Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Linguists adopted the term pragmatism: Those either familiar with this territory or interested in investigating it further should recall or learn, respectively, that amid the relevant scholarship, which straddles conventionalized academic subareas and is prolific to a degree that works against consensus, terminology is often fuzzy and the canonical concept is elusive. Analysts differ on where semantics leaves off and pragmatics begins. Also, unlike conventional lists of prepositions or conjunctions, there is no agreement as to which pragmatic words are dedicated to indicating personal involvement (modal pragmatic markers) as opposed to other aspects of pragmatics such as emphasis and starting new topics, etc. My FACE conglomeration corresponds mainly to what M. A. K. Halliday classified as the “interpersonal mode” of language in his classic “Language Structure and Language Function,” in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. by John Lyons (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).

  The FACE items are often discussed under the heading of “discourse particle,” but that refers to pragmatics in general rather than the attitudinal wing. “Modal particle” gets around, primarily in reference to German, but sometimes by extension to other languages. However, many of the words in question are too big to be called particles; “particle” is not really a grammatical category; and often it’s more than one word (or even things like intonation) that does the same job as modal “particles.” Plus, modality can be semantic as well as pragmatic, encompassing, for example, people’s assessment of probability, as in That must be the Indian food. Probability is more semantic in having meaning in the conventional sense: it is not an optional “add-on” to a sentence in the way that saying well,… is.

  Hence, FACE.

  what linguists call modal pragmatic markers: My favorite source is the academic but thoroughly readable monograph Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions, by Laurel Brinton (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996).

  words of all kinds are always going personal: Useful discussion is in Elizabeth Traugott and Richard Dasher’s Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  in one language called Seko Padang: Thomas E. Payne, Describing Morphosyntax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 255.

  “Written words are isolated from the fuller context”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 101.

  “pretense of shared knowledge that achieves intimacy”: Brinton, Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions, p. 186. For a whole book on you know (yes, there is such a thing!), try Jan-Ola Östman, “You Know”: A Discourse Functional View (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981).

  Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum: Brinton, Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions, pp. 181–210.

  In English, profanity plays its role here: The Random House Dictionary of American Slang, Vol. 1, ed. by J. E. Lighter (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 44–45.

  Or, in a language of Nepal called Kham: David E. Watters, “Kham,” in The Sino-Tibetan Languages, ed. by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 703.

  The sheer amount of laughter in typical conversation: Handy are articles in The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, ed. by Rod A. Martin (Burlington, VT: Elsevier Academic, 2007). A key academic article is Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter and Humor: A Synthetic Approach,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 80 (2005): 395–430.

  the nature of texting’s abbreviation LOL: Katie Heaney, “The Twelve Meanings of LOL,” Buzzfeed.com, http://www.buzzfeed.com/katieheaney/the-12-meanings-of-lol.

  language evolution theorist Michael Tomasello: The book to consult is Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  easing is central to classic descriptions of how politeness works: Especially well-known is Roger Brown and Albert Gilman, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” Language and Social Context, ed. by Pier Paolo Giglioli (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 252–82. (This article was also reprinted in other anthologies.) Less easily available but equally useful is Robin Lakoff, “What You Can Do with Words: Politeness, Pragmatics and Performatives,” in Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions, and Implicatures, ed. by Andy Rogers, Bob Wall, and John Murphy (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1977), pp. 79–106.

  often they will slide into using some signs with their speech: I learned of this from professional signer Alek Lev, to whom I am sincerely grateful for the information, especially given in such detail.

  2. IT’S THE IMPLICATION THAT MATTERS

  In this chapter, unless otherwise specified, word histories are based on entries in The Oxford English Dictionary.

  “‘Credit’ has been reversified”: John Lanchester, “Money Talks,” New Yorker, August 14, 2014.

  Shakespeare is, again, a useful demonstration: Mark H. Liddell, “Botching Shakespeare,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1898. My most summary presentation of the argument was a hundred years later, in my The Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a “Pure” Standard English (New York: Plenum, 1998), namely chap. 4. For an intelligent objection (followed, of course, by a response from me!), find “Translating Shakespeare into English: A Debate,” Voice and Speech Review 7 (2011): 38–51, where David Crystal and Ben Crystal weigh in from the other side.

  3. WHEN WORDS STOP BEING WORDS

  Sylvester and Tweety cartoon: “Home Tweet Home,” 1950.

  Carl’s Jr. restaurant receipt: From the blog Excessive Exclamation.

