Well, What?
It’s a whole wing of language that one hears too little about, with our natural intuition that a word is something with a meaning corresponding to some easily specified thing, concept, action, or quality. Ah, there is so much more to what it is to communicate as a human being. There are certainly the vanilla sentences. Horses run fast: if a toddler asks us what that means, we could easily go word by word and nail the matter. But then, how about another perfectly plausible sentence: Well, horses run fast. Okay: horses, run, and fast are easy. But what about well? What does well mean, Mommy? Note, this is not the well that refers to excellence: you didn’t mean Expertly, horses run fast. This is that other little well, that you don’t even think about.
Why did you say well, Mommy? Tough, isn’t it? If we must, you use well that way to politely acknowledge a previous statement, usually before expressing some view counter to it. That is, you would say Well, horses run fast if someone had asked, out of genuine curiosity, why horses don’t seem to get eaten by wolves. The well would nod politely to the person’s ignorance on the topic before affording them the knowledge that horses run too fast to be caught by canines. With well you convey, of all things, a gracious attitude. To speak English is to know that subconsciously.
And when it’s that hard to specify or master what a particular word “means,” it’s a good sign that we’re in a different realm of language, where the tidy idea of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions you learned in school doesn’t do much for you, and a Schoolhouse Rock! jingle would be frustratingly diagonal. “Conjunction Junction” and “A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing!” were delightfully instructive tunes, but it’s hard to imagine setting a melody to “Well implies discrepancy between a previous statement and what you wish to utter!” or at least one that would exactly catch on.
Why it would be hard to write a jingle about well is that it’s about not labeling and describing, but something more abstract and subjective: attitude. Well allows us to indicate our take on what we’re talking about; in this case, wanting to amend what someone has just said but without causing offense. Horse is objective; well is subjective. Horse is what you call something; well is about why you want to bring the horse up at all. Well is personal, and it is hardly alone: it is part of an aspect of language as central to being a person as naming things and saying what they do.
What is this realm of language called? I have held off because the term is one that seems almost designed to confuse. A more familiar concept is semantics: this refers to what words “mean” in the conventional sense. A horse is that magnificently peculiar animal; running is locomotion at a quick pace. However, when the issue is words used to indicate our attitude toward what we are saying, the topic is pragmatics. Ugh. We think of pragmatic as meaning “practical,” but if anything, it’s steak-and-potatoes semantics that seems practical compared to the subjectivity of a word like well in Well, horses run fast.
Linguists adopted the term pragmatism through its already abstractified usage by philosophers, referring to a school treating thought as not just mirroring reality in a passive way, but affording and mediating engagement with a surrounding environment in a more proactive, pragmatic way. Note the analogy between semantics, which is merely about naming and defining, and this other realm of language, which is about mediating emotionally between us and that which has been defined—in a practical, or pragmatic, fashion along the lines of the philosophical usage.
However, pragmatics is actually too broad a term for what I want to open up for you in this chapter. Getting our feelings in is only one part of what pragmatics entails. Pragmatics is also about what we want to call attention to (No, that sock, not this one!), what we want to leave in the background in order to get on to a new topic (Anyway, it’s over now and we need to start on the new one), initiating a new topic without seeming abrupt (So, I heard there’s a new way to peel garlic), and other things. Our concern is the personal, subjective wing of pragmatics, for which one term is modal, as in mood. In a sentence like Well, horses run fast, a word like well lends a note of personal orientation that often seems out of place in print statements, with a meaning so abstract that one almost wants to say it isn’t a “real word.” Our concern, then, is what linguists call modal pragmatic markers: we shall term them MPMs, but soon we’ll exchange that term for something more user-friendly. For now, the point is less the jargon than that having MPMs and generating new MPMs is a normal process in any language.
Any language is always dragging some words from the chipper, gingham-dress, schoolroom straightforwardness of semantics (Horses live on farms!) into the MPM maw: layered, loaded, smoking Dunhills in the courtyard. MPMs are evidence of a word that started as an ordinary one, but then got personal.
The Personal Pull
MPMs are an extreme manifestation of a general process. Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words’ meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don’t mean “I demand that that be the Indian food,” but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it’s the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. “That” (in my mind) “must be the Indian food”: here is psychology. Must got personal.
Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here’s some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot’s admirer Elaine is asleep “Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought.” Rathe? Angry, as in “wrathed,” maybe? No, actually: the word meant “quick” or, in this passage, “early.” Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant “early,” so rath-er, in Old and into Middle English, meant “earlier.” But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep—bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding.
