wise
wise-ass
wit
wonderful
won’t
wood
woost
woot
work
workaholic
world
wort
wouldn’t’ve
writing
Xhosa
x-ray
“Yesterdays” (song)
yo
you know
Zoporozhian Cossacks of Ukraine (Repin)
Acknowledgments
For this book, my greatest thanks go to the undergraduates at Columbia University who have taken courses from me on language and linguistics. It is through these endlessly brilliant people that I have gained a sense over the past several years of what interests people about language and why, something quite different from what tends to interest linguists themselves.
It’s easy for an academic to quietly dismiss what laymen tend to ask as “beside the point,” not what we really study, best dispensed with as quickly (albeit politely) as possible in the hope of getting across at least a little of the “real” stuff. However, I have increasingly found that these questions from the outside often stimulate thoroughly interesting investigations. It gradually occurred to me that my students’ questions and observations, as well as those from e-mail correspondents and callers-in to talk shows, centered mostly on matters that would be usefully covered in single presentation.
The heart of the matter (ever confusing, ever fascinating) is the difference between print and speech, vaster than it seems. Print is a statue, speech is the person; print is a drawing, speech is the thing; print is a snapshot, speech is the life—and yet, gracious, it’s hard to truly feel that from day to day. My students have, with intelligence and wit, spurred me on in seeking to help the public see language plain.
I also owe endless thanks to Paul Golob for lending me the experience of having a book of mine edited in an attentive fashion I haven’t experienced since the days of Napster, Yellowtail wine as the new big thing, and kale still over the horizon. To have someone serve as a rigorous intermediary between me and the curious layman I consider myself to write for has been refreshing, welcome, and necessary. Thanks also to Harold Itzkowitz for finding me some dandy examples of pre-Backshift examples from early television and ancient movies.
Thanks also to Katinka Matson for believing in me after all these years (I have now known her so long that the day I met her was the day I encountered my first digital camera!), and to the people who disagree with me about Shakespeare for—although I doubt this was their mission—stimulating me to continue pushing my point.
ALSO BY JOHN MCWHORTER
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language
What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be
Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress?
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America
Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
Defining Creole
Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America
Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a “Pure” Standard English
The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages
Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis
About the Author
John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and is the author of sixteen books, including The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. He writes for Time, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and his articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and the Daily Beast. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
1. The Faces of English:
Words Get Personal
2. It’s the Implication That Matters:
Words on the Move
3. When Words Stop Being Words:
Where Does Grammar Come From?
4. A Vowel Is a Process:
Words Start Sounding Different
5. Lexical Springtime:
Words Mate and Reproduce
6. This Is Your Brain on Writing:
Lingering Questions
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Also by John McWhorter
About the Author
Copyright
Words on the Move. Copyright © 2016 by John H. McWhorter. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Lucy Kim
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: McWhorter, John H., author.
Title: Words on the move: why English wont and cant sit still (like, literally) / John McWhorter.
Description: New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050775 | ISBN 9781627794718 (hardback) | ISBN 9781627794732 (electronic book)
Subjects: LCSH: Linguistic change. | Language and languages—Variation. | Language and languages—Etymology. | Sociolinguistics. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Etymology. | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Grammar & Punctuation.
Classification: LCC P40.5.L54 M39 2015 | DDC 417/.7—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050775
e-ISBN 9781627794732
First Edition: September 2016
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected]
* One rule seems especially resistant to détente: the idea is that one is not to use they in the plural as in Tell each student they can hand in their paper tomorrow. However, I suspect that with changing perceptions and courtesies regarding gender identity in our times, measured usage of the singular they will occasion ever less condemnation even in formal contexts.
* Unless you’re given to saying forsooth beyond performing Shakespeare or occasionally being called upon to sing the old standard “Yesterdays.” (My hat is off to singers who manage to sing “Joyous, free, and flaming life forsooth was mine,” an almost willfully clammy lyric even for 1933.)
