPOT.” I can’t find protobibliothecarius in any dictionary, but, picking it to pieces, I assume that it means he was Cambridge’s first librarian. I suspect that I’ll never forget him.

That’s enough digression. Back to “I’m talkin’ ” in this lunatic form that manages to seize on an adjective as a direct object. I suspect that it has its genesis in the Borscht Belt, that cradle of so much great American humor.

Probably one of the reasons I think it’s from the Borscht Belt is that I remember a lunch my wife and I had in a Jewish deli a few months ago. The waitress placed my order before me and said, “Enjoy!” My wife said, “That’s a Jewish word.”

“What’s a Jewish word?” I asked, genuinely puzzled. Jeannie, who is Jewish, said, “ Enjoy! That’s a Jewish word.” I’m pretty sure she was right. Enjoy! --as an intransitive imperative; not “Enjoy your knish” or “Enjoy your strudel , “ but just Enjoy!-- is not, to my knowledge, listed in any dictionary of the English language. It’s certainly Jewish. Like “I’m talkin’ fat!” and a great many other cockamamie linguistic sports.