"We must not leave the topic of the reading of the middle class without noticing the impact of its audience on American prose style. Its terror of ideology, opinion, and sharp meaning, which we've seen before in its visual tastes, are the main cause of the euphemism, jargon, and verbal slop that wash over us. The middle-class anxiety over the 'controversial' is the reason The New Yorker rarely runs unfavorable book reviews: too upsetting to the clientele. Better for language first to ingratiate and finally, by waffling, vagueness, and evasion, to stay out of trouble altogether. The prose demanded by the middle class is preeminently that of institutional advertising, and it's manufactured by the most cunning corporations to imitate the faux-naif sound of The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town.' The Mobil Oil Corporation is skilled in act, going in for just-folks confessions of ignorance ("we didn't know ... either") and assertions of the banal, as if avoidance of it invited accusations of elitism. 'The world did not come to an end on Wednesday, March 10 [1982], as some people had feared,' it tells us on an ad a week later:
True, the planets were aligned in syzygy on that day -- meaning that they were all on the same side of the sun. (We didn't know the meaning of the word syzygy either, so we looked it up....) If the world isn't coming to an end in the foreseeable future, why not make it a better place in which to live?
"That last will remind us of the indispensability of cliché to middle-class understanding. Where the more fortunately educated read to be surprised, the middle class reads to have its notions confirmed, and deviations from customary verbal formulas disconcert and annoy it."
-- Paul Fussell, Class, 1983 (Ballentine Books, New York; ISBN 0-345-31816-1; LC Card # 83-12637), pp. 168-169
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