Words on the Move

by John Mcwhorter

  Yet today there isn’t a thing in Forever Amber, a kind of poor man’s Vanity Fair, that would even raise eyebrows. A paragraph ends with “then his head bent and he blew out the last candle,” after which the next paragraph begins, “From the beginning Amber had both half-hoped and half-feared that she would become pregnant”; or elsewhere similarly, “As they lay in the bed, her head resting on his shoulder…” Never does the author, Kathleen Winsor, venture to actually describe what had gone on between her characters. Yet this book was considered hot peppers in its day, enough to make that cartoon matron gasp.

  But to keep making money shocking the public with sex, pop culture had to push the envelope ever more. In 1981 a woman I think I was on a date with dragged us out of a showing of Body Heat because of its early scene of Kathleen Turner and William Hurt’s characters having sex, something that would have sounded like science fiction when Forever Amber was published. Yet today, scenes like that are ordinary not only in the movies but on much of television; to make an impression, things must get even more creative.

  The Signal Fades

  It does. Or the joke that was convulsingly funny loses its snap and must be replaced by a new one. The fashion that turned heads then is now old news. There was a time when it was a tangy gesture to sport what were as often called “dungarees,” but today it’s wearing something other than jeans in casual settings that is the statement, if anything.

  And of course, things are much the same in language. It is often remarked that people are now using multiple exclamation points in texting, social media, and casual writing contexts more than they used to. A Carl’s Jr. restaurant receipt, for example, requests, “PLEASE LET US KNOW HOW WE DID!!!” and there are those who consider three exclamation points a standard number for proper texting (OMG!!!). Yet the question “Why are people using so many exclamation points?,” implying an unusual quotient of enthusiasm apparently afoot, misses the fact that today three exclamation points means what just one exclamation point did originally.

  The reason for the proliferation? The potency of the single exclamation point has faded over time. Originally intended to indicate surprise or emphasis, the exclamation point has seen its connotation diluted in the same way, and for the same reason, that a joke fades, a fashion ceases to distract, or shock value diminishes. A marker once used to summon attention can now be used merely to show that you’re paying attention, in places where an old-fashioned Strunk and White sensibility would use just a period.

  Proper texting, then, requires “See you there!” even from someone who has no reason to be excited about your presence. “See you there” without the exclamation point would imply a shrug or a sneer, and texters are quick to tell you that using a period—“See you there.”—conveys virtual hostility. “See you there!” signals not excitement but basic chirpy courtesy.

  This is not as novel as it seems, either: it has long been a convention in many comic books to mark characters’ statements with exclamation points rather than periods. Old issues of Archie were typical in this: one story opens with Veronica coming upon Archie on his way to go fishing. The dialogue:

  ARCHIE: You can watch me if you like!

  VERONICA: Oh, I don’t want to watch! I’d like to fish, too! Go and get a pole for me!

  ARCHIE: You fish? You’re joking! You don’t know the first thing about it!

  There isn’t a period at the end of a sentence in the whole episode, and that was par for the course in the Archie world. Yet normal people do not shout their conversation. “I’D LIKE TO FISH, TOO!” in real life would get us near water with no one but ourselves. As far back as these comic books, exclamation points were used to indicate, essentially, basic engagement.

  Nor is this solely about America. Scandinavians have long used exclamation points after people’s names when beginning a letter or, today, e-mail, note, etc. To them, this usage connotes what an English speaker indicates with “Dear,” and nothing more exclamatory than that. It used to throw me a bit in my interactions with Scandinavians. The e-mail headed “John!” always sounded pleasantly enthusiastic but left me wondering whether I would be able to justify the excitement in person. Today, knowing to read the exclamation point as a wave of the hand, I know that the Swede or Norwegian won’t mind if I am just (sniff!) myself.

  We have already seen that there is a theme of weakening signals in how words move through time. The firmly objective meaning becomes more elusively subjective: the command of You must be up by seven o’clock becomes the internal surmise of That must be the woman I saw the other day. The directness of the semantic becomes the abstraction of the pragmatic, as in the difference between doing something well and Well, horses run fast. The general goes narrow: audition means “hearing” and comes to mean trying out for a performance part, within which hearing will be but a minor thread.

  When a Word Devolves into a Tool

  Along those lines, we are now prepared to see another possible fate of a word. A language is more than just a basket of words—you could know five thousand of them in a language and be miserably unable to communicate even the most basic of sentiments without also knowing how to put the words together. A language is not only its words but also its grammar.

