Dumb Britannia

The term "dumbing down" came into widespread use about two years ago. Its origins are obscure but unmistakably American. One of the features that have given it high currency is that you can't easily find a concise English-English equivalent (a small prize to anyone who can). You've known what it means all your life, but never until now had a handy word for it.

Initially the term was handled as something excitingly novel, exotic - and possibly barbarous (might we not be thought a little "vulgar" if we used it?). Newspaper leader-writers, with that pomposity only matched by British high court judges and Lord St John of Fawsley, would pick it up with rhetorical tongs as "that invaluable American term, `dumbing down'."

For a while "dumbing down" continued to be enclosed in quote marks, as something not quite English. That vestigial Podsnappery has recently dropped away and the term now walks naked through our discourse and journalism. It has been domesticated. And, just at the moment, it is ubiquitous. In a year or two, we may predict, "dumbing down" will begin to look hackneyed. Those ahead of the curve (whatever happened to that phrase?) will begin to shun the term. Like "political correctness" (whose day in the sun has passed) it will be introduced almost apologetically. The inverted commas will return, now to sanitise the user against the term's staleness. Possibly, like "PC", it will for a while be abbreviated to initials.

Finally it will drop out of sight, recorded only in the graveyard of Oxford's faithful dictionaries of slang as "informal; American; current in the late 1990s; now obsolete". A few years ago, Private Eye had a whole feature that ran for the best part of a year, as I recall, citing ripe examples of the word "situation" (as in "what we have here is a sexual harassment situation"). That cant term came and went. Ou sont les mots d'antan?

"Dumbing down" is not just an American loan word - something that we, as custodians of the English language, have borrowed. It is an alien compound that has colonised a small part of our master dialect, and has driven out a useful item of our own national lexicon in the process. This can be demonstrated by looking at the different national etymologies of the word "dumb". In English-English, from its Anglo-Saxon origins, "dumb" denotes "destitute of the faculty of speech" - or, by extension, "silent". Thus, in Shakespeare, Cordelia is "dumb" in the sense of not speaking ("I cannot heave my heart into my mouth"). Words, that is, fail her. Intelligence, or lack of it, does not come into it.

In English-English the term has traditionally been applied non-pejoratively to animals - "our dumb friends", as they used to be called. This doesn't mean a dog isn't smart; just that it can't pass the time of day with its owner. The term has had an entirely different character in American-English. There it is influenced by a different root, the German/ Yiddish "dumm", meaning "stupid", as in "Dummkopf". Thus, until a few years ago, the word "dummy" had entirely different meanings in Britain and in the US. Here it was a lump of rubber that you stuck into a baby's mouth to shut it up. Over there "dummy" meant someone who was as thick as two short planks. In recent years, the traditional English application has become infected by its American usage. So much so that the 1998 edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English recommends that "dumb" should not be used to denote "incapable of speech". Like the luckless word "niggardly", it has become, accidentally, highly offensive - even to English ears. You have now to say "deaf and speaking-impaired". We have, as I say, lost a word.

And, of course, we have gained a phrase. The term "dumbing down", as we have taken it over from America, is a "pejorative". That is to say, it carries strong negative associations. But what it indicates ("simplification") is not, in every social context, a bad thing. In the world of electronics for instance, where "dumbing down" is glossed as "user-friendliness", it is a very good thing. And yet, as most of us sitting at our keyboards know, there is nothing so dumb (American usage) as your average computer- user. The first question those invaluable help-line operators ask is: "Have you checked that your machine is plugged in?" "Er... no (gulp)." Computers make Forrest Gumps of us all.

In other contexts and discourses, "dumbing down" is seen as something highly desirable. There is, for example, a citizens' movement to reform legal jargon and make it comprehensible to the lay population. Doubtless elderly barristers at the Inns of Court mutter over their port about this as dumbing down the law. The rest of us see it as progress.

