JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. Today, eight experiments in translation.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Lesson number three. They called it shell shock. [speaking foreign language.] Now you try.]

JAD: In this one, Robert Krulwich and our producer Soren Wheeler talk to writer Adam Gopnik about George Carlin.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And why is George Carlin mentioned?

ADAM GOPNIK: Oh, because Carlin is the wonderful sort of folk philosopher of language.

ROBERT: You're talking about the comedian George Carlin?

ADAM GOPNIK: The comedian, yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: And this next thing, this next thing is about the English language. It's about little expressions we use, we all say. And the little sayings and expressions that we use all the time.]

ADAM GOPNIK: It was one of his great subjects.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: And we never really seem to examine these expressions.]

ADAM GOPNIK: And all the more interesting because he was—he didn't even have a high school education. You know, so it was not something that he got from schooling.

SOREN WHEELER: And one of Gopnik's favorite Carlin riffs, and I really like this one too, is about how Carlin ...

ADAM GOPNIK: Hated euphemism.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms. And American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.]

ADAM GOPNIK: And Carlin was wonderful about things like that. About bull [bleep] as he called it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: And we have no more old people in this country. No more old people. We shipped them all away and we brought in these 'senior citizens.' Isn't isn't that a tip?]

ADAM GOPNIK: And he was like, the reason we use euphemism. I just been through—my father-in-law died four months ago. And we went through those same horrible business that we all go through in a intensive-care ward where the doctors and nurse practitioners have a language that they've been taught. "We just want your father to be comfortable. He's gravely ill." "He's gravely ill" means he's dying, right? And "we want him to be comfortable" means can we give him enough drugs so that he'll pass out before he dies, and so on. And so it's certainly true that euphemism can be a repellent thing. But no one is fooled. What we're mocking is the absurdity of the effort to disguise something that you cannot disguise.

SOREN: But Carlin's real point was that it, like, dulls our reactions to it. That it actually has, like, a kind of a negative effect.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: And it gets worse with every generation.]

SOREN: And he has this whole bit. It's about shell shock becoming PTSD.

ADAM GOPNIK: No, he goes—no, it goes—it's in four different things.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: In the First World War, that condition was called shell shock.]

ADAM GOPNIK: They used to call it shell shock.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Simple, honest direct language. Two syllables: shell shock.]

ADAM GOPNIK: And then it became ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Battle fatigue.]

ADAM GOPNIK: Battle fatigue.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say, doesn't seem to hurt as much.]

ADAM GOPNIK: And then after it became battle fatigue, then it became ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Operational exhaustion. Hey, we're up to eight syllables now!]

ROBERT: [laughs]

ADAM GOPNIK: Then it became post-traumatic shock disorder.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen!]

ADAM GOPNIK: And then it became PTSD.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Post-traumatic stress disorder. The pain is completely buried under jargon.]

ROBERT: This was the Orwell notion that you could erase sensitivities if you blanded out the words. So if you stop saying, "Oh yeah, we just tortured the guy," if you say some phrase ...

ADAM GOPNIK: Force of interrogation or enhanced interrogation.

SOREN: That makes a big difference. And part of what Carlin is saying is that, like, now that it's PTSD, we are not having the appropriate reaction to it. I mean, it's [bleep] shell shock.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: I'll bet you if we'd have still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll bet you that.]

ADAM GOPNIK: But now you're putting your finger on the—this is where the rubber meets the road. Does the use of euphemism, does that really rob us of some understanding?

SOREN: And Adam Gopnik, surprisingly, says maybe not.

ADAM GOPNIK: The truth is just the opposite. We actually have more of an apparatus to help people with PTSD than they did in 1915 to help guys with shell shock. The reason the word gets more abstract is exactly because you have a much more complicated abstract system of support. It's not because ...

ROBERT: Do you think that's the reason it's called PTSD is because it's a more complex and ...?

ADAM GOPNIK: Yes, because think about what that evolution says. The initial thing was oh, these guys are being driven crazy because the shells are exploding all around them on the Western Front.

SOREN: Gopnik says the thinking was, you know, it was temporary. The shell goes off. It explodes in a moment. They have a moment of shock and they need a moment of rest, and then they can go back in. But by World War II, we were thinking that's not quite right.

ADAM GOPNIK: It's not just shells exploding, right? It's the whole experience of battle.

SOREN: It's all the shooting and the death and the fear.

ADAM GOPNIK: So it becomes 'battle fatigue'. You're trying to generalize it. You're trying to make it richer. That's the concept.

SOREN: But it also becomes fatigue versus shock. There's less violence in that.

ADAM GOPNIK: Right. Because it—because you're looking at guys who may not exhibit the symptoms of shock necessarily, but over time it becomes impossible for them to go on. There's a wonderful film from World War II called Let There Be Light.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Let There Be Light: These are the casualties of the spirit. The troubled in mind. Men who are damaged emotionally.]

ADAM GOPNIK: About guys with what they were then calling 'battle fatigue.' And the reason they were calling it that was because you didn't necessarily see it right away.

SOREN: Then around Vietnam, he says, we realized you don't just see this on the battlefield, you see it with guys who aren't necessarily directly involved in battle.

ADAM GOPNIK: Right.

SOREN: And so the question became ...

ADAM GOPNIK: What's the source of it? It's—you say well, it's nervous exhaustion. You say the human nervous system can only take it for so long, and then everybody's nervous system shuts down.

SOREN: Hence the term 'operational exhaustion.'

ADAM GOPNIK: Now that's an example again where you're trying to enrich it. You're saying the guys aren't cowards, they're not in a state of shock. They're behaving the way all human beings do. And then you get more concerned about them, and you say the real problem isn't their—just their experience on the battlefield, the problem is is that they're in a constant state of disorder, because it lingers on long after you think it's over. You can't just get these guys into a hospital for six months and think they're going to be better. They are permanently—they have post-traumatic shock. And then once you have a whole apparatus to deal with it, then it becomes PTSD. My point is just that it's perfectly possible that the language of euphemism grows and becomes more abstract as—as people actually are becoming more empathetic to the people who suffer from it.

ROBERT: Soren, do you buy—I mean, he's basically turned Carlin on his head, and he's made these blander and blander words enrichments.

SOREN: I have—I mean, my only move would be to hit play on Carlin.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George Carlin: Poor people used to live in slums. Now the economically-disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. And they're broke. They're broke. They don't have a negative cash flow position. They're [bleep] broke. Because a lot of them were fired. You know, fired?]

[Yankee Doodle Dandy sung in Italian]

-30-

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

Unlock member-only exclusives and support the show

Exclusive Podcast Extras

Entire Podcast Archive

Listen Ad-Free

Behind-the-Scenes Content

Video Extras

Original Music & Playlists

Unlock exclusives in The Lab

Sign up for the newsletter