Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

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  Copyright Page

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  To Martha.

  I said having children would mean I would stop writing these.

  You didn’t want me to, I couldn’t, and thank you for enabling (in both senses) my habit.

  Introduction

  No one minds that today the clouds are neither in the same position nor in the same shapes they were yesterday. Yet more than a few mind that today the way people are talking is always changing.

  Of course, if polled, few of us would put a check next to the statement “I think language should never change.” However, so often we don’t like it when the change actually happens. Somehow it seems that language is always changing in the wrong ways.

  It would seem that when most people express approval of language changing, they are thinking of something relatively nondisruptive: roughly, matters of keeping the language up to date. Certainly we will always need new words for new things. Historical transformations, especially, will change the language—it seems natural that our English is vastly different from the English of people seven hundred years ago living under a feudalist monarchy without electricity, photography, jazz, or penicillin. And most of us are okay with some slang coming and going—although, even here, many would seem to prefer that it be only so much.

  Beyond that, things get touchy. When it comes to people using literally to mean what would seem to be its opposite, “figuratively” (I was itching so much I was literally about to die!), or like with a frequency that makes it sound more like punctuation than a word, the linguist may preach to the public that our language is dynamic, but to many, the better word would be degraded.

  When Samuel Johnson started assembling what would become the first true dictionary of the English language, in the mid-eighteenth century, he felt the same way about the changes in speech he had heard throughout his life. At first he hoped that his opus would help stop this messiness once and for all, by enshrining the language in the frozen state of print. Yet by the time he finished the project, he had come to realize that this was an impossible task:

  We laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability; shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.

  Johnson surely sounds wise, ahead of the curve. Yet a modern English speaker may easily receive Johnson’s opinion as wisdom while at the same time gnashing his teeth over people using literally “the wrong way.” After all, Johnson lived a very long time ago; one may feel on a certain level that when it comes to language as we live and breathe it today, things are different.

  But they aren’t. One of hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming. They tell you a word is a thing, when it’s actually something going on.

  Yet, in real time, a word’s going on often feels more like it’s going off—as in off the rails. Rather marvelous, then, is that precisely the kinds of things that sound so disorderly, so inattendant, so “wrong,” are precisely how Latin became French. The way people under a certain age use totally and the pronunciation of nuclear as “nucular” are not some alternate kind of language change sitting alongside the “real” kind. Language change like this is all there has ever been.

  It isn’t that language changes only because new things need names or because new developments bring people into new contacts. Language changes because its very structure makes transformation inevitable. To wit: even if a language were spoken by a community mysteriously condemned to live for millennia in a cave, under staunchly unchanging conditions, after three thousand years the language of that community would be vastly different from the one spoken when they were first herded into the cave, and outsiders would most likely hear it as a different language entirely. In Old English, for example, the word pronounced GAHST-litch meant “spiritual,” but as sounds shuffled around or wore away and its very meaning drifted along, it became our modern English word ghostly—imagine that kind of thing happening to thousands of words bit by bit. Yet, obviously, little of what we could call “dynamic” would have happened in the cave. The change would happen simply because mutability is as inherent to the very nature of language as it is for clouds to be ever in transformation.

  With clouds, change comes as the consequence of wind currents, temperature, and barometric pressure, things structurally eternal. In a similar way, permanent aspects of human anatomy and cognition are why language is as changeable as clouds are. Buzzing quietly around a word’s main meaning are assorted submeanings and implications, which have a way of creeping into how we actually use the word until its very meaning is forever transformed: hence a word meaning “spiritual” comes to refer to a particular kind of spirit, ghosts.

  We should, for instance, be able to say that we find 2001: A Space Odyssey and Citizen Kane adorable. After all, so many people do adore those films. Yet there is a certain quiet kick in applying the vastness of “adoration” to something small, such as a child, or to someone perceived as small in an extended sense. To grant “adoration” to the small feels generous and thus sincere. Enough people savored that good feeling that after a while, adorable meant something more specific than admired: it came to mean “charming,” pleasing in a way associated with that which is little, immature, inferior, or dear to us. (The intersection between those four traits is, in itself, vaguely alarming!) Curious George is adorable; the Statue of Liberty, not so much.

  Meanwhile, sounds are slightly misheard by each generation’s ears, with each generation making the sounds slightly differently. A word many once pronounced “dafter” now is only pronounced “dawter”; hence our familiar daughter. (There’s a reason it’s spelled like laughter!) This is much of why the actors in old movies sound increasingly odd to us as the decades pass. It’s not only that they are making references to Calvin Coolidge and calling things “swell,” but that our very “accent” has morphed on from theirs.

