Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  This third like, then, is what linguists call a quotative marker, and that is a piece of grammar, with a job quite similar to the one performed by that in a sentence like He said that it would be okay. The that in this sentence is not a “that” that involves pointing; it’s a little tool that links He said and it would be okay. He was like, “It’s okay” has the same meaning, expressed with a different grammatical construction. “Quotative marker” is not a term created just to bend over backward for little like. Lots of languages have small words that you insert just before or just after you mention something someone else said. Sometimes they start as a word meaning that, sometimes one meaning say, or even do. It might seem that like is somehow a stretch as a source for such a marker, but in fact, in Xhosa, the native language of Nelson Mandela, none other than like is used even in formal language. Ithi means “like this.” Bible is iBhayibhile. (See Bible tucked into that busy-looking word?) Now, armed with that, look at how you say in Xhosa The Bible says, “Love thy neighbor”:

  Ithi iBhayibhile “Mthande ummelwane wakho.”

  You can guess that the words in quotation marks mean “Love thy neighbor.” That leaves Ithi iBhayibhile, which means “The Bible is like this.” In Xhosa, The Bible says, “Love thy neighbor,” is “The Bible is like, ‘Love thy neighbor’”!

  Is There Really No Room for Standards?

  For a linguist to hope that the public will give up the idea that some ways of speaking are more appropriate for formal settings than others would be futile—especially since all linguists agree with the public on this. Often we are asked, “If all these things considered bad grammar are really okay, then why don’t you use them in your writing and speeches?” However, none of us is pretending that a society of human beings could function in which all spoke or wrote however they wanted to and yet had equal chances at success in life. The linguist’s point is that there are no scientific grounds for considering any way of speaking erroneous in some structural or logical sense. To understand this is not to give up on learning to communicate appropriately to context. To understand this is, rather, to shed the contempt: the acrid disgust so many seem to harbor for people who use the forms we have been taught are “bad.”

  Like is useful here once more. Young people do use it an awful lot, with one in almost every sentence for some stretches. Should they be taught to swallow the likes for public speaking or other settings where they want to be taken seriously? Yes! We cannot change that, in real life, whatever the linguist’s observations about language change, Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby, and DES-pi-kuh-bull, the new like will always have a tentative smell about it, even by the time it’s been around too long to be called new. The original meaning of like as “similar to” coexists as a comparison, and is also easily understood, unlike the baroque subtleties of the new likes.

  However, those subtleties are real, and cast in a new light the use of the new likes in casual speech. It’s one thing to agree that young people should be taught to suppress the likes in interviews, but harder to not spontaneously go further and hope they stop using the new likes completely. After all, if they go part of the way, why not make them finish the job? But a linguist encountering just such a word in an unknown language spoken by a small group in New Guinea, the African rain forest, or the Asian steppes would write fascinated papers on such a multifarious piece of language, with no reason at all to dismiss it as somehow “slangy” or used “too much.”

  I think of Mualang, a language spoken in Borneo, handy here because it is utterly unknown beyond where it is spoken, and pretty much no one reading this will ever meet a speaker of it. It’s just one of the world’s thousands of languages, like most of them deeply obscure and almost never committed to paper. It is spoken, only. And all over it is a little word: tih. This tih can pop up several times in the same sentence. It’s hard to quite nail what tih “means”—something about calling attention to something, making sure the person you’re talking to is following your point. It all sounds a lot like you know or, yes, one of the new likes. If someone had occasion to spend time with the speakers of Mualang, if they learned the language, one indication of their true fluency would be their peppering their speech with tih, which would make this person’s Mualang “real.” I doubt any of us would venture to say that there was just too much tih in Mualang, any more than we would claim that there was too much or too little of anything in it. If confronted with Mualang, we would take it on its own terms, as being what it is. There is no historical documentation of a language like Mualang, but we can be quite sure that tih arose from a morphing, in the past, of some other word that had a different meaning. Yet on what grounds, we would wonder, could anyone say that anything in Mualang was “wrong”?

  There is no reason we cannot view our own English that way in terms of casual speech. English’s new likes are like tihs. We can treat spraying for likes in public speaking as a matter of fashion that one must knuckle under to. After all, one simply cannot wear a crinoline to a job interview, and nudity would be awkward at most dinner parties. However, we can also understand that casual speech full of likes is not, in truth, tentative or messy, but empathic and polite.

  Some might have preferred, or even expected, that in a book about how language changes, the issue of standards would have been the focus throughout. However, in my view, the spectacle of how language changes is more interesting, and more useful to the collective intelligence of a civilization, than the issue as to whether we should regret the changes. In fact, the content of this book makes it rather clear that any such regret would seem to qualify as subjective, local, a matter of preference that a broader perspective sheds a different light on.

