Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Example: we are taught that natural selection favors mutations that increase an organism’s chances for survival. However, fin whales’ lower jaws are white on the right side and mottled black on the left, while their tongues are colored the opposite way. This quirk clearly offers the animal no survival advantage. (“Mmm, I want me some of that! Makes him look stronger.”) It is a genetic accident carried down generations because it does no harm. In popular music, the fade-out ending had a long vogue. It fell out of favor, and a search for a reason leads nowhere. Nothing about modern American culture is any less compatible with a fade-out ending than it was forty years ago.

  In the same way, chance is one of the keystones of language change. For example, awesome is a compliment, awful is a put-down. Yet there isn’t anything inherently positive about the ending -some, as we know from loathsome and gruesome. Nor is -ful inherently negative—note wonderful and bountiful. Awesome is good and awful is bad solely because of how the cookie happened to crumble, as we know from the fact that awful actually used to be a compliment as well. Shakespeare is always useful in such cases, as when the Duke of York condemns the king in Henry VI, Part 2:

  That head of thine doth not become a crowne

  Thy hand is made to grasp a palmer’s staff

  And not to grace an awefull Princely Sceptre.

  Here is another one of those moments where taking Shakespeare according to the modern meaning of the words trips us up. If Henry is so unfit for authority, then why is York describing the scepter as “awful”? Doesn’t he mean “awesome”? He did—except that’s what awful meant in his time. In 1660 a history of science purrs of an “awful Silence on the shady Hills,” where awful is again meant positively. One could use awful that way into the 1800s, and even today, when we say awfully good, we mean it as a compliment. Otherwise, after that, awesome began to take over in the positive role, while awful went sour.*

  There was no more reason for that than that there is a difference between entrance and entry. The native English speaker knows that one blocks an entrance while one manages entry into a place, that one suffers through a job involving data entry, not data entrance. Think also of status versus station. Both words are children of the same Latin root and started as meaning “standing.” We most associate status with that meaning today, but in an alternate universe, station could do the job as well, which we know because it actually did in the past. We can tell today from the antique expression rank and station, one of those deliberately redundant expressions like hale and hearty, where station meant what rank did. But we encounter the living usage more than we might think, in the Declaration of Independence:

  … it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …

  We may be used to the station in this text, but if we pause to truly drink in the meaning of this sentence word by word, station is a bit of toe stubbing. One may read past it as something fancy—“poetic,” perhaps. But Thomas Jefferson wasn’t seeking poesy, of course: this document was intended as a precise, flinty proclamation. The sentence reads with perfect clarity if we substitute status for station: the idea is that nations have separate and equal status. This is the term that translations of the document into other languages use, for example. Station here isn’t poetic or “high”—it was a conventional way of expressing the concept; rank and station didn’t sound quaint to people speaking English then. Status became the established replacement for station in this usage only in the nineteenth century. But it wasn’t that station was somehow insufficient; things just drifted. Awesome and awful, station and status.

  Or um and uh. Pausing, one might say uh and one might say um. In our times, across America um is becoming more common than uh. Why it’s um rather than uh taking over is something no one could furnish an explanation for even at gunpoint. Is it that there is something quietly off-putting about the sound uh? Apparently not, given something else that happened in the language not long ago. In literature of the early twentieth century and before, a locution that always reads a little weirdly is people saying hey where we now say huh. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “May Day” in 1920:

  “Beautiful morning,” he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

  “Probably is.”

  “Go get some breakfast, hey?”

  Dean agreed, with additions. “Breakfast and liquor.”

  Today, that’d be “Go get some breakfast, huh?” just as today, the tramp who growls “Tryin’ to kid me, hey?” in Fitzgerald’s “A Luckless Santa Claus” in 1912 would say “Tryin’ to kid me, huh?” (although kid would likely not be the word of choice). This is by no means a Fitzgerald quirk: this hey is common in fiction and comic strips of the period. It’s just that huh (with the same sound as uh) gradually eased this hey out. So um bests uh today, while not too long ago practically the same sound, huh, bested hey.

  The best name for things like this is flutter. Words in a language are always oozing here and there over time. A language has a grid of meanings that includes everything human beings need to say: animal, dribble, maybe, already, quick, above, stupid, Hey!, gristle, without, suppose, take out of, slither into—tens of thousands of meanings at the very least. A language needs this grid of meanings expressed by words—that is, packets of sounds. However, it doesn’t matter which packets of sounds cover which meanings, as long as speakers know which packets happen to be covering which meanings at the time. And that’s a good thing, because the inevitability of looming implications keeps inching the packets of sounds into new directions. The words are, together, like a soft film sliding slowly around upon the grid of meanings.

  This reality requires visualization. Let’s say that in any language, there are the basic concepts of food, meat, bread, vegetables, fruit, crumbs, and nourishment in the abstract sense of what we often express as “fuel.” Here is a grid of all those meanings, represented by pictures to reinforce that these are not words but what the words refer to.

