Today, biting words. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Language was up to something in the 1920s and ‘30s. I look back at my childhood in those days, and see myself learning a sassy new way of speaking. We’d emerged from a terrible world war and were rebelling against the old ways. That included everyday speech. The words around me had a staccato style – clipped retorts, cynical irony, and more. We saw it in books. We heard it in poetry. Soon it was how we talked to one another.
The literature of that time had grown terse – think Hemingway, Thurber, Lardner ... . Poets, of course, had always dealt in compressed ideas. But a new breed of writers now wore the veil of comedy as they tore into the world around us. Listen as Dorothy Parker’s acidic poem describes the end of an affair:
And the truest of friends ever after they were
Oh, they lied in their teeth when they told me of her!
Ogden Nash posed as a humorist. But underneath lay an acid view of the human condition. He writes of pedantic Professor Twist doing research in Africa. At first, Twist is merely absent-minded. But then, his wife disappears and, we’re told,
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean," he said, "a crocodile."
I could go on. Gertrude Stein, e. e. cummings ... so many more. Weirdest of these might be Don Marquis’ poems. He claimed they’d been written by Archie the cockroach, in love with a cat. Archie told of his love by plunging off the edge of a typewriter, head first, onto one key at a time. The very terse verse that resulted said much about the human condition. He writes,
coarse
jocosity
catches the crowd
shakespeare
and i
are often
low browed
But books and poems weren’t enough to make this edgy new language change how we talked with one another. The new talking movies were about to finish the job. They offered a contest between British formal speech and American wisecracking. Wisecracking soon won out. Profanity would come much later. But we were, for now, trying to speak like James Cagney and Mae West -- clipped and sassy.
As I grew up in that world, I developed what I now see were some bad habits. Those movies had not told us how to speak without inflicting pain. We learned the quick jabs of Cary Grant, and Joan Blondell.
I love those old movies. But then, if I may paraphrase the Bible, “When I was a child I spoke as a child. But then I grew up.” Still, the useful remnant of this might be an understanding of brevity’s value. I hope we can remember that part and put it to better use.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
I grant that much of what I’ve said is subjective. However,
Here is an analysis of speech evolution in the movies: A J Jucker and D. Landert: The diachrony of im/politeness in American and British Movies (1930-2019). Journal of Pragmatics, 209, 2023, pp 123-141.
One can check Wikipedia for articles about each of the authors or movie stars I mention.
Articles about:
Ogden Nash | The Poetry Foundation
Dorothy Parker | The Poetry Foundation
Don Marquis’s “Archy and Mehitabel” poems: Three Archy poems by Don Marquis – Scripturient. See also, the Britannica article about Marquis: Don Marquis | Humorist, Poet, Satirist | Britannica
This article is about slang of the 1930s. These are the words that echo through those early movies: 1930s Slang | YourDictionary
I Googled “English language grows sassy in the 1930s and got this rather startlingly lengthy site. Make of it what you will!
My thanks to Richard Armstrong and Jacinta Carlson for their counsel.
Images are from Wikimedia Commons and a book jacket.
This episode first aired on August 4, 2025