Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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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)
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
John McWhorter • 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)
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
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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)
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)
Enough people savored that good feeling that after a while, adorable meant something more specific than admired: it came to mean “charming,” pleasing in a way associated with that which is little, immature, inferior, or dear to us. (The intersection between those four traits is, in itself, vaguely alarming!) Curious George is adorable; the Statue
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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)
Yet the weird truth is that for all their artifactual splendor, dictionaries are starkly misleading portraits of something as endlessly transforming as language. In terms of how words actually exist in time and space, to think of a word’s “genuine” meaning as the one you find upon looking it up is like designating a middle-aged person’s high school
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