The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

  oddly

  parenthetically

  predictably

  roughly

  seriously

  strikingly

  supposedly

  understandably

  Note that many of these fine sentence adverbs, like happily, honestly, and mercifully, come from verb phrase adverbs, and they are virtually never ambiguous in context. The use of hopefully as a sentence adverb, which has been around in writing at least since the 1930s (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) and in speech well before then, is a perfectly sensible application of this derivational process.

  2. The suggested alternatives It is hoped that and If hopes are realized display four famous sins of bad writing: passive voice, needless words, vagueness, pomposity.

  3. The suggested alternatives do not mean the same thing as hopefully, so the ban would leave certain thoughts unexpressible. Hopefully makes a hopeful prediction, whereas I hope that and It is hoped that merely describe certain people’s mental states. Thus you can say I hope that the treaty will pass, but it isn’t likely, but it would be odd to say Hopefully, the treaty will pass, but it isn’t likely.

  4. We are supposed to use hopefully only as a verb phrase adverb, as in the following:

  Hopefully, Larry hurled the ball toward the basket with one second left in the game.

  Hopefully, Melvin turned the record over and sat back down on the couch eleven centimeters closer to Ellen.

  Call me uncouth, call me ignorant, but these sentences do not belong to any language that I speak.

  Imagine that one day someone announced that everyone has been making a grievous error. The correct name for the city in Ohio that people call Cleveland is really Cincinnati, and the correct name for the city that people call Cincinnati is really Cleveland. The expert gives no reasons, but insists that that is what is correct, and that anyone who cares about the language must immediately change the way that he (yes, he, not they) refers to the cities, regardless of the confusion and expense. You would surely think that this person is insane. But when a columnist or editor makes a similar pronouncement about hopefully, he is called an upholder of literacy and high standards.

  I have debunked nine myths of the generic language maven, and now I would like to examine the mavens themselves. People who set themselves up as language experts differ in their goals, expertise, and common sense, and it is only fair to discuss them as individuals.

  The most common kind of maven is the wordwatcher (a term invented by the biologist and wordwatcher Lewis Thomas). Unlike linguists, wordwatchers train their binoculars on the especially capricious, eccentric, and poorly documented words and idioms that get sighted from time to time. Sometimes a wordwatcher is a scholar in some other field, like Thomas or Quine, who indulges a lifelong hobby by writing a charming book on word origins. Sometimes it is a journalist assigned to the Question & Answer column of a newspaper. Here is a recent example from Ask the Globe:

  Q. When we want to irritate someone, why do we say we want “to get his goat”? J.E., Boston

  A. Slang experts aren’t entirely sure, but some claim the expression comes from an old race track tradition of putting a goat in the same stall as a high-strung racing thoroughbred to keep the horse calm. Nineteenth century gamblers sometimes stole the goat to unnerve the horse and throw the race. Hence, the expression “get your goat.”

  This kind of explanation is satirized in Woody Allen’s “Slang Origins”:

  How many of you have wondered where certain slang expressions come from? Like “She’s the cat’s pajamas,” or to “take it on the lam.” Neither have I. And yet for those who are interested in this sort of thing I have provided a brief guide to a few of the more interesting origins.

  …“Take it on the lam” is English in origin. Years ago, in England, “lamming” was a game played with dice and a large tube of ointment. Each player in turn threw dice and then skipped around the room until he hemorrhaged. If a person threw seven or under he would say the word “quintz” and proceed to turn in a frenzy. If he threw over seven, he was forced to give every player a portion of his feathers and was given a good “lamming.” Three “lammings” and a player was “kwirled” or declared a moral bankrupt. Gradually any game with feathers was called “lamming” and feathers became “lams.” To “take it on the lam” meant to put on feathers and later, to escape, although the transition is unclear.

  This passage captures my reaction to the wordwatchers. I don’t think they do any harm, but (a) I never completely believe their explanations, and (b) in most cases I don’t really care. Years ago a columnist recounted the origin of the word pumpernickel. During one of his campaigns in central Europe Napoleon stopped at an inn and was served a loaf of coarse, dark, sour bread. Accustomed to the delicate white baguettes of Paris, he sneered, “C’est pain pour Nicole,” Nicole being his horse. When the columnist was challenged (the dictionaries say the word comes from colloquial German, meaning “farting goblin”), he confessed that he and some buddies had made up the story in a bar the night before. For me, wordwatching for its own sake has all the intellectual excitement of stamp collecting, with the added twist that an undetermined number of your stamps are counterfeit.

  At the opposite end of the temperamental spectrum one finds the Jeremiahs, expressing their bitter laments and righteous prophecies of doom. An eminent dictionary editor, language columnist, and usage expert once wrote, quoting a poet:

  As a poet, there is only one political duty and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence.

