Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Counterexpectation attracts such attention when we talk because of the simple fact that language is all about subjects and predicates, where a sentence does not function just to identify something (Houseplant!) but to say something about it (That plant seems to have died). Whatever you say about something is presumably novel to some degree, justifying the effort required to talk about it and taking up someone’s time in sharing the observation with them. Even beyond the modal marker realm, much of language hinges on the difference between what is already known and what is new. The very difference between saying that guy over there and referring to him as he is that if you say he, then the person that he refers to is something already known. Counterexpectation, as in surprise, is merely a heightened manifestation of that basic new-old axis, where you highlight what you personally find to especially stand out against the expected.

  Finally, easing is central to classic descriptions of how politeness works. To a large extent, politeness is a matter of making people comfortable, and key to that is taking things down a notch. The psychologist Roger Brown and the English literature scholar Albert Gilman classically described the transformation in accepted manners in Europe, where politeness came to allow ever more use of informal pronouns like the French tu rather than referring to single persons in the plural with words like vous, as if they were kings calling themselves “we.” The comfort of solidarity triumphed over the chilliness of hierarchy. Or despite a sense one might have that politeness is about formal practices such as standing up straight, saying “please,” and wearing proper attire, the linguist Robin Lakoff nailed that seeking degrees of informality is also a basic element in what it is to be polite.

  The lesson from the FACE paradigm, however, is not only a matter of plugging assorted locutions into slots representing the human essence. The issue is: how do words end up in those slots? Clearly no one makes them up on the fly. Instead, words start out in what we think of as normal meanings, and then morph into ones that fit into FACE slots. It’s a regular process, one of the many normal fates of words.

  It can seem that what happens to words is either their sounds wear off—“Did you eat?” Becomes “Jeet?”—or they veer off into a semantic gutter, stuttered vaguely by people unconcerned with precision, such as how totally can sound and how LOL looks. However, the real story is richer, and we have seen the first part of it with FACE: one thing that has happened to words in all languages since there ever was language is that they have moved from objective to subjective. Rather starts as “early” and becomes “preferably,” or the process can go even further and yield a word that has no meaning other than conveying some facet of subjectivity we need to get across, often hard even to describe as a “meaning.” That’s you know, big-ass, LOL, and even the figurative literally that gets into so many people’s trash. These words do not encounter a semantic gutter; rather, they pass into the elegant and indispensable softness of pragmatic butter.

  Let’s FACE It: Emoticons and the Fate of the Language

  FACE makes sense of things, then. One last one: to understand that language has a modal component answers common questions as to whether emoticons are “taking over” written English, or whether it could be possible to write only in emoticons. Those questions are based on an assumption that emoticons are mere decorations upon a writing system that was complete without them. However, it wasn’t. Emoticons are not taking over, but filling a hole. They provide something that was missing from texting language at first: the pragmatic part.

  Texting, in that it is casual, rapid, and vernacular, is executed via the physical process of writing, but is actually better described as a written kind of speech. As we have seen, speech differs from formal language in its being couched in personal feelings, eternally demonstrated alongside the more concrete communication of content. It was inevitable, then, that once texting became the staff of life for a generation, its users would quickly start developing ways of injecting texts with the warmth of humanity in a way that, for example, the formality of telexing or faxing did not encourage.*

  But of course, emoticons could no more constitute a language by themselves than we could speak exclusively modally with no actual content. Writing all in emoticons would largely be the equivalent of saying, Well, anyway I mean, totally, you know. To the extent that this sentence is at all plausible, it could be so only after previous sentences that had established actual content to refer to. Otherwise, it is clothes without a body, just as emoticons alone would be. Neither decorations, detritus, nor destructors, emoticons are—you knew this was coming—the faces of texting.

  Part of why emoticons seem like add-ons rather than mix-ins is that they are drawings rather than writing in the proper sense. However, their equivalent in speech is actual words that are, in their way, faces. This chapter has been an attempt to show how central such words are to language as it actually is. No known language has ever lacked FACE-ial words like the new like, the new totally, and the new ass. German has its mal and many more, without which one is not truly speaking the language. Ask your Japanese friend what ne means: from the smiles, hesitations, and shrugs in the answer, you’ll know you’re in FACE land. The classicist who knows her Ancient Greek can talk your ear off about that language’s “particles” and how elusive their meanings are. Much of the problem is FACE fifth-century-Athens style: we don’t have living speakers to teach us what the nuances actually were by using the “particles” in live context.

  When hearing people who are fluent in American Sign Language have a conversation among themselves, often they will slide into using some signs with their speech. On describing a political address, they might mention the candidate talking while making the sign for lying, to indicate how likely it was that the candidate was telling the truth. I moved to Los Angeles, someone will say, making the sign for “put down roots” while saying moved, adding a nuance that in speech alone would be conveyed vaguely with intonation, if at all. This, like so much else, is the manifestation of feelings ever pushing out from behind mere statements.

