Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  But in fact, a great many people say “nucular,” including educated people. In a case like that, we might seek to know why so many people pronounce it that way, and more to the point, we might seek a reason more systematic than that people simply “screw it up.” There exists such a systematic reason. People say “nucular” modeled on other words that end in -ular such as spectacular, tubular, and vernacular. Specifically, because there exist the words nuke and, long before that, nucleus, a temptation looms to think of nuclear as “nuc-” plus the -ular ending: spectacular, tubular, nuc-ular. This means that the -ular ending on so many words made its way into nuclear, infecting and remodeling it just as snippets of Neanderthal DNA did to European Homo sapiens.

  This may sound like special pleading for a word that we can’t help hearing as a tad ignorant-sounding if we haven’t adopted it ourselves. However, the process is actually normal in how a language changes. There are only so many sounds, and although the ways they can combine creates a vast variety of words, there will be times when a sequence of sounds in a word we pronounce happens to resemble a sequence of sounds in another one.

  A favorite of mine, although it will never catch on, is my older daughter’s first pronunciation of bathing suit as “bathing soup”—she learned about soup first, and the t in suit doesn’t sound unlike the p in soup—she also called suitcases “soupcases.” Note, though, that you can almost imagine “soupcase” catching on, out of an idea of someone toting lots of cans of soup along on their trip, given that we tend to avoid actually carrying whole suits in suitcases and would more lucidly call them clothescases.* Things like “bathing soup” and “soupcase” do catch on when the “wrong” pronunciation ends up sounding even more logically plausible than cases for our soup on the road. Hence “nuc-ular,” or examples that, now older, don’t even sound like mistakes anymore.

  For example, by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident.

  It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now.

  Except that hamburger lent a particular reason to start saying burger eventually: the ham part. Ham is meat, and if one didn’t pause to think—and people had little more time to indulge in that pastime then than they do now—it may reasonably have sounded as if hamburger sandwich referred to something made of ham. If so, it followed from what was left of hamburger minus the ham- part was called a “burger.” The word ham, then, infected hamburger sandwich, in which until then the ham- part of the word had been a random sequence of syllables, the first sounds in the word Hamburg.

  Hence, the notion of the “cheese burger” by the late 1930s, with “burger” now referring to a disk of meat. Today, of course, one speaks of the veggie burger, taco burger, fish burger, and so much else, such that no one would object that burger is “not a word.” Now it is, but only because of grafting. We talk about eating a nice burger, and Abraham Lincoln brought back to life would picture us trying to consume a staid, small-town German tradesman.

  Or what’s a seacopter? Or a medicopter? You can imagine, because you know what a copter is. But technically you shouldn’t. The idea of copter as short for helicopter chops the word in a place its coiners would have found unnatural. Helico means spiral and pter “wing.” Both roots are Greek and, by themselves, fairly recognizable; we all know what a helix is, and pter also made it into pterodactyl. However, in English we don’t spontaneously process pt as the beginning of a word or even a syllable, and so helico-pter most readily comes out as “heli-copter.” Then the DNA/“soupcase” business comes in. The -er in -copter seems like the same one in blender, flyer, and tiller, rather than just the tail end of a weird syllable pter. That makes it easy to shorten helicopter into “copter,” as in “that which copts.” But what’s “copting”? Well, we might figure copt was perhaps the Greek root lost to us, when actually if copt were the root, then the ancient creatures would be called coptodactyls—which would be kind of neat, but only because of our initially mistaken sense of how helicopter parses out!

  This kind of mishearing has given us a goofy prefix and a goofy suffix as well. To anyone before the late nineteenth century, chocoholic, textaholic, and certainly sexaholic would have sounded as odd as A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat. “What in blazes,” they would harrumph, “is ‘holic’? Where do you get such balderdash?” We get it from alcoholic, which even to us, upon reflection, divides as alcohol + ic. However, folk impression developed a sense that the part signaling addiction was -holic rather than just -ic. A “-holic” strand of DNA broke off, born of a suffix trailing a goodly stub of what was once the word behind it, like a drumstick that comes off with the thigh attached. This new hunk of material, rather than just -ic by itself, was processed as meaning “addict.” This -holic started attaching to other words, and here we are. Our modern -holic words may seem mere jokes, but claims that a suffix now so entrenched and fertile is “not real” lead to a question as to just how we define reality. Workaholic, in particular, is hardly slang or a passing witticism.

  Then, cybervision, cyberoptics, cybermarketing, cyberculture—all these words are flubs, technically. It started with cybernetics, from the Greek word kybernetes, for “steersman.” Cybernetics was composed, then, of cybern (not cyber) plus -etics. But most of us don’t know Greek, and cyber- seemed the more intuitive first element than cybern.

