Language Fascination

I heard a news report about Howard Dean, outgoing Chairman of the Democratic Party. He will now be “going into private life.” I believe that was a quote from Mr Dean himself.

Going into private life. Interesting word choice. I guess "going into" follows "outgoing" nicely. But outgoing was my word.

Anyway, I know what Mr Dean means, I think, even though the words don’t exactly say what he means. For instance, it likely does not mean he is “going” anywhere necessarily or even that private life must be gone “into.” Pursuing private life? Another way of saying the same thing. Maybe, but that could mean he’s looking for something or chasing it. Privately. But pursuing is not what the story reported.

I think going into private life means no more public life or political life or life in the public eye, which does not mean he will be living privately entirely, in that he will never be seen in public, like J. D. Salinger, for example.

I live a “private life,” I think, and I didn’t have to go into it. Even when I taught at Boise State, which put me in—but not into—the public eye, I still was “into” private life or at least living it, and when I retired it would not have seemed apropos to say I was retiring to “go into private life.” Is it that only those who have been “public servants," if that’s what we would call Howard Dean, can then go into private life, and the rest of us are just already there? Perhaps there’s a qualifying measure, like how much of one’s time is spent as a public person.

Are those people we call celebrities living a private life? Or must they quit their celebrity and go into it? Or doesn’t everyone have a public life and a private one at the same time? The answer is, yes, of course.

But I may be moving away from the original idea or question, which is: why those words? Why is private life, for Howard Dean, something he must go into? Doesn’t the English language provide another, perhaps a better way of saying what he means?

I know, I know. It’s an idiom, and I have made no exhaustive investigation here. It may very well be the easiest way of saying what Howard Dean will be doing. Sort of..