I once appeared on a panel at the National Endowment for the Humanities with two women who talked about the importance of their secondary education. One was German and spoke reverently of the gymnasium she was fortunate enough to attend. The other, an American, spent her adolescence in France and mentioned her deep debt to the lycée that gave her so sound a grounding in the classics. When my turn came, I remarked how I envied them, and allowed that I had myself gone to a public high school in Chicago notable for its disadvantaged teachers.
I remember older women teaching in house slippers; a red-faced biology teacher who put the more bosomy girls in the front row, wrote out the pages of the textbook we were to read and which exercises at the end of the chapter to do, and promptly nodded off; gym coaches reeking of nicotine who did scarcely any coaching whatsoever. They represented the rich fruits of tenure in a public-school system.
One teacher I do remember fondly was Dr. Branz, a German émigré who taught a course called Commercial Law. He must have been a refugee from Hitler, with a doctor of laws degree; by the time he arrived in this country, I assume, he was too old to practice law, and so had to fall back on teaching the barbarian young of my high school. I cannot recall a single thing he taught. What I do remember is his instituting a system of fines for our misbehavior. If he caught any of us talking, or nodding off, or chewing gum, or not having read the day’s assignment, he would say, in a sing-song, heavily Teutonic accent, “That’s a nickel.” He used the nickels to pay for a picnic at the end of the term.
“That’s a nickel” is a refrain much heard over the past month or so chez Epstein. My wife and I, two not always successful Couéists—Émile Coué being the French psychologist who said, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”—have set out on another of our self-improvement programs. We are trying to eliminate the word “yeah” from our speech. Each time one of us fails, we pay a nickel fine, dropped into a large tin coffee mug, and announce, “That’s a nickel.”
A modest enough program, trying to eliminate a single word from one’s speech, or so one might think, and yet our success has been less than spectacular. I’d estimate that we currently have more than $15 in our cup or, in the good Yiddish word, pushkeh, and that’s a lot of yeahs. When first we set out, the nickels were flying. We are now down to lapsing into error as seldom as one or two times a day. Few are the days when neither of us gets off without making a contribution or two to the pushkeh. Later in the evenings, our guards lowered by fatigue, our lapses tend to be more frequent. When the pushkeh is full, perhaps we’ll treat ourselves to a bottle of champagne.
One of the things this little campaign of self-improvement reveals is how often the word “yeah” comes up in the talk of others and in the dialogue of movies and on television. The English now use it quite as much as we gringos do, though I haven’t yet noted any yeahs on Masterpiece Theatre. Imagine how much the Beatles would have been fined for their song “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” The singer Joe Nichols has a full song called “Yeah,” which is about the affirmation a man feels for a beautiful woman—like, yeah!
A small enough improvement, this attempt to eliminate a single slurry word from my speech, yet I would nonetheless like to achieve it. Some years ago I gave up, with reasonable if not complete success, profanity, which was threatening to take over my speech. (I still require a certain amount of profanity for my thoughts.) I long ago eliminated psychobabble from my vocabulary. I attempt to speak in full and grammatical sentences, not to mix metaphors, to divest myself of clichés, even to eliminate split infinitives, so with all this grooming of my speech, yeah, I feel, also has got to go.
Yeah is of course a synonym for yes. In German and Dutch, ja—much closer to yeah than to yes—is standard. Is yeah the more natural word; is the synonym more sensible than the original? In some idiomatic phrases yeah seems irreplaceable. “Yeah, right, sure, you believe that you’ll believe anything” is much better than “Yes, right, sure . . .” So is “Yeah, go for it” better than “Yes, go for it.” For my own touchdown dance, followed by three vigorous fist pumps, I find only a concluding yeah will do.
Sometimes you just have to spend the nickel.
