Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Uptalk is another example of the question form used to convey declaration. If the uptalker is actually questioning anything, it is not the validity of her statement but whether the person listening understands or shares the same basis of knowledge and evaluations. However, in performing that question so often, she is not spastically seeking endless answers and validation despite already holding the privilege of being the one holding the conversational floor. In its use in uptalk, the questioning intonation has morphed into a passing gesture: it doesn’t mean; it does—namely, it ongoingly establishes that you and the other person are on the same page.

  That’s a natural evolution from questioning, just as y’know is a natural evolution from the verb “to know.” In uptalk, questioning has become even more personal than it already is. In uptalking, you are acknowledging (Acknowledging) the interlocutor’s state of mind. In that, to uptalk is actually quite nice, in the grand scheme of things. Or, as certain people would put it, “Uptalk is nice?” Those comfortably dismissive of potshots against youthspeak might even put it as “Uptalk is totally nice.”

  Counterexpectation: Much to My Surprise

  To glean articulateness in sentences like those may feel a tad queer, but the sense of dislocation is worth it. To understand FACE is to see a great deal of language in a different, and less depressing, way. Just as geneticists are learning that ever more of what has been dismissed as “junk” DNA has purpose, a great deal of what feels like the trash in English is part of how the language gets basic work done.

  When we use little even to indicate disapproval or surprise, for example, it becomes part of the Counterexpectational component of FACE. He didn’t even bring a present—i.e., despite that one expected he would. Counterexpectation isn’t something we learn in school as central to grammar: we learn about the future tense and predicates and objects. But languages quite eagerly corral words (and more) into conveying counterexpectation as well. It’s part of being human to sort out what’s everyday and what’s new, and a big part of communication is, after all, to remark upon what’s new.

  Take actually, which became a counterexpectation marker instead of taking the factuality route that really took. Actually started, as we would expect, with its “dictionary” meaning “in reality.” But by the eighteenth century, speakers were also using it for a judgmental (i.e., personal) function. He actually killed the cat: note you can barely say that without making some kind of FACE.

  But you never know how a language is going to convey the counterexpectation part of the FACE apparatus. There are any number of ways a language gets across the “Hey!” sentiment beyond its mere word for Hey. In English, profanity plays its role here, too, this time with the word ass. There is a big pot and there is a big-ass pot, there is a lame excuse and a lame-ass excuse. An initial temptation is to think this is simply a matter of profanity. However, that implies that leaving aside the fact that one of them is rude, big pot and big-ass pot have the same meaning. They don’t.

  You can tell from really trying to imagine just any old adjective, any old time, quietly appended with -ass. Even in the most foulmouthed person you can imagine, notice how hard it is to imagine him saying, I saw a gray-ass squirrel. If you think about it, he’d say that only if he thought of squirrels of some other color as normal, such that the gray squirrel is a surprise. Gray-ass squirrel comes with a backstory: “Where I come from, squirrels are black, but when I got here, I looked out the window and saw a gray-ass squirrel!”

  Gray-ass doesn’t mean simply “gray as uttered by a potty-mouth,” but “counterexpectationally gray.” This is why another possible intuition actually doesn’t go through, that big-ass means “really big” compared to just big, such that there might be a profane parallel grammar:

  POLITE

  NAUGHTY

  big

  big

  bigger

  big-ass

  biggest

  biggest

  But to remark on the pot being “really big” implies, in itself, that there was an expectation that it would not be. Otherwise, the overlap between big-ass and just neutral bigger alone is actually quite partial. Willa is big, Wesley is bigger, and Brian is the biggest—in no parallel grammar could you recast this as “Willa is big, Wesley is big-ass, and Brian is the biggest.” And forget “You can yell, but I’ll yell loud-ass-(ly?)” (or “Air is light-ass than water”!).

