Fasten your seatbelt, kiddo, we’re going over a bumpy bit of language, another little pot-hole on the rocky road of thought, this puppy yclept — no hyphen, please — “multitasker.” The word is popping up of late with a fair regularity in that thesaurus of faux pas, that ample warehouse of wretched excess, the New York Times. “I’m a great multitasker,” Monique Greenwood, the new editor of Essence, recently announced in the business section of the paper. Miss Greenwood also runs an 18-room bed-and-breakfast and a 72-seat restaurant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, and she has no intention of dropping them because of her new job. Essence has more than a million readers, but, hey, no sweat, the woman is, as she herself says, a great multitasker.
The test for a new word seeking entry into the language is need; I would also allow beauty and simple amusement. In a recent collection of Henry James’s letters, I note that James, that great unitasker, refers to an American visitor who arrived for a visit at his house in Rye at 1:30 and stayed until 6:30 as “New Yorkily conversing.” Adverbing New York is swell, and I intend to do it myself the first chance I get. I also happen to like “oojah-cum-spiff,” which stands for sheer perfection in the world of Bertie Wooster, though I haven’t as yet found many uses for it.
But, somehow, I don’t think we need multitasker. I say this despite the fact that I come from a long line of the dudes. More than a mere multitasker, my dear mother was a simultasker. On the phone with her, I would sometimes hear a metallic sound and, on inquiring what it might be, learn that she was stirring soup. Once she carried on a phone conversation with me while typing a letter, and as I recall it was a serious conversation. A very smart woman, she didn’t require all her powers to talk to her son, so why not, she figured, put some of them to other uses?
I may, at one point, have been a multitasker myself. I once had three different jobs: I edited a magazine, I taught at a university, I published enough of my own writing to come perilously close to qualifying as what Edith Wharton called a magazine bore. I had no notion at the time that I was a multitasker; I thought I was just trying to make a living. But my multitaskesqueness had quite as much to do with my intellectual modus operandi — or MO, as they say down at the station — which is always to have a big project going, then do six or seven other things to avoid doing what one is supposed to be doing on the big project. By evading taking on first things first, I have found, you can get a tremendous amount of work done.
Multitaskers interest me less than do what I think of as chaos merchants. These are those people — most of them, in my experience, men — who can keep on going when their lives are under attack from several quarters. These are the fellows who are in Chapter 11, being audited by the IRS, have been served with papers for non-payment by ex-wives, are cheating on their mistresses, have the mafia on their tail for juice money, couldn’t help noting that for the past 10 days they have been urinating blood — and yet seem, as near as one can make out, to be getting a great deal of pleasure out of life.
The hideous “multitasker” — it has a bad sound and a bad look (mul tit, ask ‘er) — is probably a digibabble-age replacement first for “moonlighting,” then for “Renaissance man.” Renaissance man was hugely, comically overused a decade or so ago. A physician who could write a clear English sentence on a non-medical subject, a baseball player who read a book, anyone who could watch television and breathe evenly — all were Renaissance men. When I heard Dick Cavett described as a Renaissance man, I found myself longing for the Reformation. One of the nice things about having been born during the Renaissance is that at least no one could call you a flamin’ Renaissance man.
What distinguishes the junk language of our day from the junk language of earlier days is that it is so quickly taken up by people who are supposed to — but of course don’t — know better: journalists, public figures, academics in high places with low tastes. Glimpsing a recent book about Henry James, I came across the phrase “James’s take on this question.” Henry James had a point of view, insights, observations, apercus, a striking pensee or two, yet I am certain that he didn’t do “takes,” ever. Before long I expect to find Leonardo or Michelangelo described as a multitasker.
Multitasker may be around for a while. For one thing, people enjoy the novelty of new words, especially — as multitasker surely is — self-congratulatory ones. For another, with more people working at home, I suppose there is likely to be more opportunity for spreading oneself over more than two or even three jobs and adding to the multitasker army. Multitasker is a word made for a certain kind of person, rain-makers, paradigm-shakers, out-of-the-box thinkers — serious jerks, in other words — and I wish them joy of it.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