  The linguist Dwight Bolinger, gently urging this man to get a grip, had to point out that “the same number of muggers would leap out of the dark if everyone conformed overnight to every prescriptive rule ever written.”

  In recent years the loudest Jeremiah has been the critic John Simon, whose venomous film and theater reviews are distinguished by their lengthy denunciations of actresses’ faces. Here is a representative opening to one of his language columns:

  The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled the merchandise in their slave ships, or as the inmates of concentration camps were dealt with by their Nazi jailers.

  The grammatical error that inspired his tasteless comparison, incidentally, was Tip O’Neill’s redundantly referring to his “fellow colleagues,” which Simon refers to as “the rock bottom of linguistic ineptitude.” Speaking of Black English Vernacular, Simon writes:

  Why should we consider some, usually poorly educated, subculture’s notion of the relationship between sound and meaning? And how could a grammar—any grammar—possibly describe that relationship?

  As for “I be,” “you be,” “he be,” etc., which should give us all the heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a language with roots in history but of ignorance of how language works.

  There is no point in refuting this malicious know-nothing, for he is not participating in any sincere discussion. Simon has simply discovered the trick used with great effectiveness by certain comedians, talk-show hosts, and punk-rock musicians: people of modest talent can attract the attention of the media, at least for a while, by being unrelentingly offensive.

  The third kind of language maven is the entertainer, who shows off his collection of palindromes, puns, anagrams, rebuses, malapropisms, Goldwynisms, eponyms, sesquipedalia, howlers, and bloopers. Entertainers like Willard Espy, Dimitri Borgman, Gyles Brandreth, and Richard Lederer write books with titles like Words at Play, Language on Vacation, The Joy of Lex, and Anguished English. These rollicking exhibitions of linguistic zaniness are all in good fun, but when reading them I occasionally feel like Jacques Cousteau at a dolphin show, longing that these magnificent creatures be allowed to shake off their hula skirts and display their
far more interesting natural talents in a dignified setting. Here is a typical example from Lederer:

  When we take the time to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night….

  Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people recite a play and play at a recital?…How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?…Doughnut holes: Aren’t these little treats doughnut balls? The holes are what’s left in the original doughnut…. They’re head over heels in love. That’s nice, but all of us do almost everything head over heels. If we are trying to create an image of people doing cartwheels and somersaults, why don’t we say, They’re heels over head in love?

  Objection! (1) Everyone senses the difference between a compound, which can have a conventional meaning of its own, like any other word, and a phrase, whose meaning is determined by the meanings of its parts and the rules that put them together. A compound is pronounced with one stress pattern (dárkroom) and a phrase is pronounced with another (dark róom). The supposedly “crazy” expressions, like hot dog and morning sickness, are obviously compounds, not phrases, so cold hot dogs and nighttime morning sickness do not violate grammatical logic in the least. (2) Isn’t it obvious that fat chance and wise guy are sarcastic? (3) Donut holes, the trade name of a product of Dunkin’ Donuts, is intentially whimsical—did someone not get the joke? (4) The preposition over has several meanings, including a static arrangement, as in Bridge over troubled water, and the path of a moving object, as in The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Head over heels involves the second meaning, describing the motion, not the position, of the inamorato’s head.

  I must also say something in defense of the college students, welfare applicants, and Joe Sixpacks whose language is so often held up to ridicule by the entertainers. Cartoonists and dialogue writers know that you can make anyone look like a bumpkin by rendering his speech quasi-phoneticalty instead of with conventional spelling (“sez,” “cum,” “wimmin,” “hafta,” “crooshul,” and so on). Lederer occasionally resorts to this cheap trick in “Howta Reckanize American Slurivan,” which deplores unremarkable examples of English phonological processes like “coulda” and “could of” (could have), “forced” (forest), “granite” (granted), “neck store” (next door), and “then” (than). As we saw in Chapter 6, everyone but a science fiction robot slurs their speech (yes, their speech, dammit) in systematic ways.

  Lederer also reproduces lists of “howlers” from student term papers, automobile insurance claim forms, and welfare applications, familiar to many people as faded mimeos tacked on the bulletin boards of university and government offices:

  In accordance with your instructions I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope.

  My husband got his project cut off two weeks ago and I haven’t had any relief since.

  An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.

  The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him.

  Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.

  The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute on the bottom.

  Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

  These lists are good for a few laughs, but there is something you should know before you conclude that the teeming masses are comically inept at writing. Most of the howlers are probably fabrications.