  Words change, and ass was assigned a mission. A good guess is that it started with big-ass, because in language as in so much else, things tend to start with the literal and drift into the abstract, and human beings can literally have large behinds: Then a big-ass fellow jumped in and settled it once and for all. However, yes, it would have been fellow rather than guy, dude, or bro, because the counterexpectational ass floated beyond anatomical plausibility as far back as 1919, when someone was documented as getting angry when a “silly ass barber shaved my neck.” All manner of -ass usages pop up well before 1950: an accent criticized as having “lousy broad-ass As,” and familiar-sounding locutions such as green-ass (corporals), poor-ass (southerners), and broke-ass (a waiter). In all these cases, the point is that the quality in question draws attention.*

  In narrating, we are creating a little movie. We need to focus the camera or the lights on what we deem worthy of note. We don’t want to only show a waiter, but to remark that he was broke, since it isn’t considered the norm for someone who works to be broke. A real camera could zero in on his frayed cuffs or show him hitching a ride home: in a grand old film noir, the character would not be written as actually stating, “I lack funds.” Talking, we might designate the waiter as broke-ass: “He was working and all, but actually he didn’t have any money.”

  The reconception of the derrière is but one of the odd ways you can see languages conveying life’s counterintuitive aspects. In Saramaccan, spoken in the rain forest of Surinam, there is a difference between “dried fish” and “dried-dried fish,” but it isn’t that the latter refers to hideously dessicated fish; nor is it some kind of baby talk. “Dried fish” is fish that is traditionally eaten dried, along the lines of what Westerners are usually most familiar with from northern European smoked fish or assorted Japanese snacks. “Dried-dried fish” would be fish of any kind accidentally left out in the sun, or deliberately dried out despite usually being served fresh: dry against expectation. Or, in a language of Nepal called Kham, to say, Hey, look, he took them!, you put it as “His taking of them, its existence!” I suspect if America spent a summer expressing surprise that way it would feel natural by around October, but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, we’ll always have ass.

  Easing: No Worries

  The final component of FACE is Easing. Much of what we do when speaking is devoted to ensuring a basic comfort level, which is unsurprising given that many scholars have seen exactly this as a primary component of what it is to be polite.

  The sheer amount of laughter in typical conversation, including not just guffaws but chuckles and little passing jokes, is counterintuitive under a view of speech as just “communication.” Human speech is a laughy-ass business: we prefer communication within an ongoing reassurance that there is no impending social threat, that everyone is on the same page. A person who never laughs or chuckles lacks charm; you’re never quite comfortable with such a person, and you suspect they don’t like you. Anthropologists even have a name for this decorative kind of laughter that you miss only when it isn’t there: Duchenne laughter. It follows that shared sense of humor is so often the spark and sustenance for a romantic relationship, the most intimate and therefore most potentially dangerous kind. “Why Paul and not Andrew? I don’t know … he made me laugh.” The core essence of laughter is as a jolly manifestation of amusement, but because the state of mutual laughter is inherently relaxing and bonding, in conversation laughter is less at something than for something. It has become a quiet but potent tool.

  This easing function percolates into language itself, upon which the
nature of texting’s abbreviation LOL ends up making perfect sense. Originally it meant “laughing out loud,” and was used to indicate that one was genuinely and directly amused by a comment. However, quickly LOL came to be sprinkled throughout text exchanges with a frequency far beyond anything that would make sense as amusement. A popular article floats the idea that LOL has no real meaning at all by exemplifying its usage in a wide range of sentences.

  However, when people have a hard time assigning a “meaning” to something they nevertheless produce day in and day out, it’s a clue that we’re on to something in the pragmatic wing of language, where we have to get used to a different sense of what something means—namely, it’s where words do rather than “mean.” A goodly sampling of the sentences from the LOL article:

  I like you. Im pretty sure everyone else figured that out before you lol

  I dunno, just assuming? I wasn’t sure if you did lol but I guess I shouldn’t assume

  They charged me again so it wont cancel for a while lol

  Oh lol yea they charged me again but only for a month

  No way lol it was just a question

  That is different and now you know I actually like you and not just sex like lol

  I feel like you think that’s a bad thing lol

  Ahh ok—lol. I wanted to ask you if you would drive me to the airport:)

  Nope, not for the next couple of weeks. Why, ya miss me??? lol

  lol rude.

