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,

(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!)

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We’re all Dennis Hopper now.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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;

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

No language makes perfect sense. That’s another way of saying, there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there. If one is to impose an aesthetic preference upon English or any other language, it cannot be one involving perfect order and endless clean lines, because no language like that has ever been spoken anywhere by anyone. Rather one must revel in disorder—not chaos, but perhaps the contained disorder of an ideal English garden where it’s considered proper to allow certain plants to ramble here and there, certain flowers to spread. Call them marks of character.

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.

The intention to harm or exclude may guide some technical design decisions. Yet even when they do, these motivations often stand in tension with aims framed more benevolently. Even police robots who can use lethal force while protecting officers from harm are clothed in the rhetoric of public safety.35 This is why we must separate “intentionality” from its strictly negative connotation in the context of racist practices, and examine how aiming to “do good” can very well coexist with forms of malice and neglect.36 In fact a do-gooding ethos often serves as a moral cover for harmful decisions. Still, the view that ill intent is always a feature of racism is common: “No one at Google giggled while intentionally programming its software to mislabel black people.”37 Here McWhorter is referring to photo-tagging software that classified dark-skinned users as “gorillas.” Having discovered no bogeyman behind the screen, he dismisses the idea of “racist technology” because that implies “designers and the people who hire them are therefore ‘racists.’” But this expectation of individual intent to harm as evidence of racism is one that scholars of race have long rejected.38

It's routine, it's a dance and it really needs to stop... And I really wish that these students and the professors who support them understood how dumb they are being considered - not how dumb they look 'cause then it becomes "why are you so concerned what white people think of us?" That's not the point, it's that these people quietly are thinking "these people are dumb and so we're going to approach them on their level." I don't know where people get the idea that that's black strength or that it's "progressive". People REALLY need to get past that. And I just think that black students who protest over things that don't make sense - there's such thing as sensible black protest - but if it's about something that Doesn't. Make. Any. Damn. Sense. And you're making these demands that your school becomes some sort of anti racism academy along the lines of Maoist ideology - you have to understand that the people who give in to you think that you are DUMB AS S*** and you have to understand that that is a problem. You've been condescended to. But no, they don't get it, they just think that to stick your fist in the air and yell certain slogans makes you somebody of higher wisdom and makes you a person who is continuing the struggle of Dr. King. No.

Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still.

Skepticism is a form of intelligence. It is certainly a keystone of sophisticated thought. It would not be inappropriate to even state, for general purposes, that skepticism - that is, a dedication to applying one's mind to taking the measure of things before coming to a judgement - is the heart of intelligence.

[P]rofound social change can happen without the entire populace being junior scholars about racist injustice. Such change has been happening world-wide for several centuries.

Antiracism should focus strongly on ending the war on drugs, and there is no need for legions of whites to be instructed in how privileged they are for this to happen.

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.

English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. 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 people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.

In 2004 a New York Times writer supposed that the language of the Kawesqar tribe in Chile has no future tense marking because, having been nomads traveling often in canoes in the past, they would usually have been so unclear on what was going to happen in the future that there was no need to ever talk about it (!). Never mind that Japanese has no future markers either, and yet the Japanese hardly seem unconcerned with the future.

More interesting are cases where culture cannot possibly be the issue. In German, the word for key is masculine (der Schlüssel). If you give the key a personal name, Germans tend to have an easier time recalling it if the name is masculine; they more readily associate the key with a picture of a man than a woman, and describe it with words like hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful. In Spanish, the word for key is feminine (la llave), and Spanish speakers are more comfortable with keys’ having female names, associating them with pictures of women, and they tend to describe them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny.

Foreigners are even given to saying English is “easy,” and they are on to something, to the extent that they mean that English has no lists of conjugational endings and doesn’t make some nouns masculine and others feminine. There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there, that English is easy at first but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of.

To strike an archaic note, in English we start popping off hithers and thithers. Come hither, go thither, but stay here or stay there. Hither, thither, and whither were the “moving” versions of here, there, and where in earlier English.