  Hence cyberattacks instead of cybernattacks, just as here and there in Europeans’ DNA there are those stutters of Neanderthal. You can’t get them out of there, and so we might as well say, Vive la différence! After all, the people who actually say, Vive la différence have Neanderthal genes in them, and last time I checked, they were associated with at least some degree of sophistication.

  Here We Go Again

  When words come together, the new word is subject to the very processes of change we have seen in previous chapters. The familiarity that signals the Backshift is pragmatic, or personal, in the sense discussed in chapter 1. There is a web of sentiments around big shot, mostly suspicious. Such feelings are more subjective than the ones a term like influential person inspires. Gentleman began in the meaning of “a man who is genteel,” as in of noble birth. That is hardly what we mean in saying “The gentleman over there needs your help,” in which case referring to the man as a gentleman has become a courtesy that means, basically, “not a slob.” That’s an example of how implication changes words’ meanings over time, as we saw in chapter 2. The muffled way man is pronounced in words like gentleman and fireman suggests that it is becoming more of a suffix than a word. In other words, that man is grammaticalizing à la chapter 3. Man is “trying” to become the equivalent of the suffix -er, as in hunter. This actually happened with the product name Walkman, where the item was distinctly ungendered and thus Walkman meant “the thing you walk with,” just as walker can mean “the thing that an elderly person might walk with.” Finally, when that new word hits the ground, sound change starts messing around with it, as we saw with cupboard, breakfast, daisy, and forehead, so that after a while you may not even be able to tell the word used to be a pair.

  This churn is eternal in a language, always helping replenish the language’s word stock. Barn started as “barley-arn” for barley house; arn is now a lost word, but a dormitory was once a “sleep-arn,” a guesthouse was a “guest-arn,” and so on. But now we’d never know barn, such a gruff old stump of a word, was
ever more than one of anything, and today it is part of the Backshifted barnyard. Then, say barnyard humor—do you say “BARNYARD humor” rather than “barnyard HUMOR”? If so, there’s a new Backshift, due to the popularity of this brand of wit.

  Compounding, then, is central to how a language comes to be what it is. It is easy to miss how common it is in English: writing conventions often hide it (ice cream), and the Backshift is something subconscious that requires pointing out. However, a book like this written for Germans would not have to call its speakers’ attention to compounding, as that language is fond of highway pileups like Wohnwagenparkplatzeinwohnerklagen (mobile home parking lot residents’ complaints). Chinese consists of about four hundred single short syllables (li, wu, ma, lan, etc.), which have four tones that they can occur on. That yields just sixteen hundred possible words,* nowhere near enough to furnish a language’s vocabulary, which requires tens of thousands of words at the very least. Homonymy (e.g., bat as an animal and bat as a sporting implement) can be handy, especially with the support of context. But a language in which each syllable with a tone had dozens of meanings would not be processible by human brains. For this reason, in Chinese most words have to be compounds, with the endless possible combinations of the syllables allowing the language the massive vocabulary it needs. Rendered in Chinese, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is practically all compounds, for example. In the phrase “When in the course of human events,” human is “have-concern man-type,” events is “matter-affair,” and course is “send-unfold proceed-order.”

  In English, compounding is less dramatic but still central to the way we end up expressing ourselves. It is one more way that language does not just sit, formed. It moves, forming. What seems almost designed to keep us from delighting in, or even perceiving, this endless show is the printed page. Please read a few more of them, nevertheless, in the final chapter, where I will explain.

  6

  This Is Your Brain on Writing

  Lingering Questions

  I am espousing a view of language as eternally mutable, and yet it still may not seem quite plausible. Language change may seem like scurvy or being eaten by a bear: something the ancients had to put up with that we are more or less past.

  The main thing that encourages that perspective is that our most spontaneous conception of language, always and forever, will be writing. Writing is what it seems language actually is. And writing doesn’t seem terribly mutable.

  We think of ourselves as speaking writing, rather than as writing speech, even though writing has existed for only 6,500 years, whereas speech likely traces back to the dawn of our species 150,000 years ago. One talks less of the sounds in one’s language than of the letters in it. A speech variety rarely written is dismissed as a mere “dialect,” with status as a real language indicated by writing, even though all but about two hundred languages out of six thousand are barely written at all.

  This is your brain on writing: If someone says “dog,” you might picture a dog, but if someone says “already,” you picture the word as written. But imagine if you could neither read nor write and someone said “already.” You would likely imagine some scenario in which that word played a part, possibly one early in your life, when you were learning how to use the word. Yet with our brains on writing, we imagine the word as scratched out in arbitrarily agreed-upon symbols—and in the case of English speakers, symbols ensnared into a senseless system besides. Why does ea stand for “eh” in bread but for “ee” in meat? Why does y stand for “ee” in early but not in yak? It’s a crazy thing in its way, this business of thinking of language as writing. But we’re stuck with it.