  We are most familiar with the concept of grammar in terms of endings, such as the -ed that marks the past, the -s that marks the plural noun and the third person singular verbs, and the -ing that makes a verb progressive. However, grammar also includes what are still, technically, words. For example, the and a, our definite and indefinite articles: the pear refers to a pear already discussed, while a pear refers to a pear freshly brought into the conversation. Yet while the and a are, because they stand alone, words, note that this difference between the definite and the indefinite is a matter of grammar, in the same way as marking the plural or the past tense is. The word the doesn’t “mean” something in the same way that the word pear does. The foreigner asks “What does the mean?” and your answer, to the extent that you can manage one, will be quite different from explaining what giraffe or temporary “means.” Your answer would likely start with “Well, you use the to…”—that is, you use it, whereas you wouldn’t say you “use” giraffe to refer to a bizarrely long-necked and silent animal. To master how to use the is part of learning how to put words together—that is, grammar. Like -ed and -s, the and a are tools. Grammar is partly prefixes and suffixes, but it is also some things that stand by themselves as separate words. That is, there are “word” words (pear, okapi, rhombus) and then grammar words (the, a, and, or, may, would).

  The question is, though: where does the grammar come from?

  You are an early human sitting under a tree with no language at all, who has never even encountered a language, but hankers with the desire to create one. You will naturally assign names to things like trees, to actions like climbing them, and even to descriptions of the trees, such as “green.” But if you want to be able to say that something happened in the past, the last thing you will do is hatch up an ending to snap on to verbs. Remember, you’ve never known a language, so endings aren’t something you’ve ever encountered. Spontaneously you would seek a word to express the past just like you’ve made up words for everything else. Maybe something like yesterday, or behind—but certainly not coming up with something as queer as an ending that can’t stand by itself and glomming it onto some other word.

  We don’t need to just surmise about what you would do, either. There have been rare cases when people have had to build a language from the ground up, such as when slaves were brought to plantations and heard a few hundred words of the master’s language and forged that into a brand-new language, called a creole. When people in circumstances like this never got much exposure to the colonizer language and really had to make a new language by themselves, they didn’t make up endings to indicate things like the past or the plural. Instead, they lassoed in a word to mean the past or the plural (for the latter, often them or all). So where do endings come from?


  The answer is the subject of this chapter: another possible fate of a word is that it can gradually, without anyone noticing it over time, go from being a word to being a piece of grammar. Endings, as a rule, start as words; becoming an ending happens only later, amid a kind of extended obsolescence. Even grammar in the form of words, such as the, a, etc., starts as regular words: the started as that, a started as one. One result of words never staying the same, then, is that some of them provide the material for what becomes the language’s grammar, the blood coursing through its organs.

  As always, when we can see this process happening in our actual lives, it’s as disturbing as thinking too hard about your sibling’s or child’s dating experiences. Yet as with that and so much else involved in life, as queasy as it might make us, we wouldn’t want it not to happen.

  The Way It Used to Be: “Using to” What?

  It can be unsettling to be told to think about the fact that you have a tongue in your mouth. It’s wet; it’s biggish when you consider the whole thing all the way back; plus, it has that pebbly texture you’d find hideous to encounter in some undersea creature. Yet there it is sitting in your mouth and you can’t get it out.

  There are things we say all day long every day that are deeply weird like that, and one that often occurs to me is the vastly peculiar used to, so seldom singled out and yet certainly one of the oddest things in the English language if taken literally. If a sentence is merely a matter of words, then how about She used to live in Columbus? We all know use as a word, but in what sense is it contributing its meaning in She used to live in Columbus? She wasn’t using anything, or at least that isn’t what the sentence means.

  Even the way we say used to gives away that more is going on than our simply saying the word use. Imagine someone pronouncing the used to in that sentence as “yuzed to,” the way we would pronounce used in She used a pen. But no—to say “She yuuuzed to live in Columbus” would sound distinctly oleaginous; no one would even venture it. The thoroughly correct pronunciation of used to in the sense intended in She used to live in Columbus is “yoosta.” One might venture “yoostu” to preserve the pronunciation of the to, but the used part has to be “yoos,” not “yooz.”

  Used to is, then, something quite different from use. Spelling gives away that used to (“yoosta”) was once—used to be!—a form of use. But it isn’t now, and the difference is that use is a “word” word while used to (“yoosta”) is grammar. Use is a word meaning to utilize. Used to is, on the other hand, a tool we use to express that something happened on a habitual basis in the past. It fulfills a function right alongside the -ed suffix we use to express the simple past: simple past is he talked; the past in a continuous way is he used to talk. To anyone who has taken French or Spanish, this difference will recall the two choices of past in those languages, such as the preterite and imperfect in Spanish: he talked once: habló; he was talking: hablaba. In an alternate universe, English would also have an ending to indicate the “imperfect” to parallel the -ed one, but that just happens not to be the way things worked out.

  The path from use to “yoosta” begins with the kinds of changes we saw in the previous chapter, of the kind that take “blessed” through “innocent” and “weak” to “silly.” When it comes to using something, chances are you don’t use it just once. Typically one makes use of something regularly, over a long period of time—use is something one most readily thinks of as long-term: usage, as it were. That reality hovered over use, to the point that long-term usage (habit) became a secondary meaning of the word. A nice example is Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan intoning in 1651, “Long use obtaineth the authority of a law,” where use could be substituted for by practice or habit. Set phrases of the period such as use and custom and as the use is (which meant “which is the usual”) further indicated this new meaning.

