Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Phyfe is also valuable in showing something else about how words sound from one era to another. A witticism that gets around is the idea of someone “putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.” In fact, if we traveled to even the recent-ish past and listened around, we would hear a considerable degree of just that.

  For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, the English poet Samuel Rogers commented in his recollections, “The now fashionable pronunciation of several words is to me at least very offensive: CON-template—is bad enough; but BAL-cony makes me sick.” To Rogers, the normal way of saying those words was con-TEM-plate and bal-CO-ny.* Yet this is not someone living in the Middle Ages; he lived long enough to be photographed!

  As did Phyfe, and he, too, thought of con-TEM-plate as a normal way to say that word, but that’s only the beginning. For Phyfe, a melodrama was a melo-DRA-ma, an inquiry was an in-QUI-ry, one il-LUS-trated things, and some matters took pre-SEED-ence over others. A gaslight-era Daffy Duck would have called Bugs Bunny DEHS-pi-kuh-bul (that one is my favorite), and if the cartoon were about the two of them as soldiers, Daffy’s umbrage would perhaps be for Bugs having woken him up before not REH-vul-ee but ree-VALE-yay. Dogs were kay-NINE, not KAY-nine, and in Phyfe’s world, one valued things like a BUFF-ett (not a buh-FAY) for being EX-emplary and EX-quisite, and might com-PEN-sate for one’s original sin via ce-LIB-acy, being HOS-pitable, or giving somebody a nice, juicy “NEC-tarin.” Oh yes: Phyfe also wanted us to always remember to pronounce nucleolus “nu-CLE-olus” rather than the slangy “nucle-O-lus” that we are all so accustomed to tossing off.

  In Jack Finney’s sci-fi romance Time and Again, in which the protagonist goes back to 1882 and meets the love of his life, one of the things he and Julia would have bantered about would have been her casually pronouncing words with these accents, having been taught by schoolmarms and relatives that this was the proper way to say them. Yet, ultimately, banter is all their exchanges on this topic could have qualified as. There is no metric to determine which is the right or wrong way to accent a word from era to era. Words’ accents can vary arbitrarily in the same way as where their vowels sit. The accent can rock from syllable to syllable in a word over time, rather the way the magnetic poles of the earth switch endlessly back and forth.

  Or, at least, it’s often random in that way. However, there are times when the accent moving is part of a new word’s being born. It’s happening all the time, and yet we are no more aware of it than we are of ultraviolet light. For example, did you ever think about the fact that you re-CORD a REC-ord? It looks like that difference in accent is an accident—but it isn’t.

  5

  Lexical Springtime

  Words Mate and Reproduce

  You can’t keep them apart. Words, that is. You can try, with your spaces between them—but wait, that’s only on paper. We don’t speak spaces. Just say that last sentence and notice that you uttered no spaces. One word comes immediately on the tail of the other one. The Ancient Greeks didn’t even bother to indicate spaces when they wrote, and in that, their writing reflected speech more accurately than modern writing conventions do, despite what a pain it was to read such text.

  When things are pushed up against one another they have a way of sharing and blending, as we know from stew, the history of jazz, and dormitories. Words are similar: something else that can happen to a word is that it can join with another one to create a new word entirely.

  We have seen in chapter 3 how if a word becomes a piece of grammar it may stick to another word and become a prefix or suffix. But when that happens, the root word is still standing, modified only by a new bit of material. Walked is just a version of walk, not a new word; entire and entirely exist in the same relationship.

  But at other times, the result is neither a version of one word or the other, but something brand new. Part of what makes a language alive is that new words come not only from people making up new words for new things, or taking words from other languages, but from words mating and yielding new ones.

  Hangry for Brunch?