  That’s what FACE is about. No language qualifies as a real one without it. Much of what occasions questions as to “What’s that all about?” in how people come to use words is ultimately a mere matter of language maintaining that which it could never do without. A language without FACE would be as discomfitingly incomplete as a human without a face—just as we would expect, given that languages express humanity.

  2

  It’s the Implication That Matters

  Words on the Move

  You may know a data scientist. I don’t, however, and if I met one at a party I’d need filling in on just what a data scientist is (“I shall take this data and scient it!”).

  And I would find out that the term refers to people whose function for a company is to use statistical knowledge to identify and illustrate trends in the Big Data mined by today’s computing technology. My, my, though—the uses of data and scientist in the term data scientist are extremely specific, aren’t they? Data is supposed to be facts; one must be taught that in data scientist the reference is to Big Data in particular. And the scientist part seems rather odder: isn’t a scientist someone in a lab coat examining things, usually either liquid, tiny, or far off in the heavens? Certainly, statistics and computers fit under the science umbrella—but data scientist? Okay …

  That term may seem like a bit of a stunt. Yet it represents a perfectly normal phenomenon: the meanings of words are ever on the move.

  Shakespeare will help us get a better handle on this process and how eternal it is. We’re at a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The grand old St. Crispin’s Day speech is already past; now we’re in Act V. Henry is visiting the French court; the Duke of Burgundy wants peace. Constant war is leaving everyone numb to the finer things that make life worth living:

  And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,

  Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,

  Even so our houses and ourselves and chil
dren

  Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,

  The sciences that should become our country,

  But grow like savages …

  No one ever said Shakespearean language was as easy to take in as the language of a sitcom, but all seems well enough so far. It may seem a little odd to say that we have lost our “sciences,” given that Burgundy would seem to be interested in broader issues of cultural and psychological decline. However, it’s pretty easy to wrap our heads around the idea that Burgundy might alight upon the issue of “science” in passing—as in, perhaps, technical knowledge (like using statistics to identify trends in Big Data?). Call it the “poetic” aspect of Shakespeare.

  But then comes something that simply doesn’t make sense, which we have to just let pass. Burgundy says that the purpose of this convocation is to “reduce” the state of things to what they were before (“Which to reduce into our former favor / You are assembled”) such that peace will “expel these inconveniences / And bless us with her former qualities.” But if going back to normal would be a “blessing,” then why would it be a “reduction”?

  In its modern meaning, reduce is simply incoherent in that passage. It implies that the change would be a minimization, something unwelcome. One might force a reading according to which the current barbarisms are in some way large, as an excrescence that needs “reducing” in the sense of a hedge grown astray. However, that reading is, indeed, forced—surely not one Shakespeare would have randomly tossed into something as finely wrought as a play like this one. More important, he sought to be understood, by people hearing the text delivered orally, at speed, once. So why did he write “reduced”?

  Because the word had a different meaning in his time. You can glean what it would have been from how the word is composed: re + duce. The duce part is from the Latin word for “to lead,” more familiar to us from the Italian descendant of that word Il Duce, “The Leader.” Reduce, when first borrowed into English from French in the late fourteenth century, meant what its parts mean: to lead again. Reduce was essentially a fancier way of saying “go back,” and that’s what Shakespeare meant. “Reduce into our former favor” had nothing to do with diminution or descent; it meant, simply, to take things back to the way they used to be. Shakespeare was following in the tradition of ancient usages of the word, such as a religious call in a source from 1400 for people to “reduce me in to the right way” if “I have gone beside the way”—the “right” way being something one seeks to return to, not sink into the muck of. Even in 1664, some time after Shakespeare, a writer described the Romans after their colonization of Britain as having “reduced the natural Inhabitants from their Barbarism to the Society of civil Life,” a passage that is senseless unless we understand that reducing was a matter of return, not destruction.

  Only in the eighteenth century did reduce come to always mean what it does to us. It happened gradually, as a result of the fact that words’ meanings always have certain redolences beyond what we consciously consider. If you take something back to the way it was, that process will typically involve either improvement or ruin of some degree. For transformation to result in something neither better nor worse is, perhaps, what we least expect. Reduce, then, would as often as not have meant not only return but betterment, as in the Shakespeare quote. But just as often, it would have meant not only return but lessening, and in Middle and Early Modern English, quotes illustrating that are just as common as ones illustrating improvement. They are more common, actually—such that as things panned out, reduce was used so often with an added implication of diminishment that after a while, diminishment was actually what the word was always used to mean.

