Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
John McWhorteramazon.com
Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
One of hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming. They tell you a word is a thing, when it’s actually something going on.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
Linguists endlessly remind us that these rules are arbitrary, unconnected to clarity or logic. Yet no linguist denies the other reality, which is that these rules, having been entrenched in society as measures of formality and social worth, must be followed in formal contexts and taught to young people.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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.”
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
The acrid views expressed about colloquial speech in online comments sections today is a relatively new view of language, fostered by a combination of bourgeois sensibility and the dominance of unchanging documents such as dictionaries, both of which subtly but powerfully distract us from the dynamic reality of language’s essential mechanisms.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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.
John McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
We do not watch a parade and wonder why those people don’t just stand still. Language is a parade: the word whose sound and meaning stays the same over centuries is the exception rather than the rule.