Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still

A joyous romp through the big hits of linguistics; I loved this. I also highly recommend listening to the audiobook, since John McWhorter - who hosts the equally fun and fizzy Lexicon Valley podcast - is a natural “radio entertainer”. I found myself frequently smiling, laughing, or shaking my head in wonder and awe.

Anyway, philosophically, this book is one giant take-down of Internet pedants who despair at the ‘decline of spoken English': i.e. those people at parties who correct someone exclaiming “I was literally burning up!” with “Actually, you mean figuratively.” Ahhh, I do love taking down pedants. LANGUAGE IS A LIVING THING, YOU BETA. And that is McWhorter's central thesis: that language evolves, and that its evolution is to be celebrated, studied and even revered - rather than feared or moralized over.

I especially liked the following:
- The “euphemism treadmill”: where we use language to soften and distance ourselves from prejudice, only to find each en vogue euphemism being abused by assholes, and Concerned People having to find a new one: e.g. “crippled” –> “handicapped” –> “disabled” –> “challenged”. Each move was an attempt to distance the language from the assholey behavior of some people, but you can never escape it! IT'S INESCAPABLE.

- “Duchenne laughter” and AALLLL the amazing stuff about pragmatics vs. semantics and the grammaticalization of words: i.e. how we use laughter, or small words (“like”, “well”, “so”, and - my favorite - “ANYWAY”), not as filler/chaff, but as social lubricants conveying subtle nuances of fellow feeling. I never thought about how, when saying “Well, blah blah”, the “well” is conveying counter-expectation and softening the blow of surprise: “Well, it's actually red.” (“actually” also!) This reminded me of my Goethe Institut basic German course where - despite what you would expect - it wasn't the infamously long German compound words that were hard to understand (Lebensabschnittpartner! Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften!), it was those tiny grammaticalized words like “doch” (conveying counter-intuitive surprise?) and “mal” (a softener similar to “just”, as in “I just had a question.”? honestly, I'm still not sure).

- McWhorter's authorial voice is Full of Personality, which I sometimes dislike in authors, but I LOLed frequently at McWhorter's indulgent twirls: e.g. he calls German compound words “highway pile-ups”.

- The “back shift”: when verbs transition to nouns in everyday English, the syllabic stress shifts from the last syllables to the front syllables: e.g. “I susPECTed him.” (verb) vs. “Round up the usual SUSpects.” (noun) This reminded me of my British friends once laughing at my “charming American way” of pronouncing “goodlooking” (I say “GOODlooking”, they said “goodLOOKing”).

- INDO-EUROPEAN. My favorite proto-language. I wish we knew more about it. I could listen to a whole book about it.

Now what I need is someone to explain to me my own accent, since so many English speakers have told me I have one, and I even hear it in recordings of myself, but it makes no sense and it sounds like I'm vaguely Scandinavian. (I'm not from Scandinavia.) Maybe McWhorter should do a call-in show.

Another indulgence: OH LANGUAGE, HOW I LOVE THEE! Much like the frisson I had the other week when I attended a Clojure workshop (Clojure is a functional programming language, miles away from Python - my everyday coding language) and learned a totally new way of conceptualizing code, so too is comparative linguistics amazing and exciting! Do they have books comparing natural language to computer languages? That's another thing.

Highly recommended! I want to read all of McWhorter's stuff now, listen to all his Great Courses series. (Coincidentally, I actually listened to his intro to linguistics Great Courses series way back in the early 2000s - not knowing it was the same dude - and his explanation of how tonal languages evolve BLEW MY MIND.)