what’s up

The Finnish comedian Ismo has a nice routine in which he describes how hard it is to learn the nuances of spoken English. The best-known part of the routine (justifiably!) is when he explains why he thinks the most complicated word in English is “ass.” But I also like his comment that it took him a long time to learn that the proper response to the phrase “What’s up?” … is the phrase “What’s up”?

I thought about that when I took a look at an essay many people have recently recommended: this one by Nathan Pinkoski. The first sentence of the essay is: “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed.” And my first thought at reading that first sentence was: Has it? Has it really? Because, you know, a whole lot of what I see around me looks a great deal like what I saw around me in the twentieth century. I mean, many things have definitely changed — there’s a lot more internet, for instance. But we have the same banking system, the same car manufacturers, the same hostilities in the Middle East, the same attempts to “dismantle the canon” in university English departments, the same tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the same dumb artistic provocateurs making the same dumb provocations. We’re voting the same way we voted in the twentieth century, except that more of us get to vote early. We’re less religious then we were fifty years ago, but more religious than at other times in our history, and in any case there doesn’t yet seem to be a obvious correlation between irreligion and civilizational collapse.

But that’s just in America. What about elsewhere? Well, immigration has altered European civilization, but “collapse” seems even there to be a strong word. China and India are richer and more powerful than they were in the twentieth century; China in particular may be headed for trouble, but “collapse”?

I could go on, but you get the point.

Who didn’t get the point was me, who for a moment took Pinkoski’s statement as a declaration of fact. My bad! It was actually a liturgical greeting, as when we Anglicans exchange the Peace in the middle of the Eucharistic rite. Technically we should (I think) be saying (1) “The peace of the Lord be always with you” followed by (2) “And also with you.” But usually we say (1) “The peace of the Lord” and (2) “The peace of the Lord.”

Similarly, people who (like me) grew up as University of Alabama football fans know how to greet each other: Salutation: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.” Response: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.”

Initially, I took Pinkoski’s first sentence as a statement of fact when in fact it was a tribal salutation, the proper response to which is the same phrase: (1) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?” (2) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?”

But I’m not a member of that tribe, so I didn’t say the phrase. Nor did I read any further. The essay clearly wasn’t meant for me, and it was kind of Pinkoski to begin with the tribal salutation that informed me of that.