NONFICTION - April 24, 1994

THE SOCIAL ART: Language and its Uses by Ronald Macaulay (Oxford University Press: $25; 241 pp.). Why do some people get so worked up about misspelling? Thorstein Veblen’s explanation: because English orthography, being “archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective” and requiring much struggle to learn, is mastered primarily by people hoping to be considered “knowledgeable.” That’s just one of the many language tidbits to be found in this book, which covers once-over-lightly just about every aspect of language you can imagine. Ronald Macaulay, a professor at Claremont’s Pitzer College, has based “The Social Art” on decades of teaching introductory linguistics, and it shows, for both good and ill; many chapters are thin, only four or five pages long, but contain consummate, usually amusing examples of the topic at hand. Macaulay breaks no ground here, but he’s a good synthesizer, citing interesting research, for example, on gender (men tend to speak “firmly” or “bluntly” in novels, women “quietly” or “innocently”), ordinary discourse (“you know” and “I mean” have been found to be “effective means of making conversation coherent”), and language formation. The one enthralling chapter in “The Social Art” is that on children’s language, which contains the following skip-rope rhyme, recorded by Macaulay in Scotland in 1978: “When the war is over/Hitler shall be dead/he wants to go to heaven/with a crown upon his head/but the Lord says/’No/you have to go below/cause there’s only room for Elvis/king of rock and roll.”