  In Old English, the packets of sounds linked to those meanings were different from what we are familiar with today. For purposes of clarity, the words are translated into their modern renditions:

  Meat was the word for what we would today express as food, a word for which existed but had the more abstract meaning of “nourishment.” What we call meat or flesh was called flesh.* The word bread was used for pieces, bits and crumbs of food in general; what we call bread was called loaf. Vegetables were called wort, the rather marginal word we now use only for certain medicinal herbs. Apple was a generic word for fruit.

  Fast-forward to now, and the words have shifted around. We can express all the same concepts; what has changed is which packets of sounds we link to them. Food has edged out meat as the generic term for “eats”; meat has moved into the slot once reserved for flesh. What Old English speakers called loaf we now call bread, while loaf refers to a single table’s serving of said bread. A word crumb meaning “fragment” now occupies the slot bread once did. New words can also come from other languages: vegetable and fruit came in from French, so often the source of words for more formal things such as delicacies of the table. That edged wort out into its modern health food store reference, while apple came to refer to that certain red fruit that is never quite as good as you wish it would be. Nourishment, too, is from French. Meanwhile, we have fuel and nourishment to express what food once did.

  Picture this process happening across tens of thousands of words all the time. That is the essence of what words are, and why the dictionary can qualify only as a snapshot of how the film was situated upon on the grid at one particular point in time.

  However, even the food chart is potentially misleading in one way. Most of the changes are either narrowings or broadenings, which implies that this kind of morphing happens in a narrower range than it does. Another example wo
uld be that transition from short to merry. Here is another range of meanings on the grid: sliced off, short, jolly, and feast:

  In Proto-Indo-European, the packets of sounds linked to those concepts were quite unlike what we would expect. The words given are the English descendants of the words, rather than the Proto-Indo-European words themselves—a chart with the likes of mregh on it would look less informative than soiled:

  The word we know as short was used to mean “cut or sliced off.” One word for short was what we today know in English as merry. Meanwhile, a word to express what we know as merry, i.e., “jolly,” was one that we know especially in the word festive.

  But in English, the place of those packets of sound has shifted around. If something is sliced off, chances are that it is not long—hence, that word can come to mean “short,” and that’s where English’s short comes from. (In Latin the same process yielded a word it later gave us, curt, in which that sense of cutting is still perceptible.) For cut off, we have, well, cut off. The merry word, as we have seen, came to mean “jolly.” Festive has not been ousted from the “jolly” slot, but it is a rather starchy word, almost canceling out the atmosphere of what it is supposed to refer to, and rarely used by most. However, that same root is still used in a more ordinary way in the form of feast.

  These illustrations are, of course, highly schematized. In reality, words do not shift from one meaning to another abruptly—for a good while they retain elements of both meanings. For a period, reduce was used mainly for minimization but could still be used for aggrandizement as well. Even now, fine means “delicate” and “okay” while the original “excellent” meaning holds on as well, with a guess being that only in some future stage of English will the “excellent” meaning, already less robust than the others, wear away into true archaism. However, the main lesson is the eternally, inevitably slippery relationship between the film of words and the grid of meanings. Words are not handed down on tablets and locked into place; they are squirted out of a tube to float around.

  One might wonder how words can be useful if their meanings are so inherently unstable. That fear is much of why so many are irritated to see such changes in meaning; one envisions people groping for mutual comprehension. However, this will never happen: as unpredictable as words’ driftings are, they drift according to a subconscious communality. The implications that pull a word’s meaning in a new direction are ones that all speakers intuit, not the idiosyncratic fancies of single persons (“Rain reminds me of using a fork!”). To associate innocence with a lack of power is natural of human cognition; hence silly passed through those two meanings, not “spicy” or “rough to the touch.” Language is for communicating, and this simple fact bars words’ drifting in an incoherent way that would impede understanding. Chapter 1 showed how readily words drift into tools for reinforcing and marking various shades of interpersonal understanding. That same impulse channels words’ changes of meaning into mentally processible directions, allowing a language to maintain its basic function.

  Changes in meaning are as natural to words as changes of pitch are to music. When a note stays unchanged for an eternity, it’s unexpected, suggesting either plainchant, willful modernist contrarianism, or bagpipes. Few consider any of those three the essence of what music is, and when we expect words to change just as we expect notes to change, an advantage is that English language looks different in the past, present, and future.

  In the Past: The “Poetry” of Shakespeare

  To truly know that a word is a thing ever in flux can help us understand the language of the past—or why the language of the past can be so hard to fully understand. Shakespeare is, again, a useful demonstration: reduce is hardly alone in his work in throwing the modern listener or reader. Have you ever attended a Shakespeare play and kept to yourself, as everyone around you was exclaiming about how wonderful it was, that you missed so much of what any of the characters were saying that you’d be hard-pressed to say you took in the plot in any detail? My sense over the years has been that asking people about this creates precisely the same discomfort as asking if they floss every night.

