Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  The Backshift in Real Life

  The recruitment of words into serving as parts of new ones is one more way that a word is one stage in an endless transformation. Even if aware of how words have changed, however, we find it easy to suppose that this kind of change was tolerable in the past but somehow less appropriate in the present. The Backshift beautifully demonstrates the ineluctable timelessness of language change, however, in that we can see the Backshift operating on words in real time.

  It can happen pretty quickly, and I write this in the wake of an entire century that was amply recorded. Moreover, much of that recording is today available at the press of a button. Thus while today blackboards, blackbirds, and ice cream have been around for what seems like forever, the Backshift got to many things much more recently, explaining what otherwise sounds as if people in the recent past simply talked strangely.

  For example, in a Mr. Magoo cartoon in 1955 (“Magoo’s Check-up”), a television pitchman advertises what he calls a “super-MARKET.” But today we say “SUPER-market”—what was wrong with that voice-over artist? Or with William Holden when he says supermarket the same way in a voice-over in Sunset Boulevard (1950)? Nothing. The term was still newish in 1955, and when first coined, was intended as referring to a market that is super, as in bigger than the mom-and-pop stores that had been standard until then. One said, at first, a “downright super MARKET.” But as supermarkets became the default way of buying food in America, complete with particular associations such as parking lots, public address system announcements, that particular smell of the meat section, and express lines, the Backshift happened: hence SUPER-market. As late as 1964, a very obscure Broadway musical lyric was set to a melody line that accented supermarket on the MARKET, and I used to think of it as a small artistic slip in scansion. But then I learned about the Backshift, upon which I knew that the lyricist, born and raised before supermarkets were default, would have been familiar with the old pronunciation, such that it would have sounded appropriate to him when scanned to the melody in that way, even though he may not have regularly said “super-MARKET” himself.*

  After that, it also made perfect sense to me that on episodes of Dr. Kildare, from around the same time, characters sometimes refer to what’s on an “x-RAY” rather than an “X-ray.” The Backshift hadn’t set in completely on the word yet—people for whom the X-ray was a novel concept, as in “some ray that is the kind called X” in the vein of “some bird that is black,” would say “x-RAY” for a while. “X-ray,” with the Backshift, like blackbird and ice cream, would have come later. In a 1937 movie (Ali Baba Goes to Town) the grand old singing comic Eddie Cantor talks about serving people “hot DOGs” instead of HOT dogs, and he isn’t referring to heating up Saint Bernards. It’s just that the expression had been newer when he learned to talk in the 1890s, and thus less completely Backshifted. For the same reason, Cantor’s very last line in Strike Me Pink, in 1936, is about what he calls the “boy SCOUTS.” The Boy Scouts had begun just twenty-six years before; Backshift was still optional.

  The “Why?” melts away, especially when we think more of what has become “a thing” than of what arbitrary formalities require us to write as two words. Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko in the late 1950s called the gum “Juicy FRUIT” instead of “JUICY Fruit” as we say it today. Why? Because it was newer then, so one could say Juicy Fruit the way you’d refer to actual fruit that was juicy. “What do want after lunch, Paul?” someone might ask. He wouldn’t answer, “I’ll have some nice JUICY fruit,” unless he wanted to emphasize juicy because last night you gave him dried figs. Otherwise he’d ask for more of that “juicy FRUIT.” To Silvers in the 1950s, however, the name of the gum still, to an extent, corresponded to what it referred to: juicy FRUIT. Or, in one of those snappy, naughty little pre–Production Code movies (Skyscraper Souls, 1932), someone disparages someone else for wanting to be a “big SHOT,” not a “BIG shot.” The expression was newer then—someone at the time was still referring, on some level, to an actual shot in the sense of a gunshot or cannon shot. Note that we today would rarely even think of big shot as referring to a shot. It has long been, really, one word bigshot—thus pronounced “BIG shot”—just as gunshot and buckshot are. We just don’t write it that way.