  Old issues of Archie: Archie’s Pals and Gals 127, October 1978. Somehow Love Canal never made it into the stories; nor was the Carter presidency ever referred to. No, I didn’t have all that much better to do: you’ll glean that I barely dated as a teen. For example, the girl who hauled us out of Body Heat soonish thereafter proceeded to have experiences that likely rendered her less likely to find scenes like the one in that movie so shocking, while I was still stuck with Archie and Peanuts.

  a brand-new language, called a creole: Okay, creole language specialists—a very few may note that a creole called Palenquero, spoken in a small community of descendants of escaped slaves in Colombia, with Spanish words, has a prefix, ma-, to express the plural. But that’s because all the slaves in question spoke the same language (Kikongo) in which that prefix happened to be the plural marker. Most creole languages were created by slaves speaking several languages, in which there was no way that any trait from one language would make it into the language being created. Hence the way creole languages usually indicate the plural is with a word taken from the colonizer language, given that all that the slaves knew of the language for the most part was words, rather than any prefix or suffix from a language any of the slaves spoke natively.

  “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man”: “Lisa the Iconoclast,” The Simpsons, Fox, 1996.

  The Old English verbal ending … Latin lost its noun case: I describe this process in my book What Language Is (New York: Gotham, 2011), or for those up for detail so mind-numbing I suspect exactly two human beings have ever read it, my book Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  “We saw Wes’ Side Story” … “I kiss’ my daughter”: What determines whether something gets elided or not is a topic that requires statistical analysis to engage productively, but this means that the literature on it cannot qualify as pleasure reading. However, an article I have always found to cover the matter artfully nevertheless, because of the lapidary writing and basic lucidity of its author, is Gregory Guy, “Explanation in Variable Phonology: An Exponential Model of Morphological Constraints,” Language Variation and Change 3 (1991): 1–22.

  Latin changed when imposed upon subjects of the spreading Roman Empire: This analysis of the birth of the Romance languages is less conventionally aired than the one about English, but is in my view obviously accurate, or at least obviously enough to be appropriately broadcast here.
The arguments are not in user-friendly places, but for those interested, try R. De Dardel and J. Wüest, “Les systèmes casuels du proto-Roman: Les deux cycles de simplification,” Vox Romanica 52 (1993): 25–65; or if just by chance you’d rather read in English, Stéphane Goyette, “From Latin to Early Romance: A Case of Partial Creolization?” Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles, ed. by me (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), pp. 103–31.

  Australian Dyirbal, in which there were four classes: Those groupings cannot help but stir wonder, and for more of the story (what goes into the classes is based as much on how words sound as what they mean), a great source is Keith Plaster and Maria Polinsky, “Women Are Not Dangerous Things: Gender and Categorization,” Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Linguistics, 2007).

  4. A VOWEL IS A PROCESS

  betch, a transformation of the word bitch: Katie J. M. Baker, “Beyond ‘Jappy’: It’s All About the Betches Now,” Jezebel, June 28, 2013.

  International Phonetic Alphabet: Here are the symbols for these sounds, from which many will understand why I refrain from using them in the text—this book isn’t supposed to be school.

  Plus, these symbols are themselves a “101” depiction. Those already schooled in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) will miss the schwa (ə), similar to the uh sound but slightly higher, a little smudge of a sound we use in unaccented syllables such as the -on of lemon and the a- of about. Others will know that when we say boat, most of us are not using the straight “o” sound in this chart, which technically stands for a pure “oh” that someone speaking Spanish would use. Really, the sound is the “o” plus a tail of “oo,” written as ow in the IPA. “Boh-oot,” we say, just as we say “bay-eet” for bait (in IPA, ej). To actually say bait without the tail of ee-ness is to sound like the working-class people on Downton Abbey when they say “Mr. Bates,” just as to pronounce boat with no tail of oo-ness is to sound like Minnesotans. These things get multifarious; better, for our purposes, to stick with beet and bait, which give us a good start. If it leaves you wanting to know more about this “code” called the International Phonetic Alphabet, there are endless online sources, complete with audio samples.

  Northern Cities Shift: I am presenting only a part of the entire phenomenon: the “train” is longer. The process is comprehensively described in William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, The Atlas of North American English (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2006), one of an imposing number of seminal works by Labov, who is largely responsible for spearheading the identification and documentation of sound changes such as these in America. The volume in question is not designed for leisure reading, however. To get just a sense of how these shifted vowels actually sound, check online for an interview with Labov himself on the subject.

  there is also a vowel shift happening in California: This has been brought to attention by Penelope Eckert, for example, in “Where Do Ethnolects Stop?” International Journal of Bilingualism 12 (2008) 25–42. As with the Northern Cities Shift, I am describing the process only to an introductory degree. The full web of shifts would wear out all but a few dozen academic readers—but would also only underline the extent to which vowels are like the bees a hive is crawling with.

  The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: “Taken to the Cleaners,” CBS, 1960.

  “The now fashionable pronunciation”: Morchard Bishop, ed., Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (London: Richards, 1952), cited in David Crystal, The Stories of English (New York: Overlook Press, 2004).

