Chapter 1
Language in a Mediated World

Mad Men in a Modern Family World

On November 7, 2012, the political commentator Matthew Dowd said that the GOP had become "a Mad Men party in a Modern Family world." His comment was meant to partially explain the reelection of Barack Obama; however, when I heard it I was struck by his use of two popular television shows as the metaphorical representation for that morning's political reality. The fact that his comment was repeated frequently and posted to social media venues like Facebook and Twitter illustrates its resonance. What he seemed to mean with the first part was that the GOP was living in, and appealing to, a past in which the leaders of the party were the same kinds of white, upper-class, men in their thirties, forties, and fifties depicted as the main characters in the series Mad Men (2007-2015), a show set in a 1960s Manhattan advertising agency and renowned for its realistic connection to a specific time and place but as seen through an early twenty-first-century set of eyes. The show also captures the start of the transition in the United States from post-World War II sensibilities about the homogeneity of political and social life to a seemingly messier engagement with heterogeneity.

Dowd contrasts the world of Mad Men with the one that is presumably more centrally located in 2012, namely the diverse suburban California world inhabited by the extended family depicted in Modern Family (2009- ). On Modern Family, the social hierarchies are transparently unstable, shifting as scenes and relationships change. It is never entirely clear who, if anyone, is "in charge," and as Gina Bellafante (2013) notes about the show, it "[mainstreams] the various and sweeping changes in domestic life." Modern Family captures the contemporary outcomes of many of the nascent changes caught by Mad Men. Through its lens, the focus of attention shifts from a political, public, and domestic life that was idealized as homogenous to one that celebrates its diversity.

Of further interest in this analogy is the fact that Mad Men is a modern testament to historical detail and to capturing a feel of a time, while also critiquing that very time and many of the values and personal qualities the characters of the show hold as dear and inevitable. It's by design that the kings of Mad Men are womanizers and that the few people of color who populate their world rise no higher in the social hierarchy than the hired help. On the other hand, Modern Family presents an idealized view of the modern suburban United States and captures a feel of the early part of the twenty-first century. The show attempts to portray the messiness of difference. At the same time, the show celebrates the power of things that are shared, like family connections, shared histories, love. Like Mad Men, Modern Family is visually of its time, with a deep embedding of electronic forms of communication and "mockumentary" moments in which characters let the audience in on their true feelings even if they don't actually share those feelings with the other characters.

While neither show is specifically about language (and, in fact, few media products ever are), language is of course an inextricable component of both shows and helps to sustain the general settings, the internal consistency of the characters, and the unfolding of both the broad and the narrow narrative arcs. Language can function this way primarily because of what linguists refer to as variation, by which they broadly mean alternative ways of using grammar, of pronouncing vowels and consonants, of structuring conversations, and of selecting particular words over other similar words. The Mad Men and their families are mostly not the New Yorkers depicted in films like the Midnight Cowboy (1969) or shows like All in the Family (1971-1979) - audiovisual products set in roughly the same time period in the Manhattan of the 1960s and 1970s. They are not Taxi Drivers or George Jeffersons. They speak in ways that provide consistency for their characters as "masters of their own destiny." They use Standard American English and the general linguistic style that modern audiences associate with aristocrats and the Golden Age of film and television. They use a formal style no matter the situations in which they find themselves. As John McWhorter (2009) writes:

More generally, however, the writers at Mad Men seem to have an idea that in the early sixties, people spoke more "properly" than they do now. And they did, in formal and public settings. Until the late sixties, there was a sense that language was to be cosseted and dressed up in public in the same way that one wore deodorant. Think of the old gesture of clearing your throat before Making a Speech, the speech having been carefully written out and practiced, as opposed to today when we prefer looser "talks."

This same style is interestingly echoed in Modern Family in the character of Manny, the half-grown son of the one non-native English speaker in the cast of characters. Manny's speech style is extremely formal in virtually all settings and contrasts directly with the much more casual style of most of the other characters. Each of the characters is a recognizable type and their language supports their typification: for example, the spacey, shallow teenage girl; the brainy, nerdy teenage girl; the sexy Colombian wife and mother; the geeky, gadget-obsessed white dad who tries too hard to be cool; the flamboyant gay uncle; and, yes, even a gruff, old, white master of the universe in the family's patriarch. While all the characters save the non-native speaker of English use more or less Standard English, just like the characters in Mad Men, it is a Standard English that relies on variation to help distinguish the characters from one another. The older teenage daughter peppers her lines with 'like'; the goofy younger son says 'dude,' as does his trying-to-stay-hip father. One of the gay uncles uses extremely precise color terminology, and both uncles are masters of snark.

Even though Modern Family and Mad Men differ in fundamental ways, their similarities as contemporary media products make them available as metaphorical reference points. While Matthew Dowd's quote was a comment on politics, it also serves as a useful illustration of why I've written this book. People use media broadly as a way of understanding, organizing, and categorizing their experiences. Matthew Dowd could have made his critique, as many others did, based on some of the actual political events and players, but doing so would have missed the nuance and creativity that the juxtaposition between Mad Men and Modern Family specifically highlighted. For as much as the facts of our actual lives influence our perceptions and understandings, the facts of our stories do the same. As I'll show throughout this book, language has an important place as part of the package we use for those perceptions and understandings.

Why Does a Linguist Care about Mad Men or Modern Family?

Before moving too deeply into the substance of language within the mass media, it's important to understand the specific perspective of this book and me as its author. Language is a topic in which many different kinds of people, including many different kinds of scholars, take keen interest. While ostensibly talking about the "same" issue when we focus on "language," in fact linguists, including me, have a particular way of thinking about language and of posing questions related to language. A linguist is someone focused on the broad understanding of language as a characteristic of the human species, an understanding that is oriented fundamentally around the question, "What do you know when you know a language?"

Answering that question leads us in various directions, and linguists explore lots of different things about language - from the details of the sounds of language, how speakers of languages create words and sentences, how language changes over time and what constrains that change, how meaning works, how writing is related to speech, how children acquire language, how adults acquire new languages, how language comes to be understood as a resource for social information, what things languages have in common, and in what ways languages differ. Regardless of the wide variety of questions and conversations about language that linguists find intriguing, virtually all of them are united by an interest in what it is about human beings that makes us language users. Linguists also tend to agree that even though all humans are predisposed toward becoming users of language, one critical ingredient must trigger that process. In order to become language users we require some kind of linguistic input, and the primary mechanism by which we get the input is through interaction with other people.

Social interaction is not only the source of our language input, though; it is also one of the major functions facilitated by language. As we interact with one another, we constantly monitor both our own speech and that of the people we're interacting with, sometimes shifting our language to be more like that of those we're interacting with and...