* Of course, in some cases, the meaning of -ass with particular adjectives has gone on to freeze into something more neutral. Smart-ass presumably began as meaning “unexpectedly smart-mouthed” but now means simply “sassy”—although sassy itself contains an element of the counterexpectational: it’s a personality that confronts one and goes against the preferred norm. Similarly, wise-ass would have begun as meaning unexpectedly, and probably unpleasantly, smart, and froze into its current meaning of, again, “sassy, derisive.” This kind of thing happens when grammar gets old: meanings get more idiosyncratic and
specific. Sloth started as “slow-th” meaning slowness. The sound change from “oh” to “aw” is a sign that the word has been around a good long time, and during that much time, it is natural that sloth drifted into meaning something much more specific than just “slowness.” We’ll learn more about this kind of change in chapter 2.
* I am just old enough to have used a telex machine in its last few fading years, at one of my first jobs. It was clumsy to use and always breaking down. The company I worked for distributed guides to hotels for business travelers. There actually was such a publication, physical, heavy, with glossy color photography; trees were dying for this thing, and slowly, so was I. Spiritually I quickly reached the point of Scarlett O’Hara wolfing down a turnip wrested in desperation from the hard ground and vowing never to be hungry again. I went to grad school.
* Some will be waiting for the tale of Charles II praising St. Paul’s Cathedral as “awful, pompous and artificial,” with the lesson being that those words’ meanings have all gone from negative to positive. Believe me, I’d have used it, but the anecdote is actually one of those Game-of-Telephone distortions where a morsel becomes a meal. All the king said was “artificial,” although that was, indeed, a compliment then, not having taken on its negative meaning via implications about that which is not natural.
* I am oversimplifying slightly, in that the flesh word was used more, at least in the Old English documents that survive, to refer to flesh in contrast with the soul. What we know as meat was more often referred to as “fleshmeat.”
* Note that even history meant something different in 1607: it still meant only “story” in a general sense, rather than specifically a disinterested recounting of past events. After all, in 1607, centuries before Wallace and Darwin, who knew that animals had a “history” in our sense?
* Note that sensibility harbors the “sensitive” meaning as it does in French, while sensible itself drifted into a different meaning.
* I can’t resist. In response to my Shakespeare argument, Crystal père et fils state that only about 10 percent of Shakespeare’s words defy modern comprehension. Interesting that the word decimate, to reduce by 10 percent, came so readily to mean “to utterly destroy”! That is, my riposte to them is that one word in ten is enough to render comprehension in live performance often elusive.
* This new meaning, practice, yielded another development of use: to practice was to become accustomed, or to accustom someone else. The mother seal will be seen, a book of natural history noted in 1783, to “use her little ones to live under water,” meaning to accustom them to it, not to exploit them. When in 1826 a woman is said to have taken a man and “used him in her company,” it can seem rather bawdy unless we know that the writer meant “accustomed him to her company.” Here, then, is the source of the expression to be used to something, quite an oddity if we think of use with the meaning of “utilize.”
* And yes, because it looks funny now. But it wasn’t actually an f, but a long stroke that was often decorated with a little left-hanging scarf. Observe, blown up a bit: ſ. This does makes it look so much like an f, however, that frankly our confusion and amusement today must be judged the ancients’ fault.
* The rule was that you didn’t use the funny s at the end of a word.
* I’m cheating a little again. Old English itself already had this past tense suffix in place. Really, the word for did would have glommed onto the verbs in English’s ancestor, also the ancestor to the other languages of English’s subfamily, Germanic, all of which have a similar past tense suffix. Linguists call that language Proto-Germanic; we will likely never know what its speakers called it because they didn’t have writing. But we can know that they likely said “walk-did,” “help-did,” etc.
* Yes, I have to cheat a little here, because there happens to be no word that starts with a b and ends in a t with the vowel sound of foot, put, and wood. There is, in general, no series of words that all begin with the same consonant and end with some same other one that includes every single one of the possible vowels in between. For example, if I started with peat and pat and pot, then for the oh vowel I’d have to use an obscure British dialect word for kick, pote, and for oo I’d have to use poot, which frankly would get old.