At the Big Hole: Savagery of the Whites: Two small children crossed the creek alone and hid in the brush. Some women and the old medicine man, Kahpots, were there. One woman requested of him, "Why not do something against soldiers' killing? You must have some strong Power?" Kapots replied, "I can do nothing. I have tried, but my Power is not effective. I feel helpless. So, my niece, you better look out for yourself, how you can save your life. Go farther down the creek!" The woman did as directed and was saved. Kahpots, unable to travel farther, had to be left on the trail a few days later, and was killed and scalped by General Howard's Bannacks, and maybe white scouts. . . .when I think of those terrible scenes, wrongs waged against human beings, I say shame! shame! This great Christian government had power to do differently by those truly patriotic people. It is such rememberances [sic] which touch my emotions, and I am led to marvel at the term 'civilization.

There is nothing more to tell of my tricks, of my danger deeds. All these are now behind me. It is not as a warrior that I now talk. I was riding alone, knowing what was ahead of me. Then the places through which I was riding came to my heart. It drew memories of old times, of my friends, when they were living on this river. My friends, my brothers, my sisters! All were gone! No tepees anywhere along the river. I was alone. No difference if I was hanged. I did not think I would die by the gun. The only way I could be killed was by hanging. That church Agent! That brave General Howard! They would see how I could die! I, a warrior, who knew the fighting! Keeping the religion of my ancestors, I knew not to fear.

This is all for me to tell of the war, and of our after hardships. The story will be for people who come after us. For them to see, to know what was done here. Reasons for the war, never before told. Nobody to help us tell our side -- the whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told.

Literally, then, is easy. It was originally one more variation on indicating truth—specifically exactness, as in “by the letter”: He took the advice literally; He meant it literally. But that can have been only a snapshot along a time line; there was never any question that literally was going to morph into other meanings. The only question was what kind. For one, literally quite predictably went beyond its original meaning into one where “by the letter” no longer makes sense except as a metaphor: We were literally the only ones there; We were literally on the brink of a depression. There are no letters involved in these statements, but literally means that the statement is true in a specific way—as in what we sometimes even refer to as “by the letter.” A next step was for literally to go personal, on a mission less to specify than to vent.

The nonliteral uses of literally are quite traditional, of all things. Literally had gone past meaning “by the letter” in any sense as early as the eighteenth century, when, for example, Francis Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague (1769), which contains this sentence: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” One cannot feed among anything “by the letter.” Or, in 1806, when the philosopher David Hume wrote, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger,” in his signature history of England, despite the fact that there are no letters via which to starve. Yet this was an authoritative and highly popular volume, more widely read at the time than Hume’s philosophical treatises, equivalent to modern histories by Simon Schama and Peter Ackroyd. The purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.

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.

As McWhorter points out, critical theory considers logic, reason’s most fundamental tool, to be a social construct that serves power.

Grammar turns up in the strangest places, and so often in profanity, as we have seen. Did you ever notice that when son of a bitch is used as a slur, the accent is on the bitch, but that when it is used in joy, the accent can be on the son? Son of a bitch, that was my lucky day! Here, too, the original meaning is obscured, and beyond the degree in “sum-bitch” where bitch remains vibrant.

Spanish’s usted, the polite pronoun for “you,” started as vuestra merced—“your mercy”—said quickly for centuries.

I’m not sure anyone still says gadzooks, but it was from God’s hooks—the nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. We can see Odds bodkins emerging from “God’s body” in Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part II has a line “God’s body! The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.” (It’s not one of Shakespeare’s more iconic lines.) The Bard added the “cutesifying” suffix -kin later when Hamlet says, “God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Leaving off the g and y, then, yields the queer little locution Odds bodkins! we now vaguely associate with men in stockings fencing on staircases (or at least I do).

The British Cor blimey! started as Gor blimey, which was a disguised “God blind me,” as in “May God blind me if . . . ,” a “swear,” as it were.