  Aware of this meaning, we can more easily understand Late Middle English sentences such as a record from 1550 that one Thomas Casberd has used to set his cart in the street. (In the actual spelling: “Thomas Casberd hathe vsid to sett his carte in the streate.”) That meant, Mr. Casberd “used,” as in, had the custom of, parking in the street. Or John Milton, in 1670, wrote in his history of England about “the English then useing to let grow on their upper-lip large mustachio’s.”

  So, to an English speaker of this time, use could mean “have the habit of,” or to translate into modern slang, “has this thing where he…” From here, the path to today’s “yoosta” is clearer than if we just start with the “utilize” meaning. Over time, the meaning generalized, such that one could say used to to refer not only to someone harboring a habit, but also to habitual or ongoing things themselves, regardless of who, if anybody, was responsible for them. In 1550, Thomas Casberd has used to set his cart in the street referred to Casberd’s having regularly executed an action, and Milton’s mustachioed men did that to their faces on purpose. However, She used to live in Columbus doesn’t refer to the woman regularly executing the action of living in Columbus, which wouldn’t even make sense. It refers to her having lived in Columbus ongoingly. One can now also say something like Based on this data, she used to be the only person with type O blood in the village, when the woman in question didn’t even know what her blood type was and/or certainly wasn’t performing the action of having that blood type once a day. Her blood type just was what it was, and as something that didn’t change, was an ongoing state—hence used to. Used to doesn’t even have to be about a living being: My cello used to have a richer sound. Cellos don’t have customs.

  Used to has gone from meaning “was in the habit of doing” to, well, “yoosta.” We use “yoosta” whether the issue is a deliberate action (He used to ski), a passive state of being (He used to hallucinate), or anything that was ongoing in the past (It used to be easier to find a mailbox, where the “it” in question is too abstract to imagine practicing anything or having habits). I liked it the way it used to be—again, how could this abstract “it” do anything habitually in the way that Thomas Casberd did? Used to is now not a word but a tool, one that puts a statement into the past habitual: a piece of grammar.*

  Grammar and Modern Family (Just Read On!)

  The proper analogy is with a certain trend in television sitcoms. The Office was based on a conceit that a documentary was being made, such that the plots were regularly interrupted by sequences where the characters talked to the camera alone or in pairs in the style of reality shows. In the American version of the show, at a point of high drama certain characters even turned their mikes off for privacy, and in one plot arc in the final season the cameramen were actually shown, with one of them harboring a crush on Pam.

  In the wake of The Office, the sitcoms Modern Family and Parks and Recreation also had characters regularly doing mini-monologues to the camera. However, on these shows there was no pretense that a documentary was being made. Instead, there was a tacit expectation that television audiences were now accustomed to the sitcom narrative sprinkled with off-line commentary by the characters, such that the soliloquy commentaries could now simply help flesh out the storytelling as a kind of abstract extra layer. The soliloquies were recast on these later shows as what film scholarship would call part of the grammar of the show, alongside long-established techniques such as the close-up, the cross-cut, and the splicing in of sentimental soundtrack music.

  The relationship between use and “yoosta” is equivalent. If you don’t happen to be into sitcoms, jeans are again apropos. Once upon a time, ripping your jeans was quite the rebellion—“Ha! I can wear my clothes all torn up and whaddaya gonna do about it!” Today, the ripping is, especially among women, just one of many things that are considered to make jeans look acceptable. The rips, like the height of the waist and the flare at the bottom, are part of how jeans go from being a pair of pants to making a statement, as it were: the denim grammar.

  The point is that today’s grammar words are born from regular words changing: what we associate wi
th the “rules” of English began as the kinds of ordinary words those rules apply to. For example, here is the quintessence of “grammar”: a passage from the grandfather of all old-time grammatical descriptions of English, Robert Lowth’s once-classic A Short Introduction to English Grammar, written in 1762. Here Lowth describes, in the grand old fashion derived from Latin textbooks (as was the use at the time) certain aspects of grammar. In this era, it was also still the use to write most s’s as what look like f’s, so for authenticity’s sake I will preserve those,* as well as the printer’s use of capitals and italics:

  The Poſſibility of a thing depends upon the power of its cauſe; and may be expreſſed,

  The Neceſſity of a thing from ſome external Obligation, whether Natural or Moral, which we call Duty, is expreſſed,

  Very nice, but from a presentation like this, especially with the solemn, incantatory language, it seems as if these “particles” emerged from on high in their current state. However, descriptions like this, in their lists of “particles,” actually capture ordinary words at one point amid their changes over time.

  Take ought. One may think of tongues again in having occasion to zero in on this strange little seal-yelp of a word, with its clotty spelling making it look like something somebody punched. Ought once was, of all things, the past tense of owe. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, you can see it used in both the present and the past. Mistress Quickly tells Prince Hal that Falstaff “said this other day you ought him a thousand pound.” The prince asks Falstaff, “Sirrah! Do I owe you a thousand pound?”