  Processes like this are exactly what creates the language we speak as opposed to the way dead people did. Yet we tend to have an easier time with weather than with language change. Much of the reason for that is something as majestic in itself as dictionaries.

  Samuel Johnson’s gift to the language was also, in an unintended way, a curse upon its speakers. We are accustomed to writers opening an exploration of a concept by citing a word’s definition in the dictionary, with the implication that words have eternal meanings just as numbers have values and atoms have certain combinations of subatomic particles. Dictionaries are large; the densely printed pages packed with information are fine music to any book person; dictionaries also tend to smell good. One loves them. Yet the weird truth is that for all their artifactual splendor, dictionaries are starkly misleading portraits of something as endlessly transforming as langu
age. In terms of how words actually exist in time and space, to think of a word’s “genuine” meaning as the one you find upon looking it up is like designating a middle-aged person’s high school graduation snapshot as “what they really look like.” There’s a charming whimsy in it, but still. A person receiving such a compliment often says, “Oh, please!”—and words, if they could talk, surely would as well.

  But words can’t talk. Meanwhile, dictionaries are there, in all their weight, permanence—fragrance, even. The ancient brown ones look especially eternal, granitic, like the old library buildings they are often found in. Surely, here is where a language resides. Naturally, departures from the dictionary come off as decay and chaos. Maybe new words for new things are okay—but even there, many have a hard time with lexicographers deeming vape and Not! as “real words,” no matter how common they are in our experience.

  But there’s a lot you can miss in a dictionary. If you can’t create vape from vapor, then why do dictionaries have peddle when the word didn’t exist until people made it up from the word pedlar? Why does Darn! make it in when it came from a quiet mashup of the damn in damnation and the -tern- part of eternal when people were given to saying Eternal damnation! a lot? (That Tarnation! expression we associate with old gold prospectors was a middle step in the process.) We are unlikely to catch those things amid the massiveness of the dictionary, and besides, peddle and Darn! are, well, “olde.” Vape and Not! are just … different? It’s hard not to think so: life is slow, dictionaries are big, and novelty is unsettling.

  But novelty can also be a lot of fun. Some consider it the staff of life. It’s certainly what keeps most linguists so interested in language—but we don’t share it enough. In this book I want to help change that.

  It must be clear that this will not be one more book about a certain collection of what we might call “blackboard grammar” rules. Largely, that debate has come to a prickly stalemate, and no new arguments will likely make much difference. Many of these rules, such as the idea that one is to say It is I, and not split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, are more discussed than actually observed today. For most of the others, such as that one is to say Billy and I went to the store rather than Billy and me, that one is neither to entirely dismiss whom nor to use double negatives, that there are fewer, not less, books, and that one is to say Go slowly rather than Go slow, the verdict is essentially in. Linguists endlessly remind us that these rules are arbitrary, unconnected to clarity or logic. Yet no linguist denies the other reality, which is that these rules, having been entrenched in society as measures of formality and social worth, must be followed in formal contexts and taught to young people. It is inevitable for humans to rank, to create hierarchies of estimation, often on the basis of differences unparseable by logic: the proper analogy is with fashions in clothing.*

  In the wake of conclusive discussions of these grammar rules, such as many of David Crystal’s publications and, most recently, Steven Pinker’s book The Sense of Style, there is little need to dwell on them further. This book will focus on something larger, in a way, than that compact collection of grammatical no-nos: the general sense that when English is morphing along in any way (new accents, new meanings) we are seeing not transformation but disruption. I want to propose a sunny (and, frankly, scientifically accurate) way of hearing the speech around us, as a substitute for a view of English as a collection of words embalmed between the covers of dictionaries.

  In a way, I want to take you backward. It was not until the eighteenth century, as the middle class in England and the United States became numerous and powerful enough to develop a focused self-consciousness about their self-presentation as members of said class, that this glum, condemnatory sense of the language around us truly settled in. The acrid views expressed about colloquial speech in online comments sections today is a relatively new view of language, fostered by a combination of bourgeois sensibility and the dominance of unchanging documents such as dictionaries, both of which subtly but powerfully distract us from the dynamic reality of language’s essential mechanisms.