In the 500s CE, Pope Gregory commanded his subjects to say “God bless you” when someone sneezed because it was often the first sign of being infected with plague.

The paces that English puts damn through are rather astounding. Darn, for example, is not a random fudging but a downright game-of-telephone mangling of what began as By the eternal! as a euphemism for by the eternal God. There were those who were given to pronouncing the word etarnal, for the same reason that they might say “larn” for learn—or, for that matter, pronounce concern as “consarn” in Consarn it!, yet another euphemism for goddamnit. That etarnal shortened, naturally, to tarnal. Because this was a substitute for damn, it was equally natural to assume subconsciously that if there is a word damnation there is a word tarnation—and soon, there was. From here, it was a short step to imagining that if damnation had its damn, then tarnation had its tarn, or, since what we really have in mind is a way of saying damn without saying it and damn begins with d, darn. Few etymologies rival this one in the contrast between the beginning and the end, such as the origins of bye in God be with you.

Doggone, dang—as in, damn masked by hang as in hang it all—and the Black American Dag! all disguise damn while leaving it recognizable, via coy sound changes. Drat seems like it should belong to this family, too, but emerged via a separate transformation, from God rot.

Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words’ meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don’t mean “I demand that that be the Indian food,” but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it’s the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. “That” (in my mind) “must be the Indian food”: here is psychology. Must got personal. Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here’s some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot’s admirer Elaine is asleep “Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought.” Rathe? Angry, as in “wrathed,” maybe? No, actually: the word meant “quick” or, in this passage, “early.” Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant “early,” so rath-er, in Old and into Middle English, meant “earlier.” But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep—bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding. What happened with rather is that something you’ve got going earlier or sooner is often something you like better. As such, if rather means “earlier,” then there’s an air about rather not only of sunrise, but of preferability. That is, to earlier English speakers, rather was as much about what you like better (something personal) as about the more concrete issue of what you do before you do something else. Today the relationship between the two meanings is clearer in sooner. In saying, “I’d sooner die than marry him,” you mean not that you’d prefer your death to precede your nuptials, but that you don’t want to marry the man in question.

In the first installment, really was one of many English words meaning “truth” that came to mean very—such as very itself, which came from the French word for true, vrai (verrai in the late thirteenth century). Very is the well-worn version of verily just as “rilly” is what happens to really with heavy use. Truly was another example, of course, with true having undergone the same transformation as verrai a couple of centuries earlier.

Very, true, and sooth show that when a word means “true” and it’s used a lot, you can almost predict that, over time, it will glide from meaning “truth” into meaning “very.

true and tree developed from the same ancient word: Millennia ago, English speakers saw trustworthiness in the straight-up quality of trees.

the counterexpectational ass floated beyond anatomical plausibility as far back as 1919, when someone was documented as getting angry when a “silly ass barber shaved my neck.” All manner of -ass usages pop up well before 1950: an accent criticized as having “lousy broad-ass As,” and familiar-sounding locutions such as green-ass (corporals), poor-ass (southerners), and broke-ass (a waiter). In all these cases, the point is that the quality in question draws attention.

The joyous meaning of merry was a beautiful demonstration of the element of chance in how words’ meanings move along. The earliest rendition we can get a sense of for merry is that on the Ukrainian steppes several thousand years ago, in Proto-Indo-European, it was mregh. In Greece, this word for “short” morphed not into merriment but into the word for upper arm, brakhion. The sounds in mregh and brakh match better than it looks on paper: for one thing, both m and b are produced by putting your lips together, and so it’s easy for one to change into the other. As to meaning, it was a matter of implications, this time in one of the things the word was applied to rather than the word itself. The upper arm is shorter than the lower, and hence one might start referring to the upper arm as the “shorter,” and the rest was history. Calling your upper arm your “shorter” is not appreciably odder than calling cutoff pants shorts, after all. The process never stops. It seems that in Latin this brakh ended up, among other places, in a pastry, namely, one resembling folded arms, called a brachitella. Old High German picked that up as brezitella; by Middle High German people were saying brezel. Today, brezel is pretzel—from that same word that meant short and now connotes joyousness in English. In France, that brach root drifted into a word referring to shoulder straps or, by extension, a child’s little chemise undershirt. Women can wear chemises, too, but garments, like words, have a way of changing over the centuries, and after a while the brassière had evolved into a more specific anatomical dedication than a chemise’s. The modern word bra, then, is what happens when a word for “short” drifts step by step into new realms. Merry, pretzel, and bra are, in a sense, all the same word—yet contests could be held challenging people to even use all three in a sentence (or at least one that made any sense).

