Youngsters and oldsters communicating are like two travelers trying to rendezvous in some city that's equally foreign to both. They're in the same vicinity and they know it (both of them are certain of being "downtown" (or "uptown" or "in Chinatown," as the case may be)), and they're both walking around on their cell phones describing to each other the various landmarks around them in an attempt to orient themselves to each other's position. They're each viewing and describing the same skyscrapers and the same parks and the same plazas, but the one's descriptions never quite match those same landmarks' aspects that the other is witnessing at the time. And so the travelers end up looping round past each other over and again. Eventually, the sights that they're seeing start to match the descriptions that they've been hearing, and a common topography begins to emerge in their minds. If they can keep at it, they'll find each other. (Hell, if they wander around long enough then they'll eventually just stumble onto each other.) But often they run out of patience or minutes or both and they give up, and so they never end up meeting up and they must forever wonder what the other would have been like in person.
I don't mean to say that language is spacial. I was just being metaphorical. Of course, language is practiced in space and so there definitely can be geographical consequences to linguistic expression. For instance, people in the San Fernando Valley can't see the Hollywood sign, which makes them much less cool than the people in L.A, who bask in the sign's glamor. Conversely, the tribe whose village is out of earshot of the war drums isn't obligated to participate in the war, which must be a pretty sweet situation. But I don't think that the fact that language manifests itself in space makes language spacial per se.
I think that language is better thought of as a story, a chronology developed over time. And the spot where one lands on this chronology's timeline factors indelibly into one's understanding of the narrative. And these landings are arbitrary, as random as the day when your dad impregnated your mom. Yet our respective births and their timing, these mere historical accidents, frame and color our reality and our articulation of that reality.
For example, are you familiar with this new idiom: to "jump the shark"? It's been floating around for a decade or so, and it means to suddenly go from being lightly amusing and/or comedic to being profoundly serious and/or tragic. The term usually applies to TV shows, but it can be used to describe any ongoing creative endeavor (e.g., an advertising campaign, a comic strip, a periodical). Well, today at lunch one of my co-workers, about 25 years old, said that Taylor Swift had really jumped the shark with her new album, meaning that Swift's musicianship and songwriting skills had matured dramatically compared to her previous work and that Swift's newer songs' lyrics carried more poignancy and depth than the lyrics of her earlier songs. I asked this co-worker if she'd ever heard of The Fonz and of his role in the first shark jump, the jump from which the phrase "jumping the shark" was born, and she had no idea whom I was talking about. And so, as I shall explain below, I think that it's therefore fair to say that my co-worker didn't entirely know what she herself was talking about and that she was not in the best position to say whether or not Swift had truly jumped the shark.
Those of us over the age of forty will likely remember Arthur Fonzarelli from the sitcom Happy Days, which ran for about a decade through most of the 1970s and which was set in the 1950s. The Fonz, as Arthur was known, was a sort of lone-wolfish, young hoodlum from the wrong side of the tracks, and the show revolved around his relationship with Ritchie, a white-bread high schooler from the 'burbs, and Ritchie's bourgeois parents (Mr. and Mrs. C).
I s'pose that maybe "hoodlum" is too harsh of a characterization because I don't remember ever seeing The Fonz actually committing any crimes, at least not any malum in se crimes, but I will say that his means of support were obscure at best. He was a street tough, a shady sort of character, hangin' out on street corners at night with other tough guys, and who the heck really knows what's going on out there in the streets? Who can say? (I'm pretty sure they aren't just lickin' lollipops out there, though.) Anyway, The Fonz would occasionally pick up some work here and there as a mechanic, but he mainly just hung out, riding around town on his motorcycle and picking up chicks at the juke joint and staring down cops and squares from behind his sunglasses.
Technically, I think that Fonzie was a "greaser." I don't mean this pejoratively; it's just that he was of Italian descent, he maintained a menacing persona, and he slicked back his jet black hair. Also, he almost always dressed in a greaserly fashion (black leather jacket, tee shirt, jeans, boots).
Fonzie was a heavy, or at least he seemed like one. He intimidated almost everyone he met, and the implication was that his toughness was, at least partially, the result of a difficult childhood. As an orphan growing up during the Depression and then the war, he must've seen some nasty, naivety-shattering scenes as he roamed the mean streets of Milwaukee. The adversity that he'd faced and overcome lent Fonzie a certain gravitas, to be sure, but underneath his stern, badass demeanor was a strong current of joyful innocence. Outwardly, The Fonz posed as a brooder, but deep down he loved his life, and his joie de vivre was irrepressible. And in The Fonz' happy-go-luckiness lay his appeal (at least, for the first several seasons). He and Ritchie would get into their share of jams and rumbles, no doubt about it, but we always knew that everything would come to a happy, light-hearted conclusion by the end of the episode. We were safe with The Fonz; his confidence and his fundamentally easygoing nature ensured that any hijinks would end peacefully.