What happened with rather is that something you’ve got going earlier or sooner is often something you like better. As such, if rather means “earlier,” then there’s an air about rather not only of sunrise, but of preferability. That is, to earlier English speakers, rather was as much about what you like better (something personal) as about the more concrete issue of what you do before you do something else. Today the relationship between the two meanings is clearer in sooner. In saying, “I’d sooner die than marry him,” you mean not that you’d prefer your death to precede your nuptials, but that you don’t want to marry the man in question. Over time, meaning creep of this kind can leave the original meaning in the dust, which is what happened with rather. Rather got so personal that its original meaning is now an archaism of the kind that throws us in reading Tennyson.
MPMs are what happens when this personal pull on words’ meanings goes so far that a word no longer has what we can easily process as a meaning at all (Well,…), or has a meaning so divorced from the original that some mistake seems to have been made (the “teenager” usage of like).
In these cases, the word’s very essence has become an expression of personal feeling, rather than being the name of a person, place, thing, action, or trait. We need not think of MPMs as smokers, actually, but I think it’s safe to say they drink wine. They make the difference between the receptionist and the friend, between Siri and you. They bring language alive. Nor are MPMs usually as tough to specify as little well. They simply require us to expand our conception of what it is to “mean” something, especially since the fact that no one tells us about this side of language so often leads to misunderstandings about how people talk.
/>
In putting a face on language, MPMs even lend themselves to a handy acronym, FACE, that allows us to explore how deeply this “secret” realm of language permeates our very beings. More specifically, the FACE schema gives us a sense of the perfectly ordinary place words have gone when, superficially, they seem to have gone off the rails because it’s hard to nail down what they “mean.” In English, MPMs can be classified according to four principal functions that they cluster around:
F: Factuality
A: Acknowledgment of others’ state of mind
C: Counterexpectation
E: Easing
This likely seems a random set of distinctions. In fact, it constitutes quite a bit of what it is to actually talk—not speak or recite, but talk.
Factuality: For Real
The weather headline VERY COLD WEATHER NEXT WEEK is quite plausible, but REALLY COLD WEATHER NEXT WEEK sounds like The Onion, despite the fact that the two sentences have the same literal meaning. Yet we can’t say that really is too slangy. Buttoned-up sorts say really all day long every day. There isn’t really a lake there; I’d really like to meet an ombudsman—these sentences are hardly candidates for the Urban Dictionary.
What makes really seem out of place in a headline is that it is fundamentally emotional: it’s too personal. We can sprinkle really all over a sentence to lend notes of personally backed insistence with an in-the-moment feel: Really, I didn’t even see the point of going outside when it was that hot; He wants to pay it in installments, but really, what’s point of dragging it out?; I’m just tired of the whole mess, really. Note that in all these cases, in reality would not convey the particular meaning that really does. The reason I’m just tired of the whole mess, in reality seems off is that really and in reality do not mean the same thing.
Really conveys a hand-on-the-heart testament, something individual in a way that in reality is not. In terms of the grand old Parts of Speech from our school days, really is often a kind of interjection. Formal language, as opposed to casual speech, is cooler, more objective, and thus really feels out of place in a news headline. “Really cold” would mean not only “very cold,” but, in addition, that the degree of cold moves you, to the extent that you feel driven to point it out. Really is about your gut feelings in a way that very is much less so. Really comes coated in modal sauce.
But where does that coating come from? Why doesn’t really simply mean “very” or “in reality”? Because some words get personal. Really is now so far from its origins in the word real that it doesn’t even sound like its parent anymore. It’s been uttered so often that it has melted into “rilly”—most of us realize the connection with real only as we learn to spell. Really is a tool: it less means something than does something. In peppering our casual speech with really, we give an ongoing kind of testament.
It’s part of the fact that actual speech happens between live persons with needs and expectations. Part of an unspoken social contract with other persons is basic sincerity; language, naturally, reflects that. With really we ritually highlight the factuality of what we are saying, rather than simply making it and leaving it there, a practice that the impersonality of print allows more easily. Really flags our sincerity. The analogy is with how we perform a basic courtesy toward those we see regularly via asking, “How are you?” The reason we would often be almost offended to receive an actual answer is that, like really, “How are you?” does, rather than means, something.
Really, then, is a paradigm example of the F in FACE, the Factuality flavor of modal marker. The story of really has two parts, like a movie and its sequel. In the first installment, really was one of many English words meaning “truth” that came to mean very—such as very itself, which came from the French word for true, vrai (verrai in the late thirteenth century). Very is the well-worn version of verily just as “rilly” is what happens to really with heavy use. Truly was another example, of course, with true having undergone the same transformation as verrai a couple of centuries earlier. Even farther back there had been others. In the poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” of around 1200, the Middle English trips you up just as you think you’re in good hands: Ich was in one sumere dale…” (“I was in a summer dale”) in one suthe digele hale. What? Digel was an original English word for “secret”; hale is “hall,” or, in a poetic sense, “space,” “place.” But suthe: the key to that one is perhaps clearer in the way it would later be spelled, sooth: it meant “truth,” captured today only in soothsayer.* But sooth had an extended meaning as—you guessed it—“truly,” or “very.” In one suthe digele hale meant “in a very secluded place.”