In the same way, we must expect that designations for various groups will turn over regularly: the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has perfectly titled this “the euphemism treadmill.” Long ago, crippled was thought a humane way to describe a person—it had the ring, roughly, that hindered would today. However, once it became associated with the kind of ridicule tragically common among members of our species, handicapped was thought to be a kinder term—less loaded, it sounded like a title rather than a slur. But while words change, people often don’t—naturally, after a while, handicapped seemed as smudged by realities as crippled had. Hence: disabled, which is now getting old, as in having taken on many of the same negative associations as crippled and handicapped. Of late, some prefer differently abled, which is fine in itself. Yet all should know that in roughly a generation’s time, even that term will carry the very associations it is designed to rise above, just as special needs now does. Note the effort now required to imagine how objective and inclusive even special needs was fashioned to be.

Endings, as a rule, start as words; becoming an ending happens only later, amid a kind of extended obsolescence. Even grammar in the form of words, such as the, a, etc., starts as regular words: the started as that, a started as one.

Ought once was, of all things, the past tense of owe. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, you can see it used in both the present and the past. Mistress Quickly tells Prince Hal that Falstaff “said this other day you ought him a thousand pound.” The prince asks Falstaff, “Sirrah! Do I owe you a thousand pound?” But when you owe, you’re under an obligation. The obligation is most readily thought to be financial or transactional, but one way the word might change is for the sense of obligation to become more general.

Can you hear what I hear?”—now sing to the same tune “Can’s a piece of graaammar…” As grammar, it presumably started as something else, and it did: cunnan in Old English meant “know.” Ben Jonson in The Magnetic Lady has Mistress Polish praise a deceased woman for the fact that “She could the Bible in the holy tongue.” We can’t help at first suspecting a typo—she could what? But could meant, all by itself, “knew.” There was even an old expression “to can by heart” alongside our familiar “know by heart.” Modern English is littered with remnants of that stage: other offshoots of cunnan are cunning and canny, all about having your wits about you. Plus, the past tense of cunnan was a word pronounced “coothe,” from which the couth in uncouth comes: the uncouth person is lacking in know-how, as in the kind that lends one social graces.

Grammaticalization is what linguists call it when a word becomes a piece of grammar.

A heavily used little grammar word has a way of becoming a toolshed. After a while, it actually is a syllable of other words, and can never stand alone—the birth of a prefix or suffix. A good example is the -ly that forms adverbs like slowly and gently. It started as the word like (pronounced “leek” back then). That’s easy to imagine because even today we can still say slow-like to mean “in a slow fashion.” Used that way constantly, however, like lost the accent it once had. You hit the like in slow-like fairly hard, but the -ly in slowly not so much. Mumbled, it lost its final consonant—“leek” became “lee.

The -ed that marks the past probably started as did: painted goes back, in other words, to paint-did. Considering how often you refer to things in the past, you could have known that did, when used that way, was eventually going to wear down to something like an -ed, inseparable from the verb itself.*

In the word overwhelm, you might wonder why there is no word whelm. In fact, there once was. You might wonder what it meant, and it meant … “to overwhelm.” Overwhelm began as redundant as irregardless; people were simply being forceful.