  The folklorist Jan Brunvand has documented hundreds of “urban legends,” intriguing stories that everyone swears happened to a friend of a friend (“FOAF” is the technical term), and that circulate for years in nearly identical form in city after city, but that can never be documented as real events. The Hippie Baby Sitter, Alligators in the Sewers, the Kentucky Fried Rat, and Halloween Sadists (the ones who put razor blades in apples) are some of the more famous tales. The howlers, it turns out, are examples of a subgenre called xeroxlore. The employee who posts one of these lists admits that he did not compile the items himself but took them from a list someone gave him, which were taken from another list, which excerpted letters that someone in some office somewhere really did receive. Nearly identical lists have been circulating since World War I, and have been independently credited to offices in New England, Alabama, Salt Lake City, and so on. As Brunvand notes, the chances seem slim that the same amusing double entrendres are made in so many separate locations over so many years. The advent of electronic mail has quickened the creation and dissemination of these lists, and I receive one every now and again. But I smell intentional facetiousness (whether it is from the student or the professor is not clear), not accidentally hilarious incompetence, in howlers like “adamant: pertaining to original sin” and “gubernatorial: having to do with peanuts.”

  The final kind of maven is the sage, typified by the late Theodore Bernstein, a New York Times editor and the author of the delightful handbook The Careful Writer, and William Safire. They are known for taking a moderate, common-sense approach to matters of usage, and they tease their victims with wit rather than savaging them with invective. I enjoy reading the sages, and have nothing but awe for a pen like Safire’s that can summarize the content of an anti-pornography statute as “It isn’t the teat, it’s the tumidity.” But the sad fact is that even a sage like Safire, the closest thing we have to an enlightened language pundit, misjudges the linguistic sophistication of the common speaker and as a result misses the target in many of his commentaries. To prove this charge, I will walk you through a single column of his, from The New York Times Magazine of October 4, 1992.

  The column had three stories, discussing six examples of questionable usage. The first story was a nonpartisan analysis of supposed pronoun case errors made by the two candidates in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. George Bush had recently adopted the slogan “Who do you trust?,” alienating schoolteachers across the nation who noted that who is a “subject pronoun” (nominative or subjective case) and the question is asking about the object of trust (accusative or objective case). One would say You do trust him, not You do trust he, and so the question word should be whom, not who.

  This, of course, is one of the standard prescriptivist complaints about common speech. In reply, one might point out that the who/whom distinction is a relic of the English case system, abandoned by nouns centuries ago and found today only among pronouns in distinctions like he/him. Even among pronouns, the old distinction between subject ye and object you has vanished, leaving you to play both roles and ye as sounding completely archaic. Whom has outlived ye but is clearly moribund; it now sounds pretentious in most spoken contexts. No one demands of Bush that he say Whom do ye trust? If the langage can bear the loss of ye, using you for both subjects and objects, why insist on clinging to whom, when everyone uses who for both subjects and objects?

  Safire, with his enlightened attitude toward usage, recognizes the problem and proposes

  Safire’s Law of Who/Whom, which forever solves the problem troubling writers and speakers caught between the pedantic and the incorrect: “When whom is correct, recast the sentence.” Thus, instead of changing his slogan to “Whom do you trust?”—making him sound like a hypereducated Yalie stiff—Mr. Bush would win back the purist vote with “Which candidate do you trust?”

  But Safire’s recommendation is Solomonic in the sense of being an unacceptable pseudo-compromise. Telling people to avoid a problematic construction sounds like common sense, but in the case of object questions with who, it demands an intolerable sacrifice. People ask questions about the objects of verbs and prepositions a lot. Here are just a few examples I culled from tra
nscripts of conversations between parents and their children:

  I know, but who did we see at the other store?

  Who did we see on the way home?

  Who did you play with outside tonight?

  Abe, who did you play with today at school?

  Who did you sound like?

  (Imagine replacing any of these with whom!) Safire’s advice is to change such questions to Which person or Which child. But the advice would have people violate the most important maxim of good prose: Omit needless words. It also would force them to overuse the word which, described by one stylist as “the ugliest word in the English language.” Finally, it subverts the supposed goal of rules of usage, which is to allow people to express their thoughts as clearly and precisely as possible. A question like Who did we see on the way home? can embrace one person, many people, or any combination or number of adults, babies, children, and familiar dogs. Any specific substitution like Which person? forecloses some of these possibilities, contrary to the question-asker’s intent. And how in the world would you apply Safire’s Law to the famous refrain

  Who’re you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!

  Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Safire should have taken his observation about the pedantic sound of whom to its logical conclusion and advised the president that there is no reason to change the slogan, at least no grammatical reason.

  Turning to the Democrats, Safire gets on Bill Clinton’s case, as he puts it, for asking voters to “give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back.” No one would say give In break, because the indirect object of give must have accusative case. So it should be give Al Gore and me a chance.