Many conflicts with maturity arise in coming of age literature. (163.) That guy Morrow was aboutas sensitiveas a goddamtoilet seat. Then she reallystartedto cry, andthe next thing I knew, I was kissingher all over-anywhere-her eyes, her nose,her forehead, her eyebrows andall, her ears-her whole face except her mouthand all. God damn it-I’m warning ya’ (42). Thus, Holden’s crap is used in seven different ways. 7. The Catcher in the Rye, in replicating speech patterns in written language. ‘) or unfavorably (‘Then she turned her back on me again. The Use of Language in J.D. Salinger's `The Catcher in the Rye' Critic: Carl F. Strauch, Winter, 1961, pp. ‘l” i. CharlesKaplan,’HoldenandHuck: the Odysseys of Youth,’College English,XVI (1956), 8o. She’d give Allie or I a push. An apparent gap between childhood and adulthood emerged and this text targeted that gap. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our, The whole doc is available only for registered users. org/page/info/about/policies/terms. Such speech includes both simple description and cursing. Again, Holden’s sporadic use of “sonuvabitch” in his angriest moments alerts the reader to the serious quality of his anger.if(typeof __ez_fad_position != 'undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-studyboss_com-banner-1-0')}; Salinger carefully crafted such speech patterns to help us identify Holden’s character without lengthy descriptions of such. (73.) Rather than successfully rebelling against school or his parents, Holden appears sometimes tortured and pathetic, and sometimes just plain silly.if(typeof __ez_fad_position != 'undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-studyboss_com-leader-1-0')}; This superficiality of youth leaves him with little ability to communicate because he relies so heavily on simple words and thoughts to express the majority of his feelings. What Holden Says. His fallacy he and is ab unodisceomnes; abstracts generalizeswildly. Here, the offending words lets the reader know when Holden is most angry and the types of situations that make him so, thereby offering further insight into his character, often through the use of a single word. Salinger about a typical adolescent struggling to accept the ugliness of the society and transitioning into an adult. It can refer simply to that specific part of the body (‘I moved my ass a little’), or be a part of a trite expression (‘freezing my ass off’; ‘in a half-assed way’), or be an expletive (‘Game, my ass. (69.) ‘ Stanley Kunitz, of Queens College, wrote: ‘The only novelist I have heardpraisedvociferously is J. D. Salinger. 188. If additional in regardwith which The Catcher the Rye is held by today’s only look at the phenomenal college students,who were about Holden’s age at the time the book was written. THE LANGUAGEOF ‘THE CATCHERIN THE RYE’ 173 he language of Holden Caulfield,the book’s sixteen-year-old narrator,struck the ear of the contemporaryreader as an accurate rendering of the informal speech of an intelligent, educated, Northeastern American adolescent. (34.) I also say ‘Boy! Quite imaginative effective, and terribly dramatically entirelyoriginal;andthese are inspired, As always,Salinger’s Holdenis basicallytypical,with a strongoverfunny. finds this habit indicative of Holden’s Donald Barr, writing in the Commonweal, to generalize, to find the all in the one: tendency of has Salinger an ear not only for idiosyncrasies dictionandsyntax,but for mentalprocesses. The American Dialect Society and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Speech. It is hazardousto conclude that any of Holden’s slang has a precise and consistent meaning or function. No one has time to read them all, but it’s important to go over them at least briefly. This material is available only on Freebooksummary, We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. One literary precedent stands out strikingly: The Catcher in the Rye is a kind of updating of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Language in Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. 172-181 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http:/www. “Turd” is a word a recently potty-trained child might use instead of a prep school teen. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, Gun Control in The United States of America, Get Into Your #1 College With PrepScholar.com. does not come fromits unBut all of the humorin Holden’svocabulary the contrary,some of his figuresof speech are quality. Catcher in the Rye is about some phony named Holden Caulfield. if I’ma pacifist, youwantto knowthetruth. (16S), and ‘I sort of missed them. If an adult has every gotten on your case about uptalk, vocal fry, or saying “like” all the time, you get the point of Catcher in the Rye—you and Holden might say different things in different ways, but you both speak the same language: teenager. cit. The word appears in the novel four times, but only when Holden disapprovingly discusses its wide appearanceon walls. And yet there has never been an extensive investigation of the language itself. (Bloom, 1990).if(typeof __ez_fad_position != 'undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-studyboss_com-box-3-0')}; At the time of the novel through today, Holden’s speech rings true to the colloquial speech of teenagers. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff,’ WesternHumanities Review, X (1956), 136. Sometimes the repetition is exact: ‘He was a very nervous guy-I mean he was a very nervous guy. (43.) ” In each of the above instances, Holden makes a statement then feels compelled to clarify that is he is not making it up but is, in fact, telling the truth. But authentic by and interesting as this languagemay be, it must be rememberedthat it exists, in in The Catcher the Rye, as only one part of an artistic achievement. The only pattern that can be discovered in Holden’s use of this term is that he usually uses it only after he has previously mentioned the character; he then feels free to append the familiar old. is very easy for Holden to turn nounsinto with the imple addition a -y: ‘perverty,’ of ‘vomity’Christmasy,’ adjectives, ‘show-offy,’ ‘flitty-looking,’ looking,’ ‘whory-looking,’ ‘hoodlumy-looking,’ ‘pimpy,”snobby,”fisty. ‘ No one familiar with prep-school speech could seriously contend that Salinger overplayed his hand in this respect. 