  That in itself may not seem like news. We are all familiar with cute coinages like sitcom from situation comedy, motel from motor hotel, and camcorder from camera recorder. Linguists call these blends: smog (smoke, fog), electrocute (electric, execute), and brunch (breakfast, lunch) are further examples, and blending created many ancient words for which we’d never suspect anything amiss in their history. Words involving sounds and movement seem to have been especially susceptible to yielding blends: flush is apparently what happened when flash met gush, and if given a second to think about it, one can almost guess that twirling is twisting plus whirling.

  Modernity has increased the chances of such words catching on. Blends initially have an air of levity or artifice, of a kind one might expect only a small set of people to embrace as a kind of in-joke. However, the modern media create an artificial sense of community over broader spaces and exert endless repetition. This makes it more likely that words like palimony and staycation acquire a certain purchase.

  Only a certain purchase, however. The smile that blends like the previously mentioned ones elicit is a sign that such words often never quite shake an air of being mannered, as often as not generated by Madison Avenue. In an episode of Lucille Ball’s second sitcom The Lucy Show, she offers her maid what is supposed to be a special lunch, saying, “It’s broasted.” I wondered what that meant when seeing the episode in reruns in the seventies, have asked various people since who always draw a blank, and have been bemused to catch it mentioned as a new coinage in a book about English from precisely the year that episode first aired. Created in reference to things of the moment, blends have a way of falling away once that moment is past. For every chortle (Lewis Carroll pulled that one in his poem “Jabberwocky”) there is a cafetorium, the sort of item whose listing as an official word stays viscerally perplexing to more than a few.

  A delightful blend getting around as I write this is hangry, describing someone in a bad mood because they’re hungry. But is this, an artifice wrought by deliberate human interference, what we want to learn about when examining the life history of words and where they come from? In a class on evolution, we’d be disappointed if the professor spent three weeks on the cloning of Dolly the sheep. One of mature thought’s eternal challenges is figuring out where to draw the proverbial line, and there is no real answer here as to what consititutes a “real word.” However, things like hangry and manny (a male nanny) carry a definite whiff of being more new jokes than new words, although one never knows what may just settle in for real.

  What’s the Nilly in Willy-Nilly?

  To really get at a process that generates many more new words than blending does, in a way organic rather than crafted, and also less obvious and therefore more interesting, we need to start elsewhere. Such as with the fact that there are always perfectly humble words that combine a pair of meanings. There always have been. Example: in earlier English, the way you made a sentence negative was to put ne before it. In Old English, I have was ic hæbbe. I don’t have was ic ne hæbbe. It was pretty simple, much like the way you make a sentence negative in most languages: you put something like no before the verb. Only later in English did we start putting do before the verb and inserting not before it.*

  Anyway, because ne was a short little word uttered an awful lot, people had a way of running it onto the words that came after it. The result was a bunch of fun combination words in Old and Middle English. In Old English, to say I don’t have the book, you said “I nave the book,” with the nave resulting from ne and have mashed together. (Actually, næbbe, but I am “translating” into the modern form for clarity.) Well into Middle English, these kinds of contractions were everywhere. One must get used to them to read Chaucer in the original, beyond the famous opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, which are fortuitously easier to understand as a Modern English speaker than most of Chaucer’s language.

  “Ther daweth me no day,” he wr
ites in his poem The Legend of Good Women “that I nam up and walkyng in the mede.” That meant: There dawns me no day that I am not (ne + am = nam) up and walking. I am not was nam, is not was nis, were not was nere. If I’m speaking Middle English, if I want to, I will, but if I don’t want to, I nill. There were even contractions like this for know—except the verb was different. He knows was he woot. So, he doesn’t know was he noot!

  This is the kind of thing that you might wish English still had. We do, actually. For one, in willy-nilly, the nilly is straight from the old nill. Also, none is from ne and one, and never is from ne and ever. But those may not feel like the same thing. Since we don’t have ne alone anymore, none and never don’t feel to us as if they start with a ne. And willy-nilly is an isolated and slightly twee expression, unaccompanied by a hypothetical set of others like “havey-navey” or an “Is-nis!” perhaps said with a dismissive shrug along the lines of “Taxes, schmaxes!”

