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.

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 o

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.”

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

However, when people have a hard time assigning a “meaning” to something they nevertheless produce day in and day out, it’s a clue that we’re on to something in the pragmatic wing of language, where we have to get used to a different sense of what something means—namely, it’s where words do rather than “mean.”

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.

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.

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.