Mcwhorter Quotes

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.

The war on drugs is what makes thugs.

In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.

I am not 'African American' —I am black American.

For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation’s poetry.

Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it

Because all languages are and have always been in a state of continual transformation, anything we see in a language today is the result of change.

Don’t tell the Scandinavians I said this, but “Swedish,” “Norwegian,” and “Danish” are all really one “language,

[Speaking with John McWhorter] I take umbrage at the lionisation of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi. Who couldn't carry my book bag. He hasn't read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. He's an unserious, superficial, empty-suited, lightweight - he's not our equal, not even close.

(I must note that the copy editor for this book, upon reading this section, actually allowed me to use singular they throughout the book. Here’s to them in awed gratitude!)

People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.

there is no such thing as human beings speaking “bad grammar.

The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversation, seek to always agree--everybody agrees and agrees and that's considered basic social libation.

If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (“Each man in their degree”).

The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English’s time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft of a rigorously exacting nature has been cast to the margins of the culture.

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

the social evaluations we place on how people talk are purely artificial constructs placed on speech varieties

To wit, profanity first involved the holy, and only later the holes.

We need the hard left to point us to new ways of thinking. However, we need them to go back to doing this while seated, with the rest of us, rather than standing up and getting their way by calling us moral perverts if we disagree with them and calling this speaking truth to power.

Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.

Okay, but even if my ass is fired, the rest of me will still be coming back to work, and I hope you won’t mind me working assless.

The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous

This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.

In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

This cycle eloquently demonstrates that, in the end, dialects are all there is: the “language” part is just politics!

Today’s “Dialect” Is Tomorrow’s “Language

We’re all Dennis Hopper now.

Now independent, the Moldovans continue to encourage a perception of “Moldovan” as a distinct “language” from Romanian, in part because Romanians tend to dismiss their dialect as sounding uneducated.

[I] would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less "African" than actual Africans that calling ourselves 'African American' is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa -and we stand up and insist that we, too, are 'African' because Jesse Jackson said so?

view the world’s six thousand languages as accumulations of endless transformations of the single African progenitor of all of them.

most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.

We saw how close dialects can be compared to “covers” of an original song. A

the grand old tendency in sound change to erode unaccented final vowels

mere one percent of the words in English today are not borrowed from other languages.

the first human language emerged roughly 150,000 years ago in East Africa.

is evidence that human language is to some extent genetically coded.

However, human language is unique in its ability to communicate or convey an open-ended volume of concepts:

Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay.

To tar America as insufficiently aware of slavery is more about smugness and noble victimhood than forging something new and needed.

The truth is that shit is a defective verb.

Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids. Period. This means that if we follow these prophets’ advice and go easier on black boys, we hinder the education of other black students. The Elect earnestly decry that most black kids go to school with only other black kids, because it fits into their agenda to point out “segregation.” But that “segregation” also entails that the black boys they think should be allowed to beat other kids up in school are handing out the beatings to other black kids.

Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to “get it” for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball.

McWhorter claims that low black educational achievements are not the result of racism but of an attitude within the black community that academic achievement is a "white thing" and that blacks must reject such efforts in order to stay "culturally black.

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

There is a vast gulf in complexity, subtlety, and flexibility between human beings and other animals in regard to language ability, and that gulf is a large part of why humans have been such a successful species of such disproportionate influence on this planet.

Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar. To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like. Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there. The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work. Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.

Moreover, a similar study published in 2009 by Stephanie K. McWhorter, which examined 1,149 navy recruits who’d never been convicted of sexual assault, replicated Lisak’s findings: 144 of the recruits (13 percent) turned out to be undetected rapists, and 71 percent of these 144 rapists were repeat offenders. An average of 6.3 rapes or attempted rapes could be attributed to each of them. Of the 865 rapes and attempted rapes reported in McWhorter’s study, 95 percent of the assaults were committed by just 96 individuals. As Lisak had reported, a small number of indiscernible offenders—only 8.4 percent of the population studied—were responsible for a staggering number of rapes. It should be noted that all of the subjects in the studies by Lisak and McWhorter participated voluntarily and that none of the undetected rapists identified by the researchers considered themselves rapists.