  Lol … not even … you miss me?

  (Sleepy?) Lol a lil bit

  Do u think its possible To fall in love at first Skype?! Lol

  Maybe lol

  The LOLs in those passages are certainly prolific, but not devoid of function. All LOLs take the edge off. They buffer the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of, for example, burgeoning romance, as we sense from the content. The lols are typeset chuckles, of exactly the kind you can hear in vocal conversation.

  LOL has morphed from something direct and broad into something more abstractly subjective than guffawing at a joke. “Laughing out loud” now applies to LOL only as an origin story; anyone who used LOL to signal actual laughter would now be misunderstood: it would be, quite simply, a mistake. Texting, as speech of a sort, needs modal particles, and develops them from promising materials. Just as genuinely now does the job that very once did in its verily period, today one uses other acronyms such as LMAO (“laughing my ass off”) to indicate actual laughter, because LOL has moved on.

  More obviously, expressions such as I know, right?, which can sound like tics, are serving the same easing function, this time in terms of indicating agreement. To simply state that you agree over and over again would ease no one, suggesting perhaps an impending and unwelcome embrace. “I agree. I agree. I agree.” There needs to be a more easing way to communicate such a thing, and recurrent I know, right? serves the function, in that those words indicate agreement readably, but more obliquely.

  As always, English is just being a language: easing markers are not traceable to something about being a modern American. When I was learning German, I recall a friend offering me a bite of an apple with Magst mal abbissen? Now, just Magst abbissen?—literally “Want to bite?”—would have been the textbook sentence, but there was that little word mal. I had learned it as meaning basically “time” or “one time,” but had never heard it used the way my friend did; it sounded like she was specifying that I was restricted to biting it only once, which seemed incommensurate with the gleam in her eye. But walking away, from the context I sensed that the mal was a way of minimizing, creating a comfort zone: Magst mal abbissen? means “Want to bite a little?” or, more idiomatically, “Wanna little bite?” It isn’t hard to imagine how “one time” came to mean “a little” or “just,” as in Just try it on. One learns mal in learning to speak the language as opposed to reading it. It’s a classic modal marker, in this case a softener; it eases. A word that means something as neutral as “time” ends up being a little personal tool to create an aura of coziness. Germans often use it where in English we might talk in a higher voice: you offer someone an apple without meaning to seem too pushy—quite possibly you will say Wanna bite? And if you are a person of a particular sort of sonic expressiveness, even just kind of squeak the melody of that sentence on a little grunty buzz: nnnhh? And when people say such things, note also the raised eyebrows.

  Then we perform the easing function in ways beyond mere words, which predictably occasions considerable confusion. For example, for those whose speech repertoire includes an informal variety considerably different from the formal one, the very act of switching into that informal variety with a fellow speaker of it is a gesture of easing. To speak the vernacular, the “dialect,” the “just talking” kind of language, brings forward a shared identity as people who have the ability to speak in that way, and therefore creates a feeling of intimacy. The conversation becomes more comfortable just as it does with punctuations of laughter; it puts people at their ease.

  In America, this is how Black English fits in, especially for more educated speakers. Black English began as a transformation of English by African slaves. They transformed English for two reasons. One: they learned the language working alongside indentured Irish, Scots-Irish, and lower-class British servants who spoke regional dialects of English rather than the standard. Two: adults don’t learn languages as completely as children, and so naturally these slaves shaved off some of the quirks of English here and there. Today, a great many black Americans have full access to Standard English, and speak it with ease. However, Black English survives for them nevertheless. What was the only reality for their distant ancestors has now become a way to express facets of their personhood: Black English is a way of getting personal.

