On the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Representative Charles A. Eaton, Republican of New Jersey, made his case in the House for why the nation should enter the Second World War.
"Mr. Speaker," his speech began, "yesterday against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every land.”
Last year, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, made the case for war in Iraq this way: "And if we don't go at Iraq, that our effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation," he said. "We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: we are serious about terrorism, we're serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil.
The linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter cites these excerpts in his new book. They not only are typical of speeches made in Congress on both occasions, he argues, but also provide a vivid illustration of just how much the language of public discourse has deteriorated.
Riddled with sentence fragments, run-ons and colloquialisms like "go at," Senator Brownback's speech is still intelligible, but in Mr. McWhorter's view, it is emblematic of a creeping casualness that is largely to the nation's detriment.
"We in America now are an anomaly," Mr. McWhorter said over lunch at a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan this week. "We have very little sense of English as something to be dressed up. It's just this thing that comes out of our mouths. We just talk. "
Mr. McWhorter, 38, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, is hardly the first to complain about Americans' brazen disregard for their native tongue. But unlike many others, he says, the problem is not an epidemic of bad grammar.
As a linguist, he says, he knows that grammatical rules are arbitrary and that in casual conversation people have never abided by them. Rather, he argues, the fault lies with the collapse of the distinction between the written and the oral. Where formal, well-honed English was once de rigueur in public life, he argues, it has all but disappeared, supplanted by the indifferent cadences of speech and ultimately impairing our ability to think.
This bleak assessment notwithstanding, Mr. McWhorter, an intense, confident and--perhaps not surprisingly--loquacious man is not a curmudgeon or a fuddy-duddy. Nor, for that matter, a nerd, despite a resume that bristles with intellectual precociousness.
Self-taught in 12 languages--including Russian, Swedish, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew, which he initially took up as a Philadelphia preschooler when he was 4--he is a respected expert in Creole languages.
A college graduate at 19 and a tenured professor at 33, he has published seven previous books, including the controversial, best seller, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America", in which he accused middle-class blacks of embracing anti-intellectualism and a cult of victimology. An African-American who is an outspoken critic of affirmative action, welfare and reparations, he has aroused the ire of many liberals and earned a reputation as a conservative.
In John McWhorter's view, the speech made by Senator Sam Brownback in Congress is an example of __ public discourse.

A. war-time
B. political
C. critical
D. deteriorated