  However, as English lost the old forms, it gained new ones, in the form of what we traditionally call contractions. They arose starting in the early 1500s, having begun in less crunched forms such as donnot for don’t and wonnot for won’t, of which cannot has for some reason held on despite can’t existing alongside. We no longer have nis from ne + is, but we have isn’t, and while nave is no more, we have haven’t. The apostrophes do not make isn’t and haven’t different from nis and nave. The apostrophe is not pronounced; nor does it mark a pause: it is simply a convention of how we transcribe speech into marks on a page, and quite an arbitrary one: comprehension would suffer not a bit if we wrote isnt and hasnt. Or, if the dice had landed differently and apostrophes had been invented earlier, in Middle English nis would have been n’is, nill n’ill, etc. Rather, isn’t is, in its unwritten essence, an utterance “isunt,” different no more or less from “is-not” than nis was from “ne-is.”

  If isn’t and haven’t still don’t feel quite as “smushed” as words like nill, then consider won’t—there is no conceivable “wo” word that the n’t follows. Won’t is a pleasantly unpredictable mating of will and not, with traits from both but an individuality all its own. Don’t is similar in terms of how it is pronounced. Why not “doont”? We don’t pronounce do as “dough.” And let’s not even get into ain’t. “Ai-not?” That’s the most eccentric of the contractions, and wouldn’t you know, those who dare true peculiarity are banned from general society.

  Yet, in the end, forms like nill and don’t and ain’t still strain the notion of “new word.” Even if their shape has gone beyond what the parent words’ shapes were, they retain the two meanings—they are two words in one package. Won’t doesn’t sound like what happens if you mash will and not together, but its meaning is still that of will and not. Linguists call these, in fact, portmanteau forms—they are like bags you carry more than one thing in. It can be more than two—consider wouldn’t’ve, remembering that we don’t pronounce apostrophes! But still, you could take each piece out of the bag by itself.

  But words can mix harder than that. Imagine reaching into the bag and finding purée—except that it’s frozen into the shape of a new … well, that analogy hits a wall, but you’ll see what I mean.

  The Usual Sus-PECTS

  In the 1934 film The Thin Man, as in all the films in its series, eventually detective Nick Charles gathers together all the people connected to a crime case he’s been unraveling. However, if you listen closely, there’s something a little odd about how William Powell (as Nick) delivers one of his lines: he talks about gathering together not the “SUS-pects,” but the “sus-PECTS.”

  It’s the kind of thing that leads one to ask: why did he say it that way? But the real answer is a broad one, not something about the word suspects, or William Powell, or the old days. It isn’t, for example, that Powell was trying to sound British: Nick and Nora Charles are elegant indeed, but very much Americans. Part of their charm is in conveying the aristocracy that they do while at the same time being so very red, white, and blue with their easygoing banter and martinis.

  The actual reason is, of all things, central to the birth of new words. However, to get at the matter properly requires starting from what will seem oddly far away from an evening watching The Thin Man. It’s something one never has occasion to think about. When it’s brought to your attention, it seems as dull as that earnest person you want to run from at a party. But bear with me: you sus-PECT someone of doing something, upon which they are a SUS-pect. Notice: you would never say you SUS-pect someone of something. Why? Because SUS-pect, with the accent on the first syllable, is the way you say it when using it as a noun. Put another way, the fact that the accent is on the first syllable is what makes SUS-pect a noun, in the same way that other words are made into nouns by tacking on a suffix, like -ness in happiness.

  In 1934, however, suspect had yet to fully make the transition from being only a verb (I suspect you of lying) to having a noun form alongside (gathering the suspects). Things tend to take time, and typically, between A and B there is a stage when things are neither completely A nor B but something in between: the teenager, Jell-O when you can still stir it but only slowly, or gathering the sus-PECTS. There was a time when saying SUS-pects for the noun was common, but you could still say sus-PECTS without being asked what was wrong with you. This is why Powell was saying sus-PECTS in 1934, whereas eight years later, in Casablanca, Claude Rains said, “Round up the usual SUS-pects.”