  And one thing about writing is that it stays put. It just sits there. Its stationary quality implies constancy, tradition—law. This is much of why the English spelling system remains in place despite its absurdity: it’s cast in stone. The folk song mutates endlessly over time as the melody and words change from mouth to mouth, generation over generation. Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 will always be played the same way, however, because it’s written. The writing of language exerts a similar kind of influence. It suggests that things aren’t supposed to change.

  Moreover, this very air of judgment that writing casts over speech actually does make language change more slowly than it otherwise would, as long as writing permeates society and literacy is widespread enough that a critical mass of people can read. Shakespeare in 1600 could not have functioned at all in the Old English of six hundred years before, whereas he could get around pretty well now, four hundred years later. Much of this is because education and literacy increased by leaps and bounds after his time, such that the typical Anglophone brain was a brain on writing. By the eighteenth century, it was standard to feel that one was supposed to speak not simply in the way that felt natural, but in a certain way that was enshrined on paper. The page held the language back from rolling along as heartily as it had in earlier times.

  However, to understand that language is inherently mutable regardless of sociohistorical conditions, we need a revised sense of the trajectory from Beowulf to Breaking Bad. If you find it hard to truly believe that it’s normal for a language to change as much as English did from Old English to King Lear in just six hundred years, you’re onto something. Language does not normally transform so vastly in such a brief period. But then, even in the mouths of those of us whose brains are on writing, over on the other side of the Shakespearean divide, English has changed a lot more since Shakespeare than we think. In the grand scheme of things, change treads along at a moderate pace, but unstoppable.

  For example, the transformation of English between Beowulf and Shakespeare was indeed especially disruptive, not business as usual. The Old English of Beowulf was vastly retooled in terms of grammar when it was imposed on the Celtic people who inhabited Britain before the first English speakers arrived. Then the Vikings drastically simplified the grammar, turning a language like German into the much less grammatically cluttered English we know and love (like?). Finally, English was then drenched in a fire hose spray of new words from French and later Latin. All three of these things together made Middle English much more unlike Old English than, for example, modern German is different from Old High German. Short of some unprecedented historical upheavals, the English of the year 2500 will be in no way as different from today’s English as Shakespeare’s was from Old English.

  But then, we are farther from the English of 1600 than we know. Nothing makes this clearer than the fact, mentioned in chapter 2, of how easy it is to attend a Shakespearean play and find much of the language opaque when delivered live. Some may hold to the idea that this isn’t the case when the actors are British and especially well trained, but those who would disagree may be familiar with the experience of attending a perfectly fine rendition of Macbeth and finding it all but impossible to draw sense out of most of the words going by without previous study. The simple reason is that English has changed more vastly since 1600 than it may seem. We will recall Lear’s Edmund complaining about the “curiosity of nations” and describing himself as “generous,” using meanings unrecoverable today when heard live without prior instruction. Despite the reactionary tendency that writing exerts, English has gone on changing.

  Shakespeare seems so very long ago, though, such that it may seem that maybe English was different waaaay back then, but that things have pretty much settled into a certain permanent place since, perhaps, about two hundred years ago, other than new names for new things. In fact, not. The first clue that more is changing even now than we suppose is things we have already seen: bobbling accents on words and the Backshifts clicking into place here, there, and everywhere all the time. But there’s more. For example, instead of going back to the seventeenth century, what about just the nineteenth? The English of Moby-Dick is interesting in that Herman Melville was writing in a language more removed from ours than we would expect of a book that was only a hundred-and-a-bit years old during the Eisenhower a
dministration. In fact, much of why the book is a majestic and yet often taxing read is not only the almost obsessive detail about whaling and the mile-long sentences, but also that Melville often means something different with a word from what we’re used to. It can make his writing feel like a radio station not quite tuned in right.

  For example, early on, Ishmael mentions that something is “more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas.” But would seeing an iceberg tied to a tropical island make us exclaim, “Great that that’s finally happened! What will they think of next!” Would we find it “wonderful”? Elsewhere, Ishmael mentions the “wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors”—but does he really mean to describe rumors as being neato and scary at the same time? That’s a little idiosyncratic, no? After a while one understands that by wonderful, Melville was referring to actual wonder, something that occasions marveling, usually in the vein of finding something strange, not “cool.” Of Ahab, second mate Stubb says, “Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!” But even those who haven’t savored the book likely know that Ahab is hardly someone typically called “wonderful”—he is a broken, humorless obsessive, “wonderful” only in the sense of, say, an iceberg washing up in Bermuda. The word’s meaning has changed since 1851. Today Stubb would say that Ahab was curious or peculiar, just as Charles Darwin would likely call the flesh-eating Venus flytrap plant bizarre rather than wonderful, as he did in 1892.