  One often cannot truly know what it is to be an American until one has spent time somewhere else. The idea that any new development in a language could be “bad” feels as authoritative as one’s sense of up and down—until one sees that the exact same things thrive in other languages where sensible people never even notice them. We might also consider that the fury some harbor over language usage issues is incommensurate with the gravity of the issue. Does anyone genuinely fear that we are on our way to babbling incomprehensibly to one another when no such thing has ever happened among a single human group in the history of our species? One suspects more afoot than logic: rage over language usage may be the last permissible open classism, channeling a tribalist impulse roiling ever underneath.

  The tribalist impulse has ever fewer officialized outlets in our society, in which open discrimination is increasingly barred from the public forum. The very pointedness of the rage behind so many comments about language usage suggests something exploding after a considerable buildup of pressure, denied regular venting. In this grand and tragic world of ours, it is rather unexpected, in itself, that anyone would experience anger in response to the construction of a sentence. A student can hand in their paper anytime after Thursday—this use of their is grounds for fulmination amid global warming, terrorism, grisly epidemics, and the prospect of a world without bees?

  Nevertheless, language standards will always be with us to some extent. I hope a sense of language change as a parade can coax us to think of the standards as a matter not of logic but of fashion. One must at least pay lip service to fashion, but no one thinks the fact that we no longer use attachable collars is a moral issue. There are times you have to tuck in your shirt (or, as it were, your likes), but no one sees a person with his shirttail out at home as a blackguard.*

  Meanwhile, the show goes on. Changes are always happening, sometimes detected and reviled, sometimes creeping in unnoticed. The quotative like isn’t the only new quotative marker: all is used in the same way, as in And he was all “You better watch out.” There was a time when someone followed this all with an actual imitation of the person. However, for a while now, people have been using this all expression in an increasingly matter-of-fact way: And he was all “So when’s the party?” and I was all “Just ask me tomorrow when I have it all organized,�
� and he was all “But I need to know now,” and I’m all … One now hears young people using all in this way without intending any particular drama. In other words, all is becoming a piece of grammar, just one more bit of stuff that doesn’t “mean” anything but gets a job done.

  Interesting: if our brains weren’t on writing, and English were an unwritten language that people just talked, with little concern as to whether it was changing from century to century, then all would possibly be the beginning of a new verb. It might work like this: I’m all, said endlessly across generations, could start to be heard as “I maw,” with the final l sound on all softening and falling away. If this also happened with you’re all and he/she’s all, then we would have this process:

  TODAY

  SOMEDAY

  I’m all

  I maw

  You’re all

  you raw

  He’s all

  he zaw

  The fun thing would be that this would be a highly irregular verb. There are times when an English speaker might almost have Irregularity Envy toward other languages. Native speakers of French or Russian effortlessly manage verbs that take a menagerie of different forms depending on person, number, and tense, but in English the only real contender we have to this is to be and its wild mashup of am, is, been, were, etc. Imagine if we also had a new verb that meant say, where one had to memorize I maw, you raw, but she zaw, and we could listen to learners messing it up and saying, “I zaw.”

  Certainly, though, we have a new grammar word from all, whose meaning no one could have predicted would come to be “say,” any more than anyone could know that a word for “body” could come to be an adverbial suffix.

  Meanwhile, no has become a word that by all rights should arouse the same animus that literally does: it is used as often to mean its opposite as to mean what we think of it as meaning. To wit, think of a modern American exchange like this:

  DIANA: They kept saying nobody would get there on time, and everybody ended up there ahead of schedule.

  FRANCESCA: No, the trains are actually running properly now, it’s amazing.

  Why “no” when the person is agreeing? Taken literally, a “no” like this could be read as oddly confrontational; yet today it is an established part of casual American conversation. I myself participated in an exchange in which I said, “And so you wound up loving it here in Toledo,” and the other person said, “No, we have a five-bedroom house and a garden!” Again, that exchange makes no sense if we insist, as a dictionary would, that no negates.

  Things are changing. This usage of no does make sense on the basis of what no “should” mean, actually. Francesca’s “no” is negating something implied: other people’s denial of Diana’s take on the matter, with which Francesca agrees. Francesca is saying “no” to the people who thought nobody would get there on time, therefore agreeing with Diana’s line of reasoning, which is to argue that the trains are better than they used to be. The person I was talking to was denying the implied others who would perhaps not expect that someone would be excited about moving to Toledo, as opposed to, say, San Francisco.

  However, to the extent that we are not accustomed to thinking of implied contradiction as part of what a word “means,” this new no can seem odd, just as totally, with its similar function of refuting implied naysayers, can seem overused. Both are just how language keeps going, as each generation comes up with slightly off interpretations of what they hear from the previous one.