"Dumbing down" is a term that has been aggressively mobilised in two controversial contexts: education and the "culture wars". There it aligns itself with the perennial pessimistic tendency. Children are always less educated than their elders. This complaint could be found 50 years ago in Leavisite jeremiads about the irresistible rise of middle- and low- brow taste. It underlies the "Johnny can't read" panics in America in the Fifties and the British "Black Papers" of the Sixties.

The young always seem like know-nothings and philistines to their elders. There is no mystery about this. The generations know different things. I, for example, could not get into university without Latin and two modern languages. I was force-fed the King James Bible every school day. Not surprisingly, school-leavers whom I interview for university entrance who don't know ma plume from ma tante or can't recognise the joke in Monty Python's "Blessed are the cheesemakers" may strike me as pig-ignorant. But there is much that they know that I don't. Put them in front of a computer monitor and this will often become evident. Think of the generic "computer whiz". What do you see in your mind's eye? A greybeard or a wunderkind?

Secondly, it is not just that the young know different things; they know things differently. For the last 15 years I have taught English literature (as part of their humanities "requisite") to near-genius science students at the California Institute of Technology. One thing that perplexed me was that these precocious big-brains didn't seem able to remember literary detail: "That guy in that play," they would mumble: "Hamlet!" I'd snarl through gritted teeth. The reason, I worked out, was that they didn't see a reason to store such information, because they always knew where to retrieve it when needed.

My education, like that of most of my generation, was based on trained memory. I took all the important exams in my life with the necessary knowledge stored in my head. Today's students, the brightest of them, reserve their memory banks for knowing not things themselves but where to find those things. Not surprisingly they seem "dumb" to me. I seem a dinosaur to them.

In the culture wars, the "dumbing-down" issue is more complex. It's complicated by the polemical argument that dumb is good - that is, as it is manifested in childish innocence or sanctity. St Francis conversing with his animals as equals, Wordsworth's "idiot child" (who knows more than his parents), Dostoevsky's Holy Fool, and Forrest Gump - all assert the belief that brains aren't everything. There is, of course, a strong and nostalgic justification for this, confirmed by the Christian injunction that unless we become as little children we shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. None the less, the majority opinion is that smart is better. Is our culture, driven by the remorseless pursuit of sales and audience ratings, lobotomising us? Roger Scruton thinks so, and cites the popular music business ("Yoofanasia", as he calls it) as evidence. As Scruton argues, in his An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture: "Pop culture [which is, of course, no culture] is an attempt to provide easy-going forms of social cohesion, without the costly rites of passage that bring moral and emotional knowledge. It... has demoted the aesthetic object, and elevated the advert in its place; it has replaced imagination by fantasy and feeling by kitsch; and it has destroyed the old forms of music and dancing, so as to replace them with a repetitious noise."

There is an old-codger reflex in any reader over 30 that leads us to agree. But, if you look at Scruton's cited arguments, you realise that he hasn't really listened to what he dismisses (on the circularly prejudicial grounds that it isn't worth listening to). He is hard put to come up with five pop groups (grotesquely putting Michael Jackson and Oasis cheek by jowl). David Blunkett, on his part, thinks that TV cartoons are programmatically dumbing down our children. People think our diet of news and entertainment is less "demanding" than it used to be. Blunkett is wrong, I think. Has there ever been a wittier cartoon series than The Simpsons? It is true that the average adventure series, bought as a package from America, is nowhere near as good. But neither were B-movies in the Forties, from which we extract prime examples of film noir.

There is, I think, considerable hope in the cultural scene. I, as a teacher of literature, am heartened by the fact that there are now more "classic" titles in print than at any period in British cultural history. A culture in which Jane Austen (in film, TV and print) is a best-seller, where Shakespeare in Love is packing cinemas, and where Noel's House Party dies for lack of viewers, can't be all that dumb.

Over the coming days, the Dumb Britannia series will examine the ways in which "dumbing down" has been held to have had an impact on our social and cultural life. It will look at education, high art, popular culture and television and will attempt to draw conclusions as to what we really mean when we use the DD words.