  Thus often today Black English is a vehicle of modal expression. More specifically, it is an easing—the way that one signals warm connection, group membership. Black English for such speakers is not something they would ever speak continuously the way a less-educated Bavarian might spend most of his life speaking Bavarian rather than High German. Scholars of Black English seek and prize recordings of anyone speaking full-blown Black English for minutes on end the way some cherish bootleg tapes of Springsteen or Dylan.

  For most black Americans when talking to one another, in addition to the battery of pragmatic strategies all English speakers have at their disposal, switching into Black English is ever available as a supplement. The very act of the switch is, in itself, an expression of empathy analogous to LOL. Hence the common sentiment that in many of its renditions, Black English is more honest, warmer, realer—there is feeling in it. “There Isn’t Any Mountain High Enough” would never have made the charts; “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is the necessary title for a song intended to convey heartfelt affection. Feeling could be considered the very essence of what Black English is for, to most modern black Americans who use it. It is part of the FACE component of speech.

  Yet it is because Black English is often today a matter of the pragmatic realm of speaking that the black American fluent in Black English, apprised that she “speaks a dialect,” is typically somewhat perplexed or even, due to the stigma attached to the dialect in some quarters, offended. Scholars see that stigma itself as responsible for the perplexity and ignorance. There is truth there, but the person who feels something off in the idea that they speak a “thing” called Black English is nevertheless onto something. The idea of a Rosetta Stone set for Ebonics seems silly for a reason: Black English does not feel like a discrete dialect of English in the way that Sicilian is a dialect of Italian (or, as analyzed by many, not even properly “Italian” at all). To most speakers, Black English feels like a repertoire one takes advantage of, a tool kit—“something you can dip into,” as it is often put. They’re right, and although they have no reason to put it this way, it’s because, for them, Black English is a pragmatic strategy.

  For that reason, a great many of the grammatical traits documented as part of Black Engl
ish are more FACE components (pragmatic) than vanilla semantic items familiar to all English speakers such as using -er to mark the comparative and -s to make something plural. We have seen the straight up factuality marker. The yo used before or after a sentence, as in Dat’s my jam, yo! (where jam refers to a popular song, not something to spread on bread), is an acknowledgment marker. Distinct from the Yo! used to call someone, this yo is uttered in a parenthetical way, and summons common feeling: Dat’s my jam, yo! translates roughly as “That is my favorite song, comrades!” with an assumption that it’s a lot of your friends’ favorite song, too—you wouldn’t say it if you happened to be into Scriabin, or some odd little song you knew was just a quirky personal favorite of yours. Or, when a black person says, She done growed up, he doesn’t simply mean “She grew up.” That done is used only when the observation is counterexpectational. She done growed up! conveys that you find it counterintuitive that the little girl you seem to have encountered just a couple of years ago is now driving a car.

  And then, easing is the very use of the dialect at all. There are those who criticize Barack Obama for using elements of Black English when he addresses black audiences. They see the switch as fake, from someone they usually hear speaking Standard English. To understand Black English as a modal gesture clarifies the matter: Obama’s Black English is the texter’s LOL.

  The FACE of Humanity

  The FACE part of English, then, is what allows us to talk rather than speak. Its components are each expressions of a fundamental aspect of being human. The philosopher of language Paul Grice outlined a Cooperative Principle of conversation, long accepted as canonical, under which we subconsciously follow certain maxims in an exchange. One is a commitment to truth: “Do not say what you believe to be false.” Hence the reflex of underlining that one is sincere with factuality markers, driven also by another maxim that encourages one to be maximally informative—we want our interlocutors to know we’re giving them the real deal. Then, to be human is to have a theory of mind, understanding the states of mind of people other than ourselves. Hence the acknowledgment impulse, which in the larger sense grows out of the fact that conversation is fundamentally a cooperation, not two people taking turns expressing themselves individually. It is, as the language evolution theorist Michael Tomasello has noted, not a matter of me talking to you and you talking to me but us communicating with each other.