Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)

If fast means “speedy,” then why can you hold fast and be fast asleep? And did it ever bother you? Dusting can be removing something (like dust) or laying it down (like fertilizer or paprika). No T-shirts about that. You seed a watermelon to get the seeds out, but when you seed the soil you’re putting the seeds in. You can bolt from a room (running

In English, MPMs can be classified according to four principal functions that they cluster around: F: Factuality A: Acknowledgment of others’ state of mind C: Counterexpectation E: Easing

In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.