  Indeed, the way we are taught to process language is as antique as our ancestors’ sense of how nature worked. The first generations of people living under today’s conception of English in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were also taught that all the world’s animals were created at one time, unaware that animals are the product of endless evolution over vast periods. When Charles Darwin presented the latter proposition, people were at first deeply skeptical—but consensus moved on. To carry the analogy further, just as many today are most comfortable with the idea of language changing in response to large-scale historical events, there were those who subscribed to the naturalist Georges Cuvier’s idea that fossils of now-extinct animals showed that animals had been created anew after each of a series of global “catastrophes.” But, in retrospect, even that concession is all but unrecognizable to us today as science.

  And just as we cherish science because it teaches us new things rather than just describing what we already know, under a scientific view of what the language around us is like, so very much makes sense instead of seeming merely curious. Why is Shakespearean language harder for us to understand in performance than it was for people five hundred years ago? Why do younger people sound like they talk in questions, with their pitch rising uUP at the end of their sentences? Why do civilized euphemisms such as disabled so often get reclassified as quaint or even insulting? Why does that woman you know pronounce her boss Nick’s name more like “Neck”? Why is it so hard to truly accept that there is a “dialect” called Black English? Why does William Powell in The Thin Man say that he is going to round up all the sus-PECTS instead of the SUS-pects? (I’m sure you’ve always wondered about that!) Why have emoticons caught on to such a degree? Why do women say “um” more while men say “uh” more? (Actually, on that one nobody knows!)

  This book will answer all those questions (or, in the case of the last one, refer to it) and many more. The answers require understanding a mere five ways that language changes. The question is not whether a word will undergo one or more of these processes, but which ones of them it will go through. We do not watch a parade and wonder why those people don’t just stand still. Language is a parade: the word whose sound and meaning stays the same over centuries is the exception rather than the rule. If that kind of change is precisely why we speak Modern English rather than the language of Chaucer and don’t mind a bit, then today’s changes ought to inspire curiosity rather than perplexity: “Where’s the language going next?” rather than “What’s that all about?”

  This book will show us what it’s about, getting us past the perceptual detour English speakers have been shunted into over the past few centuries, and back to the way earlier generations saw the fluidity of language around them. Let us go, as it were, back to the future.

  1

  The Faces of English

  Words Get Personal

  There’s a reason that it often requires an art history class to get a handle on medieval painting. It may be pretty in a general sense, but it’s hard not to notice that the people tend to exhibit only the broadest of emotions, if any—in much of medieval painting, the faces seem almost frozen blank.

  It would never have occurred to a painter like Giotto to depict the full range of human expressions. The individualist focus that seems so natural to us was not yet a part of how one was taught to create art. Art was less about you, him, or her than about that: grander things such as religion and commemoration. We cherish the Mona Lisa as one of the heralds of the new era, with that smile we can imagine someone curling into near the middle of a good first date. And even that doesn’t compare with the japingly sarcastic glow on the face of the Cossack scribe penning an insulting letter to the Turkish sultan in Elias Repin’s most famous painting, Zaporozhian Cossacks of Ukraine Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, of 1891. It’s lifelike in a fashion we’d never find in a Byz
antine image.

  This increasing focus on the individual is a theme in much of Western history. We can practically hear and smell Anna Karenina, Holden Caulfield, and Oscar Wao in a way that we never can any of the characters in The Iliad. To Plato and Aristotle, steeped in unquestioningly hierarchical ideologies, a political system guaranteeing all individuals “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” would have sounded like science fiction. Even the notion of a popular song “cover” is a sign of the times. To Cole Porter, it would have seemed alien to write a song for only one artist to sing, with anyone else required to wait about ten years to take a crack at it, and even then, have their effort classified as a salutary “version” of the first one. Today, a pop song is about one person expressing their one self.

  Language, however, has always been ahead of the curve on individualism. Long before Rembrandt, Thomas Jefferson, or Adele, human language has always and forever been getting personal. Not in the sense of people having arguments, although of course that has been happening, too. Rather, one of the things that has always happened to a great many words is that they start out showing what we mean, but end up being used to show how we feel. This trajectory is as common as words getting shorter (I’d-a done it from I would have done it), cuter (horsey, brewsky), or nastier (hussy started as housewife). Just as often, a word nestles into a place in English that grammar mavens and quite a few others consider unsuitably vague, random, redundant, or as having no “real” meaning—the use of so at the start of a sentence is an example—when to a linguist the word in question is fulfilling a function as normal as marking past tense or making something plural.

  This chapter will introduce you to something very old about language that, through no fault of our own, always seems new.