  And so the forms and meanings of words sail along. One that I have experienced, as someone rounding fifty as this book goes to press, is based off of. My point is based off of what Lily said, my students will say, and I blink a couple of times, internally at least, since my sense is that the term is based on. However, there is nothing inherently better about based on—based off of conveys movement from the base and could therefore be considered more vivid. Really, it’s a six versus half dozen kind of difference, with based off of having randomly caught on of late. The reason its proliferation has struck me is that it indeed took off especially in the 1990s, after I was already an adult. Make no mistake, language change can throw me a bit, too. Based off of first struck me as a tad clunky, I must admit, for reasons that are quite arbitrary.* However, in light of awesome and awful, hey and huh, reduce meaning “go back to” versus “go down to,” merry having once meant “short,” and so much else, there is no basis upon which I could present anything called judgment. Based off of is just one more symptom of the fact that the language a people speak is properly the stage a language is in as they are speaking it.

  All these novelties can’t help but seem like just that, novelties, with the air of triviality and impermanance associated with that word. However, a new view of language requires hearing things like this as the essence of what language is, rather than as interruptions of a stasis that has, in fact, never existed. One must avoid being, for example, Jonathan Swift.

  Yes, we’d all like to have written Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal.” However, Swift was also a highly language-conscious person who heard English’s moving on as a desecration. Let’s listen in on him in 1712, complaining about people “abbreviating words.” He finds the abbreviations in question to be “such harsh unharmonious sounds that none but a northern ear could endure,” the idea in his time being that the dialects of northern England were less quaint than irritating. But what “abbreviation” was bothering Mr. Swift? Why, the -ed past suffix pronounced as it is now. He was used to it always being pronounced as we today pronounce blessed as “bless-id” in religious contexts. Swift couldn’t handle hearing the excrescence all around him of pronunciations like “drudg’d, disturb’d, rebuk’d, fledg’d, and a thousand others everywhere to be met … we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it ever could obtain.”

  “But you’re shortening the word! You spell rebuked with an e before the d—why don’t you pronounce it?” Swift would ask us. Quite easily we would dismiss him with “Get over it—it chang’d.” If anything, we wish he could have viewed the shortening of -ed as English becoming the form of itself we are so cozy with today, since to us, our own stage of the language seems so right, so inevitable, where we can say “kist” rather than “kiss-id” without a man in stockings rapping us on the knuckles. But we, too, are present at just a stage in the language. In our discomfort with signs that new stages are coming as they always have, we become Swifts.

  We don’t need to. “Variety is the spice of life,” we say. We may wonder what the new fashions will be. We admire the old person who keeps trying new things. We behold the history of Western music with awe, dazzled by the endless transformations over time. The term move on strikes us in a good place; stay put, not so much. The lava lamp mesmerizes; the apple cut in half turning brown does not. Yet, somehow, language is supposed to be different.

  Language must stay put because novelty is ugly? Ugly as in words like kissed, rolled, and believed? It must stay put because if it doesn’t we won’t understand one another? But that never happened as English went from being an alternate-universe German to what it is now; language change is communal, not idiosyncratic. It must stay put because … we want the story to just stop cold? We don’t want to know how it comes out? We don’t want it to come out at all? Little Red Riding Hood knocked on the door. And knocked. And knocked again. Then, she knocked. Again. Little Red Riding Hood knocked, as always, on the door, upon which she then knocked on the door. She’s knocking now. She will knock on the door afterward, and continue to do so. Knock knock. Knock.

  The Victorians had a practice of grouping elaborately costumed people into poses inspired by paintings to make what was called a “tableau vivant.” The tableau would be part of a social event, with ladies grinning as they stood frozen, striking their painterly poses. “How charming! How lovely!” people would say.

  But today the practice seems as bizarre as feeding people to lions. It made more sense before fi
lm and color print reproduction, and it was also often used as an excuse to ogle women scantily clad. Yet, from our vantage point, it still seems odd that anyone would watch people striking a pose when you could watch them performing a play. Or even just walking down the street, as long as they moved!

  This tableau tradition is analogous to the dictionary. The language poses sweetly between its covers, caught one afternoon and made to hold still. The dictionary is handy in ways just as the tableaux were—but it does not represent what a language is any more than the tableau represented actual existence. Let’s enjoy not a snapshot of the language, but its living reality: as a show, a process, a parade. Let’s watch it going by, wondering what’s next. Or even, let’s join it. The language lives, as we do. Let’s love it as what it is—something always becoming, never still.

  Maybe some prefer their flowers pressed dry in books. There are those with affectionate feelings toward the inflatable doll and the corpse. Surely, though, most of us seek life. Language, too, lives. We must take a deep breath and, like the people initially so put off by Darwinism, embrace reality, this time linguistic. Among the many benefits of doing so: wonder replaces disgust, curiosity replaces condemnation, and overall, you have a lot more fun.

  Notes

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  1. THE FACES OF ENGLISH