  Who cares about this word? Nobody, in itself—but it’s an example of something general. When a verb becomes a noun in English, if it has two syllables, something happens very quietly, so quietly that I have never known anyone who noticed it by themselves. The accent shifts backward. It’s why someone who re-BELS is a REB-el, whose crimes you can re-CORD and thereby leave them on REC-ord for all to see. It’s why your tooth may be im-PACT-ed and have a negative IM-pact on your sense of well-being.

  Let’s pull the camera back some now. The shift of the accent backward—from now on we’ll call it the Backshift—is much more widespread than just in verbs becoming nouns. Someone from 1950 noticing that we send photos as digital files would be missing the picture, so to speak, if they stopped at marveling that we can do only that, as opposed to also sharing live conversation, written messages, and music in the same way. Similarly, the Backshift is not only a secret way to make a new noun; it’s a secret way to make a new word in general. It is how a way of expressing something in our language becomes “a thing” as opposed to a one-off or a passing peculiarity.

  More to the point: the Backshift doesn’t happen only to single words; it happens to pairs of them, and knits them together in the process. An example is the difference between black board and blackboard. A black board is some board that someone painted black. A blackboard is the particular thing made of slate that hangs on a schoolroom wall. Black board is pronounced “black BOARD,” while the thing on the wall is a “BLACK-board,” and that’s no accident. The way we mark blackboard as “a thing,” different from just any old board that happens to be black, is with the Backshift. A blackboard is something very specific—“a thing,” as it were.

  It’s the same with a black bird, which is what we would call some probably uglyish bird of any number of strains, and a blackbird, the one variety taxonomized as Turdus merula. (Turdus just means thrush in Latin!) Blackbird is pronounced “BLACK-bird” because of the Backshift. The Backshift is in you: it is a rule of English that we all know without having to work at it. You know, for example, that Backshift itself is pronounced “BACK-shift,” not “back-SHIFT,” which would sound like someone trying to imitate William Powell. How did you know? Because I am discussing the Backshift as an established process, and to speak English is to know that when something is “a thing,” it has the accent on the first syllable. If someone described what they called, say, a lethal shift, then spontaneously you would pronounce it as a “lethal SHIFT.” That’s because it’s hard to even imagine what a lethal shift would be, it is most certainly n
ot “a thing,” and therefore no Backshift happens. Note how much more graceful paradigm shift sounds when we acccent the paradigm rather than the shift—“PARADIGM shift” is more likely than “paradigm SHIFT.” That’s because paradigm shift is an established concept.

  What we’re seeing is words coming together to become new ones. Black and board became parts of a new word, blackboard. Or, ice and cream became parts of a new word ice cream. Ice cream is two words? Well, that depends on what you consider a word to be, and writing conventions don’t help us much in deciding. Writing, inherently conservative, changes with the language only in fits and starts. English’s spelling system, as we have seen, blithely conserves the pronunciations of people very, very dead.

  Therefore the fact that we write ice cream as two words can’t be taken as an indication that it actually is, in some self-standing way, two words. In our minds, in our mouths, is it? When a toddler is learning about ice cream with the requisite enthusiasm, do we really think they feel themselves as saying ice and cream rather than something which in an alternate universe we would write as “icecream”? Ice cream is only abstractly icy, after all: unless it’s been improperly stored, there are no tooth-rattling ice crystals in it; nor is it hard like, say, icicles or even Popsicles. Then, to the extent that we regularly encounter cream, if it has a consistency anything like ice cream it’s in the form of hand or face cream, which we do not eat. To muse upon the fact that ice cream is supposed to be some kind of iced cream, or cream of ice, is actually very much a matter of musing, not intuition. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher, and that’s because ice cream is really a single thing of its own. It is, in a sense, one word, and a key indication of that is that it has submitted to the Backshift. ICE cream, not ice CREAM.