178 AMERICANSPEECH Even Holden’s nonhabitual easily as unimaginative. It has been translated widely. Because he did not do well in school, Holden may have felt as though no one ever took him seriously and realized his actions left him with no solid academic standing. It has It has JING Jing, Master, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Changchun University ” Holden’s perception that situations were anything but normal in some relation to the extremes of the usage of “hell” is applied to both positive and negative situations. The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by J. D. Salinger, partially published in serial form in 1945–1946 and as a novel in 1951. Throughout the years, the language of the story has startled some readers. It soundedlike a real kid. in Most critics who looked at The Catcher the Rye at the time of its publication thought that its languagewas a true and authentic rendering of teenage colloquial speech. Throughout the reading of the text a large amount of graphic language is used by the narrator. He wanted to see the characteristics a child possesses like an adult such as generosity, kindness, innocence and impulsiveness. Ibid. Ass keeps a fairly restricted meaning as a part of the human anatomy, but it is used in a variety of ways. Often Holden seems to choose his words consciously, in an effort to communicate to his adult reader clearly and properly, as in such terms as ‘lose my virginity,’ ‘relieve himself,’ ‘an alcoholic’; for upon occasion, he also uses the more vulgar terms ‘to give someone the time,’ ‘to take a leak,’ ‘booze hound. A student who showed the self-consciousness of Holden would not write so many fragments, such afterthoughts (e. g., ‘It has a very good academic rating, Pency’ [7]), or such repetitions (e. g., ‘Where I lived at Pency, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms’ [i8]). Holden’s regular use of curse words to describe his view of any given situation leaves the impression his vocabulary is limited, as observed in one much younger than himself. Holden is also conscious, of course, of the existence of ‘taboo words. Heiserman and Miller are able to find characterizationin this habit too: The skepticisminherentin that casualphrase,’if you want to know the truth,’ suggesting that as a matterof fact in the world of Holden Caulfieldvery few peopledo, characterizes this sixteen-year-old ‘crazymixedup kid’ more sharplyand vividly than pagesof character ‘analysis’possibly could. An intelligent, educated boy, Holden possesses, and can use when he wants to, many words THE LANGUAGEOF ‘THE CATCHERIN THE RYE’ 179 which are many a cut above Basic English, including ‘ostracized,’ ‘exhibitionist,’ ‘unscrupulous,”conversationalist,”psychic,’ ‘bourgeois. They and Both bastard sonuvabitch no longer, of course, in Holden’s vocabulary, have any connection with the accidents of birth. See reviews in America, LXXV (August 11, 1951), 463, 464; Atlantic, CLXXXVI Part 4, p. 3; ChristianScienceMonitor, July 19, 195 1, p. 9; Library journal, LXXVI (i95 i), 1125; Times [London] LiterarySupplement,September 7, 1951, p. 561; Manchester Guard- CLXXIV World, July 15, ‘951, (195i), 8z; Catholic (i95I), I54; ChicagoSundayTribune, ian, August o10,195, p. 4; Nation,CLXXI (Septemberj, 1951), 176; New. Today we study The Adventuresof Huckleberry in (with which many critics have compared The Catcher the Rye) not only as a great work of literary art, but as a valuable study in 1884 dialect. Holden is, in fact, not only aware of the existence of ‘grammaticalerrors,’but knows the social taboos that accompany them. Sentences such as ‘You could tell old Spencer’d got a big bang out of buying it’ (i o) and ‘I’d’ve killed him’ (42) are repeated throughout the book. But if Holden’s slang shows the typically ‘lousy vocabulary’ of even the educated American teenager, this failing becomes even more obvious when we narrow our view to Holden’s choice of adjectives and adverbs. Salzman, 1991). So Holden not only admits to having a limited vocabulary, but he has a vocabulary seemingly limited to one even younger than his age. (19 1.) ‘ and may be, it can, nevertheless, Repetitious trite as Holden’svocabulary when Holdenpiles one trite adjective becomehighlyeffective. 4z.) Holden uses the phrases to be a lot of crap and to shootthe crap and to chuckthe crapall to mean ‘to be untrue,’ but he can also use to shootthe crapto mean simply ‘to chat,’ with no connotationof untruth,as in ‘I certainly wouldn’t have minded shooting the crap with old Phoebe for a while. But as there are exceptionsin his in itself, in his word figuresof speech,so are thereexceptions his vocabulary well-read(‘I’m quite illiterate,but I read a lot’), and stock. As Holden’s experiences change, so does his use of crude language. This use of killedis one of Holden’s favorite slang expressions. Like most colloquial uses of body parts, accidents of birth, or religious connotations, Holden does not strictly make use of words in reference to their original meaning. To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below: Get your own essay from professional writers. The Etymology and Symbolism of Characters' Names; The Maturation of Holden Caulfield and Henry Fleming Although always in character, the rest of Holden’s speech is more typical than individual. )3 or