The Mumbling Multitudes : Why should our language be formal when we no longer are? : THE INARTICULATE SOCIETY: Eloquence and Culture in America, <i> By Tom Shachtman (Free Press: $25; 260 pp.)</i>

Americans endlessly write books warning that democracy is in peril, but this is the first I have seen that makes language the threat.

Tom Shachtman is a prolific writer and former teacher of that mystery at New York University. He believes that we are so dumbing down our speech that we risk sliding back to an oral culture, “that derives its literacy from the television, popular music, telephone conversations, and the like.”

He calls for a revolt of the literate to stop the rot before America plunges into the totalitarian nightmare we thought we had defeated in Nazis and Communists. Theirtyrannies deliberately debased language and Shachtman now sees “an entrenched power structure” in the United States that “benefits from a passive and largely inarticulate populace.” He means “politicians in office, entertainment and news media producers, child care system entrepreneurs, and marketers of all sorts of products and services.”

“Time is short,” he warns, “the tide of mumbling multitudes rises and this rising is inimical to our culture, our governance and our individuality,” of greater significance to the future of the country than “changes in sexual behavior.”

Language a greater threat than sex? Holy lexicons, Batman! Get out the wordmobile: We’ve gotta save our syntax!

But as a doom merchant, Shachtman is long on dire prophecy and short on evidence.

He claims that “current child-rearing practices are affecting the process of language acquisition.” His proof? Children have lost the conversation of extended families with television no adequate substitute. He quotes one psychologist who believes “today’s parents are ‘emotionally distant’ and today’s family atmosphere ‘flat and sterile,’ ” a generalization of stupefying irresponsibility to this layman. And Shachtman arrives at the amazing conclusion that children from middle-class families are often more articulate than those from poor families with diminished language skills, something obvious in grade school 50 years ago.

Noting the decline in verbal SAT scores, Shachtman indicts American teachers for taking too many education courses in college and not enough English.

He chastises movies and television for pitching language down to mass audiences and for celebrating inarticulateness, (e.g. Beavis & Butt-head). He buys the Frankfurt School of Social Research theory that “one of the main purposes of the mass culture is to keep the consumers’ responses at an infantile level.” He believes everything in our culture has become commodified and the principal victim is news and informational television.

He compares 30 years of CBS News (Cronkite 1963 to Rather-Chung 1993) and finds that in vocabulary, sentence length and syntax, CBS has descended to a seventh-grade level. “As a model for, and a great influence on, the language that Americans speak, it has become a reflection of the very best,” Shachtman says.

I would argue that the language of CBS News today more accurately reflects the way the average American speaks than the broadcast did 30 years ago. My own theory is that broadcasting has gradually democratized the publication of language. Most English-speaking people never spoke the way grammarians thought they should. From Chaucer through Shakespeare to the present day, the great mass of the people, even literate people, have used speech much less formally than the models taught in school. Mark Twain was excoriated for importing popular speech forms into literature but there has been no closing the floodgates since. Radio and television have helped legitimize the way ordinary people talk. And those who wish to communicate with them--advertisers, popular journalists, politicians--have followed.

Shachtman is particularly hard on politicians, saying they have corrupted public discourse through euphemism (like the Pentagon’s “collateral damage” for civilian casualties) and avoidance of blame (as in Ronald Reagan’s passive Iran-Contra plea, “mistakes were made”). Politicians, he claims, have adopted “the villainous undermining of language that characterized the Nazi and Soviet empires. We are in danger of becoming what we heard and once despised.”

Shachtman makes his case so stridently, with such unrelieved earnestness, that one longs for the wit and subtlety of the late S.I. Hayakawa’s brilliant “Language in Thought and Action,” which he does not cite.

I am sure that Shachtman is right to some degree. There is much greater informality in our language, but it reflects the declining formality in our lives--our dress, our manners, our forms of address. You cannot make language put on white gloves and hats when Americans have long abandoned the real thing.

So Shachtman’s “coordinated national program to counter inarticulateness” seems Canute-like in its impracticality.

Parents need to stress articulate expression and he suggests tax credits to enable them to stay home more and tutor their children.

We should turn off television to counter its “pernicious effect on language use,” reintroduce parlor games and stage dinner conversation around discussion topics.

Education reform should start with “the abolition of teachers’ colleges and teaching degrees.”

“New regulations should require that networks broadcast more news and public affairs programs,” and correspondents’ word use “would be monitored to ensure that they meet certain standards of vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure.”

And finally, “Presidents should speak less and say more.”

OK. That’s simple. I’ll tell Dan and you tell Bill.

Incidentally, one idea Shachtman endorses--a national issues convention in which randomly selected delegates discuss issues with presidential candidates--has borne fruit. It will take place in Austin, Tex., in January, 1996, and will be broadcast by PBS.

Overall, I feel Shachtman’s anxiety is overwrought and too apocalyptic. It takes no account of the graceful, eloquent, expressive English still widely available to Americans (perhaps more widely available than ever) from myriad sources, including despised politicians. The speech content of television is not all afternoon talk-show drivel. The most popular hardcover fiction this summer is Pat Conroy’s “Beach Music,” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) a novel delirious with its own poetic language. Many American parents make enormous efforts to read to their children. Many teachers care as much about language as Shachtman.

As for his claim that Americans are losing the gift of metaphorical speech, he can’t be listening. We rejoice and excel in new metaphor. We’re inventing language at a rate faster than the Elizabethans. The dynamism of this culture brims over with vivid new expressions to the distress of Prince Charles, who sees American linguistic energy constantly seducing British ears.

Finally, Shachtman’s call for revival of eloquence might be more persuasive if his own prose were not so studded with infelicities, for example: “Politically freighted language is disemboweling our attempts at ordinary description.”

Ouch!