The work we should do involves calling for the war on drugs to end, supporting phonics-based reading instruction, and celebrating every political move that helps dilute the conviction that all people need to spend four years living in a dorm before they start training for the workplace. That’s work enough, and it will help change the world.

Shakespeare, as it happens, writing as the 1500s became the 1600s, wrote in a period when English was just becoming what we would recognize as “our language.

Goodbye, is strictly speaking a truncated form of “Be with you, be with you!

More to the point, though, a language consists not only of isolated words but also sounds and sentence structures, and these are at all times changing along with the word meanings.

general instability in vowels–in all languages, they tend to gradually mutate into different ones as time goes by.

the first human beings to speak language as we know it today lived in East Africa about 150,000 years ago.

Latin illa became, with some erosion of sounds into la, the definite article

Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive “fitness” but toward simply filling available ecological niches.

Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.

that anything I write or say in this language can be said in about six thousand other ways, with completely different words

will end up being a kind of mantra for this chapter, “dialects is all there is.

Dialects follow naturally from the inherently nondiscrete nature of language change.

English is one of several languages that evolved from an unwritten ancestor linguists call Proto-Germanic;

Each dialect is just a different roll of the language-mutation dice.

Even Fijian, spoken on a complex of islands by just seven hundred thousand people, has more than one dialect.

the concept of “language” is a mere terminological convenience.

is no logical conception of “language” as “proper” speech as distinguished from “quaint,” “broken” varieties best kept down on the farm or over on the other side of the tracks.

If language arose approximately when sapiens did, then a combination of the fossil record and modern comparative genetic analysis can point us to language’s time of origin.

all languages constantly create expressive usages of words or phrases that gradually wear

as Clinton taught us in 1998, any action is potentially negatable.

the eight main “dialects” of Chinese are so vastly different that they are, under any analysis, separate languages. The

But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is.

The modern asshole is presumptuous, entitled—the key element is that he knows that he could do differently.

What the deuce? emerged because in cards, number two—deuce—comes from the early French deus, which was associated with bad luck and, pertinently, the devil because it was the lowest score.

In this chapter we will go beyond the one type of change we saw in chapter 1, and embrace the word in general as a fundamentally impermanent association of a sequence of sounds with a particular meaning.

In fact, however, the most useful analogy to keep in mind is that a language is like a lava lamp. The “lava” slowly swirls and clumps and rises and falls in its fluid in an eternal, mesmerizing flow. Although constantly changing, in no sense is the clump of lava decaying—if one piece is beginning to drip or split into strands, we can be sure that a few inches away, other pieces are joining together. At any given point, we do not see the present configuration of the lava clump as somehow “better” than the one thirty seconds ago—the joy is in the infinite variations that the clump can take while at all times remaining consistent in its expressive motility. DIFFERENT SPINS

pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope that it doesn’t, because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose. We must conceive of such people as adherents of a sect called the Elect.

To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one’s sense of belonging. Figures of authority are the same color as you. You are thought of as the default category.

A critical mass of the people he was referring to no longer just quietly pride themselves on their enlightenment in knowing to be offended about certain things, but now see it as a duty to excoriate and shun those (including black people) who don’t share their degree of offense.

Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites.

People say “nucular” modeled on other words that end in -ular such as spectacular, tubular, and vernacular. Specifically, because there exist the words nuke and, long before that, nucleus, a temptation looms to think of nuclear as “nuc-” plus the -ular ending: spectacular, tubular, nuc-ular.

Note: There is no such thing as someone who speaks your language with a perfect accent but whose sentences are full of grammatical mistakes. If the person has mastered the sounds, then it follows that before that, he had the sentence structures down. People learn a language’s parts in order of difficulty.

Just as we would be inestimably poorer to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity.

At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late 1990s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later after students who once would have been “mismatched” to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, where one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.

