by
Neil Postman
by
Neil Postman
The American humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the worrisome words in the English language, the scariest is "uh oh," as when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says, "Uh oh." I should like to suggest that the words which are the title of this [page] are ominous as any, all the more so because they are spoken without knitted brow--indeed, with a kind of idiot's delight. The phrase, if that's what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such it serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America.
"Now ... this" is commonly used on radio and television newcasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order of meaning and is not to be taken seriously...