Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Of course, some could object that just because people were doing it a long time ago doesn’t mean they were any more correct than we are. But a second clue about literally is a certain inconsistency in objections to its figurative usage. Fowler suggested practically as a substitute, but in its usage as “approximately,” practically has drifted into a near opposite to practical’s original meanings of “actual,” “realistic,” and “suitable,” has it not? Also, it’s easy to forget how far even the meanings of very and truly are from where they began. It all made my daughter very happy—try paraphrasing that with “in actuality,” the original meaning of verrai and truly. “It all made my daughter happy in actuality”? What—in comparison to her alternate happinesses in the fifth dimension? Or, where are the pedants opining that very’s original, and therefore “real,” meaning is verily, and that therefore to call something very small implies that something else could be unverily small?

  Thus in some cases we have no problem with words’ meanings drifting quite a bit. Yet, finally, some might still object that the figurative is the direct opposite of “by the letter.” Surely there’s something particularly irregular about that? But in fact there isn’t, which is our third clue that hating on the new literally is like daring a lava lamp not to let its clump drift into “improper” configurations on the pain of being disconnected. If fast means “speedy,” then why can you hold fast and be fast asleep? And did it ever bother you? Dusting can be removing something (like dust) or laying it down (like fertilizer or paprika). No T-shirts about that. You seed a watermelon to get the seeds out, but when you seed the soil you’re putting the seeds in. You can bolt from a room (running fast) in which the chairs are bolted to the floor (stuck fast).

  Examples go on and on—and notice they matter not a jot. They’re called contronyms, and the only reason nobody goes around with a shirt reading, AGAINST THE MISUSE OF FAST TO MEAN “RAPID” I SIT STEADFAST, is that the bifurcation happened before there were people thinking of English words as held fast in dictionaries. The question is: do contronyms actually create ambiguity, or are they construed as possibly creating ambiguity via willful overanalysis? Asked to seed a watermelon, no one carefully removes the seeds from one watermelon and then inserts them into another one. Genuine ambiguity disturbs like a stray eyelash. I once had occasion to spend hours in a hospital where the nurses often referred to discharge. They usually meant the process of someone being given leave to depart the premises, but sometimes they meant the less savory orifice-related meaning of the word. In that context, the difference mattered, and I was repeatedly confused for a flicker as to which meaning they intended, including an odd ten seconds in which I sincerely thought one nurse was talking about something I’d best not dwell upon when she was actually talking about insurance papers to sign before leaving.

  Who among us can say that the figurative use of literally occasions confusion of this kind? It never does—perfect, idiomatic comprehension thrives because context always makes clear which meaning is intended. Language is not self-standing orations howled into the ether; it is a vehicle for talking about life and emotions directly experienced, recalled, or predicted from moment to moment. Too often we are taught to think about language as if it were written sentences out of a Language Arts workbook. Walter Ong, in his magnificent book on the difference between oral and written uses of language, magnificently got across why this is a mistake:

  Written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.

  Few would have any argument with Ong here, and most might even see him as belaboring the obvious. However, if so, then equally obvious is that even contronyms create no cognitive dissonance. The richness of context keeps miscomprehension from even having a chance to begin.

  In that light, the fact that literally can mean both itself and its opposite is—admit it—cool! The way literally now works is a quirky, chance development of the kind that makes one quietly proud to speak a language. It’s neat that fast can mean both fleet and sitting tight. I for one like that something can both weather away and also weather a storm, in one instance destroyed and in the other, holding fast. Or at least, I’d be hard-pressed to say it hurts anything. A perfectly reasonable (and in Hume’s charming spelling, “chearful”) perspective on literally is that we were watching to see where this word was going and—get this—it ended up meaning its own opposite!

  Literally, then, is just one more factuality marker amid the FACEs of English. Words move; there are new factual markers a-borning as I write. One of them is almost perfect: straight up, as in I straight up told her she had to move out. It has the personal, “I’m telling you” function of really and of the figurative literally, and given that factuality markers come from words referring to truth, it’s no surprise that this is exactly what straight up’s original meaning is: one can also mean it to say, essentially, I agree. Wouldn’t you know, true and tree developed from the same ancient word: Millennia ago, English speakers saw trustworthiness in the straight-up quality of trees. The rest was history, which has that famous way of repeating itself: today people are feeling the same trustworthiness in the expression straight up itself.

  Acknowledgment: I Hear You

  Thus speaking is about more than making tidy little observations about things and concepts, what they do, and what they’re like. Notice that the only humans who talk this way are toddlers, from whom it sounds cute—as in, less than mature. Running alongside the “blackboard” realm of language is another one, through which we communicate our feelings about what we’re saying not just with facial expressions and gestures, but with speech. With the factuality wing of the FACE apparatus, we prophylactically attest to sincerity. Something else we do as humans, rather than robots, is routinely acknowledge others’ state of mind. It is, fundamentally, a kind of politeness, although less overt than deliberately taught formulas such as saying “Please” and “Thank you.” And just as with factual markers like really and literally, a “parts of speech” view of language misses the true function of our Acknowledgment tools. These tools lurk in places you’d never suspect, of a kind that many consider suspicious indeed. Yet English wouldn’t be a human language without them.