  Commonly we are told that Shakespeare’s language is “high,” such that the challenge can be met by making a certain effort. Related to this is the idea that Shakespeare’s language is poetic, requiring more effort to process than the phraseology of Neil Simon. Then someone will say that the language comes across best with careful acting technique, ideally wielded by British people.

  All claims except the one about Brits are true. However, many will be nagged by a feeling that there is more to the story, and there is. When, in Hamlet, Polonius opens his farewell speech to Laertes (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”) with “And these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character,” rising to a challenge can take us only so far. We can indeed process precepts, thy, and thou with the aforesaid rising. But what does Polonius mean by character? Neither intonation, facial expression, being British, nor rising will get across that in Shakespeare’s time that word meant “write,” as in the characters that one writes. Polonius is telling Laertes, in short, “Note these things well.”

  At the very start of Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio announces:

  Of government the properties to unfold,

  Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse;

  Since I am put to know that your own science,

  Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice

  My strength can give you; then no more remains …

  The reason we could grasp almost no meaning from this when spoken in real time, and might get little more even reading it on the page, is not that the language is poetic. There isn’t a Wordsworthian word in the passage. Yet one “rises” to this only to bump one’s head. The problem is that so many of the words no longer mean what they did four hundred years ago.

  And that is exactly what we would expect. Shakespearean text looks and sounds like the language we speak. Skim a text and usually no word leaps out as utterly unexpected. This is much of why we are told the task is simply to buck up. However, lurking behind the familiarity are many “false friends,” of the kind students are warned about in learning French. Sensible means “sensitive” in French rather than “levelheaded.” (“Sensible” is sensé.) If you hear or read sensible in French thinking it refers to common sense, you’ve missed something basic without even knowing it. In the same way, in the Measure for Measure passage, affect for Shakespeare meant “to make a pretense of,” while science meant “knowledge.” Thrown by both those when hearing this in real time, not to mention the now unconventional use of unfold in reference to speaking, we end up lost. Not because we are uncultured or incapable of effort, but because language is always moving. It’s done a lot of that since 1600.

  Another example is Edmund’s cocky speech about his origins in King Lear:

  Wherefore should I

  Stand in the plague of custom and permit

  The curiosity of nations to deprive me

  For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

  Lag of a brother?

  To know that wherefore meant “why” is hardly a stretch, and we can likely agree that moonshines for “months” is poetic. All “rise”! However, why curiosity? With our poetic hats on we are poised to interpret it as meaning “something peculiar,” but that meaning makes no sense here. “The curiosity of nations” can’t mean that nations are a peculiar concept, since they aren’t. But if curiosity more immediately reminds us of a healthy interest in matters outside oneself, then why is Edmund implying that curiosity is a bad thing?

  Because in Shakespeare’s time, curiosity meant “care” in the sense of close attention. In 1664 someone we would now call a scientist wrote about the resolution power of lenses, exclaiming that if the state of the art in his time “could attain to that curiosity as to grind us such Glasses … we might hazard at last the discovery of Spiritualities themselves.” But was this man implying that astronomers of the tim
e simply lacked sufficient interest in their own subject to bother to fashion more powerful lenses? It’s weird little things like this that make antique prose so often seem a tad off, as if people then were incapable of expressing themselves quite as lucidly as we do. Actually, though, this writer was quite lucid: if we read curiosity in the passage as meaning “carefulness” or “precision,” then all is clear.

  By curiosity, then, Edmund means “fine distinctions,” such as the kind that would label him as inferior for not being the eldest brother. To make such distinctions implies a certain interest, and over time that interest became the core meaning of the word itself, such that today we associate curiosity with schoolchildren, museums, and cats. However, in our times, the word has morphed into connoting not just interest, but something more specific: the positive kind of interest. Before things had gone that far, however, the curious person’s interest could also be of a less welcome kind: in 1680 a bishop mentioned that “the opposition of Hereticks anciently occasioned too much Curiosity among the fathers.” This is the flavor in Edmund’s use of curious, and the issue is less poetry than the mere passage of time and its effects on arbitrary linkages between word and meaning.

  Edmund continues:

  Why “bastard”? Wherefore “base”?

  When my dimensions are as well compact,

  My mind as generous, and my shape as true

  As honest madam’s issue?

  That all sounds like the language we speak, but in modern English it’s actually a downright inept passage, not “poetry” at all. How does it refute an accusation of being lowly to assert that one’s physique is modest and tidy—i.e., what compact most readily means to us? Also, if someone calls you illegitimate of birth, then isn’t it a rather diagonal smackdown to mention that you are “generous”? There isn’t anything poetic about that; in a modern playwright’s script, that wouldn’t make it past the first read-through. And most certainly, when called a bastard, no one venturing flinty self-assertion does themselves a favor by recounting their birth from a madam!