Hence, the notion of the “cheese burger” by the late 1930s, with “burger” now referring to a disk of meat. Today, of course, one speaks of the veggie burger, taco burger, fish burger, and so much else, such that no one would object that burger is “not a word.” Now it is, but only because of grafting. We talk about eating a nice burger, and Abraham Lincoln brought back to life would picture us trying to consume a staid, small-town German tradesman.

DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here—“You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are”—is the logic of the sandbox.

Did you ever notice that when you learn a foreign language, one of the first things you have to unlearn as an English speaker is the way we use do in questions and in negative statements? Take Did you ever notice . . . ? for example. Or I did not notice. We’re used to this do business, of course. But it’s kind of strange if you think about it. In this usage, do has no meaning whatsoever. It’s just there, but you have to use it. One cannot, speaking English, walk around saying things like Noticed you ever? or I not notice. English has something we will call meaningless do.

Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for violence, which when translated into policy, is documented to have led to violence persisting in the schools and to have lowered students’ grades. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test. Forget directing black students to (free) resources for practicing the test and reinstating gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very schools just a generation before – those wouldn’t be quite “revolutionary” (and anti-“white”) enough.

Modern Our Father, who is in heaven, blessed be your name. Give us our daily bread today. All three of these languages were rich, beautiful systems. There are no dogs to be seen. Middle English, the language of Chaucer, does not give the impression of being a “bastardization” of Old English or an example of “Old English in decay.” It was simply a new English of its own, the product of the gradual transformation of Old English, a transformation barely perceptible to Old English speakers themselves but visible to us by looking at texts over time. Similarly, Modern English, the language of Jane Austen, is surely not “bad” Middle English, but a new English in its own right. In other words, the progression from Old to Middle to Modem English shows us that contrary to the impression so easy

In 1987, a rich donor in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 black sixth graders, few of whom had grown up with fathers in their home. He guaranteed them a fully funded education through college as long as they did not do drugs, have children before getting married, or commit crimes. He also gave them tutors, workshops, and after-school programs, kept them busy in summer programs, and provided them with counselors for when they had any kind of problem. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen became felons. Twelve years later, the forty-five girls had had sixty-three children between them, and more than half had become mothers before the age of eighteen. So what exactly was the “racism” that held these poor kids back that could have been erased at the time and created a different result for these children? The answer is none. Social history is too complex to yield to the either/or gestures of KenDiAngelonian propositions. What held those poor kids back was that they had been raised amid a different sense of what is normal than white kids in the burbs.

Did I mention that besides being the brains of our little group, Garrett was also the one with the biggest balls? Skeletal hands rising out of a murky lake notwithstanding, I had rarely ever seen him scared of anything. I, on the other hand, was his opposite. Along with clowns and insects larger than my thumb, a dark and foreboding forest rounded out the trio of things that meant nightmares for me.

They don’t just put in random driveways because they think they’ll add to the natural beauty of things.

When a note stays unchanged for an eternity, it's unexpected, suggesting either plainchant, willful modernist contrarianism, or bagpipes.

One can divide antiracism into three waves along the lines that feminism has been. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and ’80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Lieutenant Commander Thomas McWhorter of the navy, who fired off an early broadside against the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” asking that it be cut. “It is like drinking a scotch and soda and suddenly swallowing the ice cube!” McWhorter wrote. “You could not have interrupted the beautiful flow of entertainment any more effectively had you stopped the show for a VD lecture.” Oscar wrote back, “I believe I get the point of your letter very clearly, and I realize very well the dangers of overstating the case. But I just feel that the case is not fully stated without this song. I wish it were true that all these things are accepted by the public. You say, ‘the theme is wearing very thin,’ but in spite of this, I see progress being made only very slowly.

you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence. Here is an Austrian psychoanalyst writing in German in 1927 about precisely what would

Because faggots of wood kept a fire going, the word was extended metaphorically to being burnt at the stake.

It all starts with the name Richard. Richard became Rick, which then became Dick because of something medieval English speakers found jocular that only proves that humor dates badly.

They are unreachable for the simple reason that they are arguing from religion rather than reason, trying to foist their dogma into the public square out of a misguided sense that they are the world's first humans to find the Answer to Everything.