  An example is, of all things, the word totally, as used by young (and, increasingly, “younger”) people. He’s totally going to call you means neither “He is going to call you in a total fashion” nor even “He is actually going to call you.” Anyone who uses totally in this way or hears it often will intuit that it has a more specific meaning than actually. He is actually going to call you would mean simply “It turns out that he will call, despite what you thought.” He’s totally going to call you is much more specific: it refers to feelings between you and the person you are talking to. He’s totally going to call you: you and I both know that someone has said otherwise, or that the chances of it may seem slim at first glance, but in fact, the naysayers are wrong, and whoo-hoo, he is going to call!

  Totally tracks and nods to the opinions of others with an air of warm fellow feeling. It’s no surprise that it has become entrenched enough to be clipped to the cheery Totes! (which surely does not mean “Completely!”). It’s totally gonna snow implies that someone said it wouldn’t, or that there would be only flurries, and also that you and the person you say this to are in some way in the same boat as to how that heavy snow is going to affect you. If someone in Chicago turned on the TV and caught the tail end of a newscast in which someone said, “It’s totally going to snow,” you know they would have tuned in to a local station, not a national show covering weather conditions across the nation. The to
tally wouldn’t “read” coherently from someone likely too far away to experience the snowstorm themselves, because totally is about shared sentiment: once again, what looks like slack-jawed devolution actually contains a degree of sophistication.

  Here is where little well fits in, acknowledging what someone has said (i.e., what they think) while nicely venturing an additive or correction. Someone says, That Thomas the Train is cool, isn’t he? The proper response is Well, frankly, no—I find him rather strangely dull; I prefer the Powerpuff Girls. Note: one would not respond Frankly, no—I find him rather strangely dull; I prefer the Powerpuff Girls. The absence of well may seem a small distinction but isn’t; the well makes the difference between a normal exchange and a zinger, likely delivered in an old play or to be deliberately arch.

  Acknowledgment also takes forms beyond what we typically think of as words. In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion. Quite often, a phrase of two or more words does what one word could easily do. Never mind!, for example, is two words technically, but the never is not meant literally. You aren’t warning someone to “never” think about something over time, but to not think about it right now, and mind, in the meaning of “attend to,” is actually close to archaic beyond a few expressions. We barely stop to think what the words in Never mind! actually mean—rather, Never mind! is in essence a single “word” in itself, such that we are not surprised to know that for the same concept, Russians use the one word nothing. Other examples include Forget about it (not accidentally spelled as the single word Fuhgeddaboudit in New Yorkese) and Long story short for “To make a long story short.”

  Or, and stuff. Here is a shaggy bit of speech we associate with imprecision, but it can be seen another way. Again, it’s no novelty—English speakers turn up using it even in formal documents as far back as the 1620s, as in someone investigating a rather grisly prison and finding “six several Priests prisoners in several Chambers, and Altar, with all Furniture thereto belonging, with Church-Books and Stuff.” Part of the joy of the novel Middlemarch is how you can almost smell the characters from nearly two centuries’ remove, and one of my favorite facets of that is that George Eliot has Dorothea Brooke’s dilettante uncle speak with an and that kind of thing tic: “Life isn’t cast in a mould—not cut out by rule and line and that sort of thing,” “You are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, that kind of thing,” “I lunched there and saw Casaubon’s library, and that kind of thing.” This shows that there were people who used that expression in that way, so familiar to us now, even in the mid-nineteenth century, when Eliot wrote.

  For Mr. Brooke, to be sure, that little expression ends up helping kill his political chances, as he retains it even when giving a public address and a heckler parrots it back at him. Few would classify and stuff or and that kind of thing as appropriate to formal speech, but the informal is not always incoherent. And stuff and its equivalents reflect a visit into other people’s heads, the assumption being that the things not being specified are known already, such that one need not take the time to elaborate. “You are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, that kind of thing”—Brooke is envisioning a scene and assumes we, prompted by the basics, have approximately the same picture in our heads, with not only balls and dinners but certain kinds of dancing, clothing, manners, pit odor, faintings, and delusions. With and that kind of thing, Brooke is drawing upon an assumed common body of knowledge among the kinds of people he talks to most—the matter is intimate, personal.