I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamautobiography anything (5.. .. splendid’and and clear-thinking all (6.) The language used in The Catcher in the Rye has been a topic of controversy in the literary critics realm. I have never heard any Salinger partisanamong college students doubt the authenticityof the languageof Holden. Indeed, the language of the novel is one of the reasons critics considered the novel groundbreaking and controversial upon its initial publication. However, when he addresses the reader as a narrator, Holden rarely, if ever, slips into his habitual use of swearing (Costello, 1990). His most common rule violation is the misuse of lie and lay, but he also is careless about relative pronouns (‘about a traffic cop that falls in love’), the double negative (‘I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it’), the perfect tenses (‘I’d woke him up’), extra words (‘like as if all you ever did at Pency was play polo all the time’), pronoun number (‘it’s pretty disgusting to watch somebody picking their nose’), and pronoun position (‘I and this friend of mine, Mal Brossard’). The use of colloquial idioms is one of the most unique and characteristic aspects of Holden Caulfield's idiolect in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. ‘”0Holden appends this word to almost every character, real or fictional, mentioned in the novel, from the hated ‘old Maurice’ to ‘old Peter Lorre,’ to ‘old Phoebe,’ and even ‘old Jesus. The stronger and or usually more offense for Chrissake Jesus or Jesus Christare used habitually and Stradlater;but Holden uses them only when he feels the need by Ackley in for a strong expression. ‘ has Sonuvabitch an even stronger meaning to Holden; he uses it only in the deepest anger. Salinger writes The Catcher in the Rye in an informal, colloquial, stream of conscious style. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. 7-75 ISSN: 1137-6368 Translating colloquial idioms/metaphors in The Catcher in the Rye translation (Nida's Equivalent Effect). (43-) can And his limitedvocabulary also be used for good comic effect. Hell is perhaps the most versatile word in Holden’s entire vocabulary; it serves most of the meanings and constructions which Mencken lists in his AmericanSpeech 176 AMERICAN SPEECH article on ‘American Profanity. the Old Marty was like dragging Statueof Liberty aroundthe floor. Specifically, I was concerned with the two novels, The Catcher in the Rye and The Chocolate War. ‘ But Holden uses these phrases to such an overpowering degree that they become a clear part of the flavor of the book; they become, more, a part of Holden himself, and actually help to characterizehim. He was faced with the artistic task of creating an individual character, not with the linguistic task of reproducingthe exact speech of teenagers in general: Yet Holden had to speak a recognizableteenage language, and at the same time had to be identifiable as an individual. For example, a another, strongpowerof invectiveis often the result: upon He was a goddam stupid moron. jstor. (44.) Accessed: 30/01/2011 11:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at. It simply expresses an emotional feeling toward the object: either favorable, as in ‘goddam hunting cap’; or unfavorable, as in ‘ya goddam moron’; or indifferent, as in ‘coming in the goddam windows. Salinger. All we can conclude from Holden’s slang is that it is typical teenage slang: versatile yet narrow, expressive yet unimaginative,imprecise, often crude, and always trite. Title/Author: The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. (64.) We have already seen that Holden’s most common simile is the worn and meaningless’as hell’; but his often-repeated ‘like a madman’ and ‘like a bastard’are just about as unrelated to a literal meaning and are 9. THE LANGUAGEOF ‘THE CATCHERIN THE RYE’ 175 Holden uses this phrase only after affirmations,just as he uses ‘It really does,’ but usually after the personalones, where he is consciously being frank: I haveno wind,if youwantto knowthetruth. The was not written for itself, but as a part of a greater whole. This is especially obvious for readers who are fluent in, or are native speakers of American English. The narrative structure is one of a story frame. The structure of Holden’s sentences indicates that Salinger thinks of the book more in terms of spoken speech than written speech. )… right in the pocketandall (7.) I have no wind, if you want to know the truth,” “I’m pacifist, if you want to know the truth,” and a variation: “She had a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know. She kills me. Although Holden’s slang is rich and colorful, it, of course, being slang, often fails at precise communication. 5. He fails to notice that his cursing loses much of his intended rebellious impact by his overuse of the words. Whenever The Catcher theRye is substantially after the quotation. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. comic effect. In coming in decades, The Catcher the Rye will be studied, I feel, not only as a literary also as an example of teenage vernacularin the 1950s. Page Number. of You’rea dirty stupidsonuvabitch a moron. have also drastically changed in meaning. There is also an increase in this language when any of the characters are excited or angry. The use of language in J.D. Thus, we have such phrases as ‘They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pency’ and ‘It has a very good academic rating, Pency’ (7). Holden’s phrase ‘shooting the bull’ is just an informal replacement for ‘passing the time by talking’ or ‘making small-talk’. jstor. I decided to create a hermeneutical analysis of colloquial language, specifically profanity, and apply this analysis to discuss high school reading curriculum. ‘ “s S. N. Behrman, in the New Yorker, finds a double function of these ‘perpetual insistences of Holden’s.