  You can even see the Backshift happening in living color. In an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the early 1970s, Mary Richards and some other characters order what they call Chinese FOOD. With the color photography and the fact that people in the early ’70s considered themselves so resplendently modern, what with hippies, discotheques, and the Pill, it looks odd now to see these people saying Chinese FOOD rather than what we would say today: CHINESE food. The Backshift makes sense of it. In the early ’70s, Chinese food wasn’t mainstream yet; it was still an exotic novelty. Therefore, one would not yet have pronounced it with the Backshift. I’d bet a lot of money that about ten years after that episode was taped, Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper (playing Rhoda), now as accustomed to Chinese food as the rest of America became, started saying CHINESE food.

  You don’t even need to listen to the past: the Backshift tells you what you would have heard anyway. With French fry—again, it’s two words more on paper than in reality—in our minds, are we really thinking about Frenchness at all when we say it? When the Republicans tried to get us to call them Freedom fries during their irritation with the French in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, much of the reason it was so funny was that French fries are not French in our minds in any real way. French fries are “a thing” in themselves, quite apart from any literal conception of a “fry” (whatever that exactly is) prepared in a French way. However, certainly, at a point they were still processed as fries that are French—people didn’t start calling them that for no reason. Therefore, we can know that “FRENCH fry” must be a Backshift pronunciation of something that started as “French FRY.” And it was indeed: as late as 1966, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary was giving the “French FRY” pronunciation, and recently I have heard octogenarians say “French FRY” rather than “FRENCH fry.” People of that age at this writing have witnessed the Backshift making French and fry into a new word: “Frenchfry.”

  One last one: on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show the same year Lucy was buying her maid the broasted chicken, a woman of a certain age refers to a “crossword PUZZLE.” Odd way to say it—until we realize that the actress, Arlene Harris, was born in 1896 and crossword puzzles became popular only in the 1920s. That’s the way it would have been said when she learned the word as a young woman, and she stuck with it. To be Boardwalk Empire/Mad Men–style obsessively accurate about getting the past right, people saying crossword puzzle in a play or movie set in the 1920s or ’30s should pronounce it “crossword PUZZLE,” and older people depicted in the 1950s and ’60s should say it that way, too. Because, well, some people (me) will notice.

  As with anything in language, the Backshift exhibits some irregularities. It’s hard to say, for example, why street forces the Backshift while avenue doesn’t: BROAD Street, WASHINGTON Street, but Fifth AVENUE, Kennedy AVENUE. It isn’t that avenue is a longer word, because if that were the solution, then why Penny LANE, Allens LANE?* These are things that intrigue the professionals. More generally, however, the sheer tendency fascinates nevertheless: grammar below the radar that creates new words out of old ones. For example, you now are in a position to know why old-timers pronounced Broadway “broad-WAY.”

  Lexical Mitosis: When Words Reproduce

  Products of the Backshift are “new words” to varying degrees. We can’t help perceiving the two elements black and board surviving within the word blackboard, even if their meanings are now abstractified. Most readily, we perceive blackboard as “two words in one,” but still, two of something. Linguists even call these kinds of words compounds, with its acknowledgment that even as “one word,” the product is something less than totally unitary. But things, as so often, go farther. Words that date can go on to ma
te.

  First can come what we could think of as the commitment. Because it involves only one of the words, it may seem more like codependency, but we’re all adults here. Often if a word is part of the unaccented part of the compound, then it starts being pronounced more fuzzily, and drifts ever farther beyond what we would think of as a word in any sense at all.

  Take policeman, fireman, clergyman, postman, and gentleman: one does not pronounce the -man part the way one would pronounce man by itself. Rather, you say something like “mun,” a sludgy “whatever” kind of pronunciation. That has happened over the years, as the words have undergone what you could call enunciational wear. Originally, the -man in these words was pronounced fully, but now, if someone had no idea how English was written and heard words like policeman and fireman, they might not even associate the little -mun with the word man at all.