  5. LEXICAL SPRINGTIME

  The Lucy Show: “Lucy Gets Her Maid,” CBS, 1964.

  perfectly humble words that combine a pair of meanings: For a history of today’s contractions, see Barren Brainerd, “The Contractions of Not: A Historical Note,” Journal of English Linguistics 22 (1989): 176–96.

  The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “The Courtship of Mary’s Father’s Daughter,” CBS, 1973.

  The Dick Van Dyke Show: “The Return of Edwin Karp,” CBS, 1964.

  the Backshift exhibits some irregularities: An article on the subject suggesting a cocktail of factors responsible is Ingo Plag, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe, and Maria Braun, “The Role of Semantics, Argument Structure, and Lexicalization in Compound Stress Assignment in English,” Language 84 (2008): 760–94. What strikes me about this article other than its interesting content is that the authors are all German and yet command English well enough to know how Anglophones accent their compound words. I am alternately envious of, amazed by, and sympathetic to scholars born to languages other than English who actually have to perform academically, including live, at conferences, in English, a language not native to them.

  Road in Old English: I base this on a discussion by Anatoly Liberman in his blog on Oxford University Press’s website, August 20, 2014, http://blog.oup.com/2014/08/road-word-origin-etymology/.

  how some people pronounce nuclear as “nucular”: A degree of guesswork has surrounded this pronunciation, but some entries in Language Log seem to have nailed the issue, and I have based my explanation on them. Especially useful are ones by Geoff Nunberg, October 5, 2008, and Steven Pinker, October 17, 2008.

  6. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WRITING

  “It’s been proved” … shat as the past of shit: The handiest way to see these changes in our times is with Google’s Ngram viewer, which shows the usage of words and combinations of words in print over the centuries.

  like: Alexanda D’Arcy, “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction,” American Speech 82 (2007): 386–419. This article is so readable that I highly recommend it even to laymen. However, she defines not just three but four likes. In my presentation, “easing” like corresponds to what she calls an “approximative adverb,” while what she classifies as separate “discourse marker” and “discourse particle” likes are what I am calling “reinforcing like.” In my view, these “discourse” usages have a more definite function than D’Arcy dwells upon, and essentially a single one rather than two.

  in Xhosa … Ithi means “like this”: Herbert W. Pahl, A. M. Pienaar, and T. A. Ndungane, eds., The Greater Dictionary of Xhosa (Alice, South Africa: University of Fort Hare, 1989).

  Mualang: Johnny Tjia, A Grammar of Mualang: An Ibanic Language of Western Kalimantan, Indonesia (Utrecht: LOT, 2007).

  Swift: “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in a Letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain,” printed 1712. In the letter, Swift’s complaint is aimed specifically at the use of the shortened -ed form in poetry and prose, rather than speech. However, his meaning makes it clear that he would consider the use of the “shortened” form in speech as equally barbarous, as he can barely even imagine wrapping his lips around it.

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  a

  “flat”

  “long”

  abbreviations

  about

  accommodation

  Acknowledgment

  Ackroyd, Peter

  actually

  adorable

  affect

  African slaves

  after

  ah

  ain’t

  “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (song)

  alcoholic

  Algonquian languages

  Ali Baba Goes to Town (film)

  all

  Allens Lane

  already

  American Sign Language

  -an

  anchorman

  and stuff

  and that kind of thing

  angry-like

  “Annie Laurie” (song)

  anyway

  apostrophes


  apple

  Arabic

  Archie comic books

  Aristotle

  Armstrong, Louis

  arn

  Arthur, Chester Alan

  articles, definite vs. indefinite

  artificial

  ass

  as the use is

  Atlantic Monthly

  audition

  aunt

  Australian Dyirbal language

  authority

  avenue

  aw

  awesome

  awful

  ay

  Backshift

  bag

  baht

  bait

  balcony

  Ball, Lucille

  barn

  barnyard

  barnyard humor

  based off of

  bat

  bathing suit

  bear

  Beatniks

  bed

  beet

  believed

  Bellow, Saul

  Beowulf

  bet

  betch

  Bible

  Biden, Joseph

  Bierce, Ambrose

  big-ass

  big shot

  bird

  bit

  bitch

  bite

  blackbird

  blackboard

  Black English

  blackguard

  black southerners

  blends

  blessed

  bloat

  block

  blood

  boat

  boatswain

  body

  Body Heat (film)

  bolt

  bone

  book

  boot

  Borneo

  bough

  bought

  bountiful

  Boy Scouts

  brakh

  brassière

  bread

  breakfast

  Breaking Bad (TV show)

  brezel, brezitella

  bridal

  bring

  broadening

  Broadway

  Brooke, Frances

  Brooklyn

  brother

  Brown, Roger

  brunch

  buckshot

  buffet

  burger

  bus

  Bush, George W.