Savan does not really approve of pop language. She worries that it clicks into place too easily and displaces complex thoughts. She is, too often, a scold, the sort of person who turns the lights on at a party and reminds everyone to drink in moderation. Again and again, she feels called upon to interrupt her narrative with a public service announcement, warning the reader that the easy pleasures of pop language come at a price, turning thinking citizens into shiny corporate pawns.
There is an elitist fallacy at work here. Savan sees straight through the machinations of advertisers and understands the malevolent forces at work behind pop speech, the "subtle social and political trade-offs." Everyone else, apparently, is not quite smart enough to do the same. They prove this, time and again, by doing things like buying advertised products (bad) or voting for Republicans (very bad).
The people must be warned. "As cathartic as it may feel to blurt `Duh,"' Savan writes primly, "doing so can confer a false sense of immunity, leaving us more susceptible over the long run to better-disguised vile, naked greed." Please.
Savan needs to worry a little less and enjoy a little more. Pop language is like ketchup. People don't put it on everything all the time, and we all need some stupid time in our day. (Savan herself estimates that the average person speaks pop less than 10 percent of the time.) If everyone engaged in the politically committed, exquisitely nuanced conversations that Savan sees as an endangered species, mass exhaustion would set in before 10am.
Fortunately, there are moments when even Savan lets her guard down. "I quote Shrek and crew a lot because, although he's a cartoon and the movies are shrines to programmatic cool, I'm attracted to the guy," she writes. Yesss!
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