  By the eighteenth century, then, reduce had lost its old flexibility: you “reduced” something no longer to its former glory but to squalor. Before long, reduction was referring to liquids and even the act of dieting. “Dearie, I must tell you, I’m reducing!” the old-time society dowager would say in refusing that éclair—in response to which an Elizabethan would have said, “Reducing what, and back to where?”

  Words Do Not Sit Still

  In chapter 1, I focused on one possible pathway of change words can undergo, the shift from the neutral to the personal. However, that is only one of a great many pathways a word may drift down as time passes. The difference between our sense of what reduce means and Shakespeare’s demonstrates something general about how language works. It isn’t that a certain curiosity cabinet of a few dozen words happened to have different meanings hundreds of years ago. Just about all words in any language have different meanings now than they did in the past. Some words’ meanings hold on longer than others. Some few even hold on to the same meaning for thousands of years. However, it is they, and not the reduces, that are the oddities, mostly a homely collection of especially heavily used words, living fossils analogous to horseshoe crabs and coelacanths. The word brother, for example, has meant the same thing for at least seven thousand or so years (and probably longer), ever since the language that later became most of Europe’s languages was still a tribal one spoken in the south of what is now Ukraine. (Linguists call it Proto-Indo-European.) Or, the word for I traces back with the same meaning that far and likely farther, although its sounds have changed so much that many will not feel that it has remained “the same word.” (It was probably eg in ancient Ukraine.) But beyond a few words like these, change is the default; it’s stasis that is weird. By science, for example, the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V (like Shakespearean characters in general) meant “knowledge.” Only later did the word come to refer only to knowledge having to do with the systematic understanding of the natural world.

  The change happens slowly, step by step. Consider that in terms of what in- and numerable mean, innumerable “should” refer to something that cannot be counted for some reason. And that’s just how it started, as in a writer in 1485 exclaiming that the amount of his love for someone is “innumerable to express.” That meant that the amount can’t be numerated—the writer even spelled it “In-nvmerabyll,” complete with the hyphen. (Can we even pretend that this spelling, despite that people then hardly intended such orthography as “cute,” doesn’t make the proclamation seem more sincere?)

  But even this early, you can smell the implication hanging over things. If something can’t be counted, it just might be because it’s covered with mud, and it just might be because you’re too far away, but more likely, the reason something resists counting is because there is a great amount of it. To be innumerable is probably, in life as we know it, to be a lot. After a while, that implication affected the meaning of the word so consistently that new generations thought of the “a lot” component of the meaning as part of the meaning itself rather than a mere redolence. Soon, one could no longer use innumerable to refer to something unable to be counted for some other reason. Today, if the reason you can’t count the rats under the floorboards happens to be because you can’t see them, you just might declare the rats “innumerable” and stand by that forced usage of the word. However, you’d be about as misunderstood as the dowager telling the Elizabethan that she’s “reducing.”

  Step by step, the degree of the transformation can be rather gorgeous. In Old English the word sælig meant “blessed.” Today, we’re still using that word—it’s our silly—but in what would seem to be a quite unrelated meaning. And it is, unless you imagine the step-by-step inching along that words do. If you’re blessed, it stands to reason that you’re innocent. If you’re innocent, it stands to reason that in having been accused of the opposite, you’ve been someone in the down position—and probably in some way still are, even though you are now exonerated. If you’re in the down position, it may not stand to reason per se that you’re feeble in some way, but the suspicion hardly seems utterly unwarranted. Then, if you’re feeble, it isn’t completely counterintuitive to associate the feebleness with degree of mental acuity, upon which one might be assailed as weak-minded: i.e., a silly-billy. There’s how our wo
rd for being a goofball began as one whose soundtrack would have been an “Amen” chord.

  It’s like the litter box, at least in my life. Back in the day, both my wife and I changed it. Then, when she first got pregnant, she stopped doing it because it’s considered unhealthy for pregnant women to do the job. (Something about some virus?) So, I was always the one to change the box; it became “my job,” such that my doing it became the norm. After the pregnancy, that norm stuck via inertia—the fact that no one really enjoys doing it discouraged my wife from taking it back up, and the fact that it’s a light task discouraged me from bothering to say anything about it. But this means that today when our daughters see my wife occasionally doing it when I am away, they find it peculiar. “Mommy, why are you changing the kitty litter?” I suspect that to them, changing the cat box is a gendered activity, or possibly one connected specifically only to me.

  None of this has anything to do with the structure and function of the box, of course. Chance factors presented my daughters with a perception that has become, for them, a reality. Our reality is what we experience; history is lore while the future is speculation. In the same way, our sense of what reduce and innumerable mean is the result of chance conventions in their usage having edged out what the words originally meant to create new realities of usage. Crucially, even what the words meant before is not what they had meant before that—this kind of change is eternal. The -numer- part of innumerable comes out elsewhere as number, which was once a word that meant to mete out. You can imagine how that meaning could drift into the concept of amount. It did.