But then, about five seasons into the show, its producers at ABC decided to change Happy Days' format from a breezy comedy to a tragic drama. Having been pummeled in the ratings by more serious and thoughtful and somber shows, such as CBS' M*A*S*H, ABC executives decided that the American viewing public's tastes had changed. Nobody believed in Mayberry anymore, and nobody gave a shit about Opie or Beaver. There was a widespread and growing awareness that the world was a mess. People were pretending to still like disco, sure, but by then everyone had figured out that it was shit. Oil prices were through the roof, Idi Amin was eating people, inflation problems, Pol Pot, the PLO…life was a bitch, everybody knew it, and facing up to that fact had become part of the zeitgeist. The mega-hit movie of the day was Spielberg's Jaws, and this was emblematic of the culture. Mayhem, existential threats, and shark violence were problems that folks could relate to, indeed, problems to which folks needed to relate. People were scared, people were pissed, and people were generally interested in angst and discontent. ABC wasn't stupid; they went with the flow and decided to give the people what the people wanted.
And so we had "the episode," the Happy Days episode that took primetime TV to the next level of dramatic artistry. If I remember correctly, it was the season premier of the fifth or sixth season: Fonzie and the gang go vacationing in southern California and end up tussling with some surfer thugs…to defend Milwaukee's honor, The Fonz accepts a challenge to waterski over a penned shark, a confirmed man-eater…Fonzie wipes out and, to America's horror, the shark attacks him and eats his legs.
Suddenly Fonzie wasn't so funny anymore, and in a flash the show's title became imbued with irony. The remainder of that season dealt with The Fonz' painful and bitter rehabilitation, and things got awfully real awfully fast for Mr. Arthur Fonzarelli. All of his subconscious fears and torments had come to the surface after his accident, and so Fonzie was forced to wrestle with his insecurities around cowardice and fallibility and mortality. His agonizing psychological self-analysis, along with all the torturous physical therapies, proved too much for his girlfriend, Leather Tuscadero, who broke up with him in a heart-wrenching episode that ended with Ritchie telling The Fonz that Leather was right to leave and that he (The Fonz) had "sat on it long ago."
This excruciating drama continued on for years. Millions of schoolchildren stopped carrying their lunches in Happy Days lunchboxes, and it was instead their parents who were discussing the show. This, not so incidentally, is where we get the term "a Mr. Coffee show": each week, office workers across the country would dissect the previous night's Happy Days episode as they gathered around the company coffee maker.
Fonzie, having racked up a huge debt in medical bills, sought solace in the bottle and in the needle. The next season, he finally got clean and adopted a little orphan girl, but she died along with Ritchie and Mr. C when Mr. C's hardware store burned down. The next season, The Fonz again turned to alcohol and drugs to ease his anxiety, but this time he got mixed up with some Born-On-The-Fourth-Of-July Vietnam vet types, who ended up rejecting him when they discovered that his disability was the result of a shark rather than combat. "Ain't no fish scarier'n Charlie," they all said. The Fonz argued that none of the vets had even the slightest fucking clue how scary a shark attack was, but to no avail.
Fonzie later invented and patented some assistive technology that enabled amputees to ride motorcycles. His invention was basically a rolling stabilizer, similar to a set of training wheels, that automatically descended down from the bike's chassis whenever the speedometer went under 1.5 miles per hour. This stabilizer, when combined with a manual gearshift and a manual rear brake, promised motorcycling's thrills and delights to legless people everywhere.
Initially, Fonzie's bike-stabilizer was a huge success, but soon he was being sued by the estates of thousands of dead amputee-cyclists, the victims of traffic accidents around the globe. The Fonz' attorneys argued that, yes, but for The Fonz' adaptive equipment the amputees wouldn't have been riding motorcycles in the first place but that that didn't mean that Fonzie's equipment was the proximate cause of any of the plaintiffs' traffic accidents. "If you're worried about motorcycle crashes," they scoffed, "then don't ride a motorcycle, for Chrissake."
The Fonz' best-selling model, pretty much the Model T of bike-stabilizers, had been called the Icarus 3000, and so plaintiffs' attorneys argued that this name evidenced Fonzie's knowledge that his product was inherently dangerous. However, defense counsel countered that this reference to Icarus served as a disclaimer to all of the products' consumers, who knew or should have known of the inherent danger and therefore should be deemed as having assumed all risk. Fonzie's legal issues still hadn't been resolved when ABC canceled the series in the early 80s, when the Reagan era was ushering out the American public's fetish for tragedy.
Now, I'm not suggesting here that Taylor Swift's emotions are somehow not real or not important or that they're in any way less legitimate than The Fonz' emotions. I'm not seeking to trivialize or minimize or in any way diminish Swift's experiences and problems. (Well, actually, I suppose that I'd be happy to minimize and diminish her problems, assuming that she wanted me to do so and assuming that doing so was fairly easy.) Sure, Swift may have youth and beauty and talent and wealth and fame, etc., but these attributes can't protect a person from heartaches, especially not heartaches in the romance department, to which I'm assuming her songs relate. So I'm in no way trying to imply that Swift's feelings aren't profound or that she doesn't have the artistic chops to convey those feelings to her fans or that her fans (such as my 20-something co-worker) can't genuinely understand and be moved by Swift's pathos. I'm just saying that unless you were there with The Fonz when he jumped that shark, unless you witnessed that horrifying attack and its aftermath, then you can't really know Fonzie's pain and you can't really know the strength that it took for him to recover (not that anyone ever truly recovers from something like that) and you can't really know what it means to jump the shark.