  One way we know that this pronunciation of -man develops gradually over time is that if you start all over again and make up a new word with -man on the end, you will usually pronounce the -man fully. Anchorman and caveman are newish concepts; yes, cavemen themselves date pretty far back, but what taught us that they existed was paleontology, which does not. Therefore those two words are pronounced with “man” rather than “mun.”

  After that, chance plays its role as always: sometimes fate spares a -man. Postman is pronounced “post-mun,” but there’s no such thing as a “mail-mun.” However, the general tendency is what matters, as it explains, for example, why British people say “saucepun” for saucepan—it’s because the Backshift left the -pan hanging, exposed to the elements. “Saucepun” sounds bracingly weird to the American ear, and yet it’s no different from forehead when pronounced “FORE-id,” as it commonly is. One no longer knows head was ever even part of the equation without the spelling, which reflects the stage when fore and head first came together at all, when head was still its own person instead of losing itself trying to live through fore.

  But after a while, even the other word’s pronunciation gets muddied up, and that’s when dating finally gets to actual mating. Cupboard is a fine example. Only as written is cupboard in any sense two words; cup is as lost in the shuffle as board. Learning it as a child, one hears simply a single word “cubberd,” and has no idea that the word refers to a board you put cups on, which, today, it does not anyway. Breakfast is similar: we think not of breaking a fast but of “breckfist,” a single word for a certain meal taken early in the day. That “break” and “fast” were originally the word’s parts qualifies as a fun fact, available only upon learning the conservative spelling of the word. This is also the reason for those odd nautical pronunciations such as “bowson” for boatswain and “fokesul” for forecastle. Then even if one word’s pronunciation is still intact, that word’s meaning may give so little clue to what the pairing means that we’ve essentially hit cupboard territory anyway. When main sail became “main-sul,” the “-sul” left no clue that the reference was a sail, but just about anything can be “main.” In the same way, to link the fore- in forehead with frontness is a bit of a stretch: it’s on the “fore” of your head, but more immediately we think of it as above the eyes. Besides, in regions such as where I grew up, where the word is pronounced “FAHR-id” rather than “FORE-id,” the connection really was completely lost anyway.

  This is also how daisy originated from day’s eye: say day’s eye fast enough and note that you are, one, bored and, two, saying daisy. That describes how that word emerged in the mouths of English speakers over time, but the difference with breakfast is that with daisy, even the spelling gives nothing away. There is sex in the history of quite a few words that seem quite untouched. World is one. In werewolf, the were- part once meant “man,” which is why werewolves are half man and half wolf. World began as wer-eld, where wer was that “man” word and eld meant “old,” as in age. Wer-eld meant “man’s age,” as in “the age of man,” as in man’s time on earth. Gradually, via implication, it came to mean the earth itself: hence, today’s world. Bring started as two words in Proto-Indo-European, the one we now have as “to bear,” as in carry, and another one, enk, meaning “to get to” (enk later became enough). People were saying “to carry something and get it to a place,” which is what bringing is. Bher-enk, said a whole lot over thousands of years, becomes bring. Or bridal only looks like bride with the -al on the end that we recognize from final and total. The word started as a reference to a feast connected with a wedding: the bride-ale. The word about is not the scion of some ancient Old English word like “ægboþe,” but a melding of at, by, and out.*

  Backing Up, Dropping Off: On the Street and in Your Life

  A final way the Backshift makes new words is when the second word gets tired and drops off, leaving just the first one in a brand-new meaning. For example, again, in old movies and television shows, you can hear people referring to pizza as “pizza pie,” pronounced “PIZZA pie.” So, pizza started as short for pizza pie. This you can catch happening in 1956 on an episode of The Honeymooners when Alice refers once to pizza pie and then later to just pizza. But that cannot have been the whole story of pizza. If originally the idea was that pizza was a kind of tomato and cheese tart, which it is, then based on blackboard and French fry and the rest, we can know that at first, people must have thought of it as a pizza kind of pie as opposed to another kind, in which case they must have said “pizza PIE,” before the Backshift happened.

