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)
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)
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.”
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.
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)
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
... See moreJohn 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)
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)
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