Very, true, and sooth show that when a word means “true” and it’s used a lot, you can almost predict that, over time, it will glide from meaning “truth” into meaning “very.” But the process can also go further than that, and that’s where really comes in. Very settled into serving as an objective word, of the kind learners get in textbooks early on. But the personal pull got a hold of really, such that it morphed beyond the very stage into a more personal (i.e., modal) place. When someone says it’s really cold, we think of them shivering under their coat, not a weather report. To say, Okay, really, what are we going to do? is to indicate one’s emotional commitment to getting down to cases. You show your FACE.
A language needs factual modal markers of this kind; in English, the roll of the dice chose really for the job. Elsewhere, other stuff fills in. On the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, best known elsewhere for its coffee, in one language called Seko Padang to say you’re full you say Kuboromo. But to say what you mean in English by “I’m really full!” you say Kuboromo-ko. That little ko—wouldn’t you know it’s called a veridical marker—does the job of really in English. The question is how a language will convey that nuance, not whether it will.
What happened to words like very, true, sooth, and real reveals that when a word means truth, we should expect that its meaning will eventually shift: what would be strange is if it didn’t. A word is something that goes, not sits, and the very meaning of truth is ripe for transformation into related concepts such as intensification and extremity, including the fate of really, which we might call an example of factuality maintenance.
Literally, then, is easy. It was originally one more variation on indicating truth—specifically exactness, as in “by the letter”: He took the advice literally; He meant it literally. But that can have been only a snapshot along a time line; there was never any question that literally was going to morph into other meanings. The only question was what kind. For one, literally quite predictably went beyond its original meaning into one where “by the letter” no longer makes sense except as a metaphor: We were literally the only ones there; We were literally on the brink of a depression. There are no letters involved in these statements, but literally means that the statement is true in a specific way—as in what we sometimes even refer to as “by the letter.”
A next step was for literally to go personal, on a mission less to specify than to vent. This is when we use literally to attest to the vividness of our personal sentiments amid plainly exaggerated, fantastical metaphors during animated storytelling, justifications, and the like. I was literally dying of thirst and she wouldn’t give me any water is not intended to mean that someone really was perishing, but that they truly were experiencing what that expression does connote, extreme thirst. I literally coined money—that is, I indeed was making quite a bit of money. Here is factuality again, flagging sincerity. The personal pull, ever present, had its eternal effect: like really, like literally.
Or not. Online comments sections overflow with declamations about the “misuse” of literally. The idea would seem to be that, for one, literally must not be extended into metaphorical usage beyond a certain minimal point. He took the advice literally is okay, because though oral advice does not properly have letters, we might take “letters” to refer to language in general. But at a sentence like Vice President Joseph Biden’s The count
ry was literally on the brink of a depression, toleration stops, out of an objection that one cannot be on the brink of something “by the letter.” And then all hell breaks loose over the use of literally in sentences such as I was so sick, I was literally dying and she still expected me to come to work. The educator and lexicographer H. W. Fowler, in his grand guide to usage, groaned in 1926, “We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,’ we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate.” The acidic satirist and journalist Ambrose Bierce in 1909 had declared similarly that “to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.” As I write, one can actually purchase a T-shirt emblazoned, MISUSE OF LITERALLY MAKES ME FIGURATIVELY INSANE.
But ultimately, in view of the fact that language inherently goes rather than sits, literally is that kid in sixth grade who became the one to make fun of for some random reason when, with another roll of the dice, many of his tormentors would have been equally ripe for torment and what everybody really deserved was to be left alone. More to the point, literally is that kid subjected to a bizarre accusation that he is remiss in refusing to talk and dress like his grandfather.
A first clue that we need a more realistic take on literally is that neither Bierce nor Fowler has been with us for quite some time. The person calling in to a radio show will complain about how people are using literally “lately” when, after all, Bierce and Fowler were writing when movies were silent. The nonliteral uses of literally are quite traditional, of all things. Literally had gone past meaning “by the letter” in any sense as early as the eighteenth century, when, for example, Francis Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague (1769), which contains this sentence: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” One cannot feed among anything “by the letter.” Or, in 1806, when the philosopher David Hume wrote, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger,” in his signature history of England, despite the fact that there are no letters via which to starve. Yet this was an authoritative and highly popular volume, more widely read at the time than Hume’s philosophical treatises, equivalent to modern histories by Simon Schama and Peter Ackroyd. The purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.
Words on the Move Page 2