* This issue of vowel length is why the Great Vowel Shift involved two-step jumps, like pawns on their first move, rather than moving one slot at a time. This was a shift involving long vowels; the vowels in the inner ring of slots (clockwise, book, bought, bet, and bit) were not long. Vowel length seems a rather arcane thing to us now, because we don’t use it to distinguish words. Imagine if “meeet” meant to make someone’s acquaintance, while vegetarians were people who didn’t eat “meet,” said at a quick, beepy clip. I’m actually kind of glad we don’t do that. But in earlier English, vowel length was that important, to the point that, for example, a vowel shift might single out just the long vowels while the short ones just hung out for a while (but only for a while!).
* Here, too, is what’s up with the famous Wisconsin “bayg” for bag. It is all but impossible not to find it “cute” as an outsider, I openly admit. But it’s also just a matter of “Oh, of course…” in terms of the vowel chart. The bat sound has moved up to the bait slot, pulled up there because of what g is like. The ng sound and g are both produced by hiking your tongue up in the back of the mouth; to anticipate making a g means lifting things up a bit. Naturally, then, bag becomes “bayg,” to haggle is to Hegel, and so on. (Yes, I’m smiling. But then, I’m from Philadelphia and I say “woo-der” for water, which is not even part of something systematic like a vowel shift—it’s just some one-off mess!)
* But how is er to oy a chess move? It’s spelling that makes it hard to see. Neither Brooklynites nor southern blacks ever actually said “woyk” for work. The sound was actually what happens when you do four quick things: (1) Say work; (2) now say work but stop before the -rk; (3) now repeat 2 but then add a little ee sound to the end; (4) now put a k on the end and you are speaking old Brooklyn (or old black Atlanta). In other words, the vowel in -er stayed the same; what changed was the r, into a little squeak. It happens.
* Linguists, actors, et al.: yes, I mean voiced versus voiceless consonants.
* Rogers actually used accent marks over the vowel of the accented syllable; i.e., cóntemplate. I am using capital letters for uniformity with the other transcriptions of accent in this section.
* The reason for the do was actually rather interesting: languages like Welsh use do this way, and when speakers of such languages switched to the English of the invading Angles, Jutes, and Co., they spoke English “in Welsh,” as it were, and there were more of them than there were of anybody else. The rest was history. I describe this process in greater detail in my book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (New York: Gotham Books, 2008).
* I know some people will ask, so: “Addy’s at It Again,” from I Had a Ball.
* Allens Lane may seem oddly specific, and it is: it’s a street in Philadelphia in my childhood neighborhood, occupied by a camp as it has been since I was a kid and before. The camp did a (nonmusical) production of Cinderella in the early ’70s, and despite the low-tech facilities, I recall as clear as day that the Fairy Godmother actually did change Cinderella’s dress into a different one with a wave of her wand. I am 95 percent sure this isn’t a distorted childhood memory. What I recall is a very real live female person standing there onstage, suddenly granted a different dress in a flash. For forty-plus years I have been wondering how they did that.
* For a sense of how words coming together is a key process in making a language what it is, there is a laudably readable, compact article by Paul Hopper that helped form my perspectives long ago, “Where Do Words Come From?,” Studies in Typology and Diachrony, ed. by William Croft, Keith Denning, and Suzanne Kemmer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 151–60.
* Sammy Davis Jr.,
late in his life, actually did travel with a full array of Campbell’s soups when he toured. (Thank you to Terry Kelleher for the recollection.)
* One has not lived, frankly, until one has seen a certain Harry Rose perform an old song called “Frankfurter Sandwiches” in an early talkie short in 1929. Due to the miracles of modern technology, one can now see it at the press of a button on YouTube. I won’t even describe this marvelous two minutes; just take a look. It has delighted legions of guests in my house.
* Fewer, actually, because not all the possible syllable-tone combinations exist; there are holes in the “grid.”
* Which is pronounced “blaggerd,” which makes it a new word from two in everything but the spelling, like daisy and breakfast.
* Linguists have biases indeed. One expression I just “don’t like”—although I “patch” myself into accepting it as another example of form and meaning splitting harmlessly apart as with uptalk—is Can I get a…? when ordering food. The get sounds, just, coarse to me. And yet everybody says it. I’m used to it now. Really, I am …
Words on the Move Page 21