  And before YouTube happened, I would have had to be satisfied with asking bewildered elderly people about this, who likely have gotten so much in the habit of saying just pizza that they wouldn’t remember whether they once said “pizza PIE” (and wouldn’t care). But now I know that there are ancient 1950s TV commercials hawking, for example, what must have been a repulsive substance designed to allow Mrs. America to delight her bairns by bringing home “pizza PIE” in a can!

  Therefore, one, pizza PIE, two, PIZZA pie, and three, pizza, a word Americans before World War II would have heard as some random “Eye-talian” word. (Franklin D. Roosevelt may never have tasted pizza.) In my own life, I have experienced “cellular PHONE”—a prop in a play I was involved with in 1993 when certain characters were sporting “cellular PHONES” as an indication of their obsession with money—becoming “CELL phone.” Remember, circa 2000, “I only use my ‘CELL phone’ for emergencies,” said by people already actually spending half their lives on their CELL phones? Or at least so much of their lives that rapidly the term became just “cell”? Talking on a cell, to someone as late as 1990, would have sounded as incoherent as something a Timothy Leary would have come up with in his more, well, enlightened moments. Cell in reference to a phone happened because of the Backshift, followed by what we could call the Dropoff.

  Words you’d never suspect have the Dropoff in their past. Road in Old English meant a ride, not a path. When in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Griffith recounts to Katherine the demise of Cardinal Wolsey, he mentions that after being so sick that the cardinal could no longer ride his mule, later “with easy roads, he came to Leicester.” Today it sounds like Shakespeare was referring to smooth carriage trails, but Shakespeare may well have been referring to easy rides, as in gentler horses. Roadway, as in “riding path,” was the term that meant what we mean by road today. After a while, though, people started dropping the -way off and saying just road for short, now to refer to a path instead of a ride.

  Words are on the move, then, right here in life as we are living it. I once heard someone on the street talking (on his CELL) about the “re-PEAT stress” plaguing him. It took me a bit to process what this utterance that sounded like “PEES-treh” was. It sounded like it was perhaps another kind of Italian pastry. But no—he meant what not too long ago all people were pronouncing as the novel term “repeat STRESS syndrome.” The Backshift on the streets, backing up, dropping off—it’s everywhere. Listen for living language!

  When Words Mate on the Sly

  The analogy between languages and anim
al reproduction can go only so far. For example, languages do not evolve according to fitness the way creatures do. Of course they retain words for what they need words for, but French’s subjunctive and German’s three genders are not adaptive. They are accidental overgrowth that languages accrete as inevitably as words change their meanings.

  Yet the analogy can get us quite far. For example, we have learned that Homo sapiens of European heritage carry DNA sequences from Neanderthals, as a result of matings long ago. In the same way, words can leave chunks of themselves inside other words, replacing the original material with a new one. The word lives on, and no one bats an eye.

  Or sometimes they do, especially lately in the case of common sentiments about how some people pronounce nuclear as “nucular.” Commonly treated as a mere matter of messiness, “nucular” is actually another example of word sex.

  Typically we hear of “nucular” that it’s an ignorant mistake because the word is nuclear in the dictionary. However, I hope that this book has gotten across the point that the dictionary has no sacrosanct authority in telling us how a word “is” pronounced in some cosmically unquestionable way. Rather, the dictionary tells us how a word happens to be pronounced, often by most but not all people, at the time it is compiled.

  Now, if only one person said “nucular”—an impression some seem to have had of George W. Bush, whose use of the “nucular” pronunciation seemed to give complaints about it a new urgency—then it would qualify as an eccentricity, and therefore as a mistake. “If the way so many people talk is okay, then what counts as a mistake?” a linguist is often asked. The answer is: when people are doing things on their own. I once knew someone who, for some reason, despite otherwise perfectly ordinary American English, used “nerfry” for nursery and “grofery” for grocery. That was, quite simply, off because no one else says the words that way; nor is there anything about their sounds that makes it likely that anyone ever will.