  Warm, even. Stuff like that there is another variant, and an old song of that title has the lyric “I want some huggin’ and some squeezin’ and some muggin’ and some teasin’ and some stuff like that there”—we all know what “stuff” the singer is referring to, especially in 1945, when a popular song could go only so far in specifying such things. There can be a cozy wink in it, vividly apparent in today’s robust vernacular variant ’n’ shit. Because it involves the word shit one might dismiss this simply as “profanity,” but that’s like calling a fire blazing in a living room hearth a high-temperature oxidation. Profane ’n’ shit may be, but it also summons shared knowledge. After all, a home fire isn’t just a chemical process; it’s cozy ’n’ shit. By that, do I mean that it is both comfortable and a kind of feces? No: I mean that it is cozy, with all the associations we have with coziness, many of which may challenge expression—it’s probably nighttime, you’re probably with someone you like, it’s a nice way to end a day, it has a gamy smell modern life usually doesn’t expose us much to, it might get one in mind for, say, stuff like that there. You don’t have to say all that; it’s all implied by ’n’ shit.

  It is here, then, that you know fits in. It is one more acknowledgment marker, typical of what any living language needs, and predictable as the fate of a word know when acknowledgment markers are all about what the other person … knows. You know can sound like verbal litter, and indeed one can lean on it excessively to compensate for being unsure of what to say. However, to never use it would suggest an oddly self-directed communicator. To say you know is to take a quick trip into your interlocutor’s mind, this time in order to facilitate your presentation of a point by suggesting that the other person knew what you know all the time. One can even use it when that shared perspective seems unlikely: That bus is, you know, the last one for the night—in that even implying that the person knew what you know seems less pedantic than just laying the point out straight. As one linguist perfectly nailed you know, it lends a “pretense of shared knowledge that achieves intimacy”—i.e., we’re again in the FACE world. Note that he said “pretense,” just as another linguist who is great on you know put it that it is “presenting new information as if it were old information in order to improve its reception.”

  You know is handy in showing that classifying all these words and expressions as acknowledgment markers is not some kind of special pleading for linguistic sloth. You know goes way back—if it’s lazy to say you know, then English speakers have been lazy since, say, Chaucer’s time, when he has his Canterbury Tales characters popping off with you knows and similar things, like thow woost, where woost is the old know verb, which otherwise spawned the wit in mother wit and use your wits. Emily in “The Knight’s Tale” says, I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye a mayde, and love huntynge and venerye, with thow woost as you know for the fourteenth century.

  And it had been ever thus: Beowulf, that masterpiece in Old English, is a little weird in its very first word—since when does an epic poem begin with “What!”? Yet generations of scholars have internalized that first line Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon … “What! We have heard of the fame of the spear-Danes’ people-kings…” Really, though? Did Old English speakers kick off a good tale by bleating “Whaat!” to quiet everybody down? Actually, no. Many translators have gotten by the awkwardness by using Lo! but even that doesn’t get across what that What actually meant. The original manuscripts have no punctuation; that was added later, by editors. In manuscript, the passage is simply HWÆT WE GARDENA IN GEARDAGUM. There is no indication that hwæt was an interjection kicking off the show, and from how hwæt is used throughout Old English documents in general, we can see that it actually translates best as roughly “So…” In the Beowulf opening, for example, it brought the listener or reader in, with an implication that the fame of the spear-Danes’ kings was familiar, reinforcing that it was something of which “we have heard.” Imagine: “So we’ve heard of the spear-Danes’ people-kings’ fame.” Hwæt, then, went into the audience’s mind: in Old English, what could be used as an acknowledgment marker.

  A language has so many ways of doing things: conveying not just meaning but attitude, packing a concept into not just one word but two or three—or, even, expressing a concept in ways beyond words. Intonation, for instance, communicates so very much beyond broad emotions. Just as there is many a slip between a word’s original meaning and what it can come to mean�
�literally 1.0 and literally 2.0, or what meaning “so”—intonation can come to mean something other than what we’re trained to suppose.

  Why, for example, do younger people seem to be asking questions when they’re making statements? So it was Daylight Savings Time? And I forgot to set my clocks back? And so I got to school late and Anderson gave me extra homework? Those observations could seem more gracefully couched as declarations. Why are these people so unsure? To the extent that women have been documented to be more likely to use what has been called uptalk, we might read this as evidence that they lack conviction, and perhaps that uptalk is a linguistic response to sexist dismissal.

  Tempting ideas, but actually what we’re seeing is that the meaning of an intonation can drift, via implication, just as the meaning of a word can. This includes questions. It’s interesting how often what we couch formally as questions are actually meant as statements. If we ask someone who is piling their omelette with pepper “How much pepper do you need?” we are not waiting for them to specify how much. We are stating something, and something quite specific: that the person is overdoing it—here, using too much pepper. Languages are full of wrinkles, and here is one, where the meaning clashes with the form. One way of calling someone out on some kind of excess is to phrase it in the form of that particular how question: How cold do you need it to be? (It’s now too cold), How many times do I have to tell you? (I’ve told you too many times as of now). Convention and context ensure that this confuses no one, which is why a language allows such things to creep in and settle.