Namely, English spelling is hideous in large part because it represents what English was like before the Great Vowel Shift happened. That neatly demonstrates that vowels really are as liquid as I am presenting, and that what happens to them can neither be said to “ruin” the language nor be dismissed as bubblegum static, since no one wishes we could go back to talking the way Chaucer did. Here’s what I mean. Why would any sane person write mate and pronounce it “mayt”? We’re used to being taught that this is a “long” a and that the “silent” e is our clue to that. But clearly no one would design a system this way. If people in France and Spain and seemingly everywhere else on earth were writing the “ay” sound as e, what was the sense of instead bringing in an a and signaling that it, instead of e, is pronounced “ay,” and by putting a “silent” e at the end of the word? Why e? Or why use any sound at all as standing for absence instead of, duh, not writing anything there? While understanding that customs differ across the ages, we can be quite sure no writerly caste decided on such nonsense as a writing system. Sure, some eccentric medieval scribe could have arbitrarily decided on such a system, but why on earth would it have been accepted across England? When something makes that little sense, usually it was created amid conditions now past in which they did make sense. And indeed, time was that mate was actually pronounced the way one would expect: MAH-tay. The final -ay, unaccented, wore off over time just as the -ther in brother has worn off among men saluting each other such that guys of a certain demographic call each other “bruh” and one might call one’s sister “sis”—that’s easy. “Mahtay” became “maht.” But why don’t we just say “maht” today? Because likely the vowel moved, and this one did.

Words involving sounds and movement seem to have been especially susceptible to yielding blends: flush is apparently what happened when flash met gush, and if given a second to think about it, one can almost guess that twirling is twisting plus whirling.

When a verb becomes a noun in English, if it has two syllables, something happens very quietly, so quietly that I have never known anyone who noticed it by themselves. The accent shifts backward. It’s why someone who re-BELS is a REB-el, whose crimes you can re-CORD and thereby leave them on REC-ord for all to see. It’s why your tooth may be im-PACT-ed and have a negative IM-pact on your sense of well-being.

More to the point: the Backshift doesn’t happen only to single words; it happens to pairs of them, and knits them together in the process. An example is the difference between black board and blackboard. A black board is some board that someone painted black. A blackboard is the particular thing made of slate that hangs on a schoolroom wall. Black board is pronounced “black BOARD,” while the thing on the wall is a “BLACK-board,” and that’s no accident. The way we mark blackboard as “a thing,” different from just any old board that happens to be black, is with the Backshift. A blackboard is something very specific—“a thing,” as it were.

The word about is not the scion of some ancient Old English word like “ægboþe,” but a melding of at, by, and out.*

by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident. It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now.

Then, cybervision, cyberoptics, cybermarketing, cyberculture—all these words are flubs, technically. It started with cybernetics, from the Greek word kybernetes, for “steersman.” Cybernetics was composed, then, of cybern (not cyber) plus -etics. But most of us don’t know Greek, and cyber- seemed the more intuitive first element than cybern.

Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess. To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body”! The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like. Gelic over time shortened to just lic, which became like.

then–Vice President Joe Biden made national news by not saying but whispering, “This is a big fucking deal!” to President Barack Obama after the passage of the Affordable Care Act,

Where we have the space to carefully assemble and burnish our sentences, something like already or grocery store comes out; meanwhile, we spit out fuck when it’s time to run away from a lion.

meanwhile, with cock, in America the basic penile meaning has reigned on through the centuries, such that as late as 1965, Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, wrote a father yelling “Drop your cocks and grab your socks

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

darn

Hence when Donald Trump, during his first campaign for president, was revealed to have recounted of women that he had been given leave to “grab ’em by the pussy,” it was widely thought that his campaign was finished. This

The Misery Merchants tell us, for example, that most blacks are poor. In fact, only one in four black families is poor, and only one in five lives in an inner city. They tell us that there has been an "epidemic" of racist arson against black churches. In fact, there are seven times as many white churches burned every year as there were black churches burned during the seven years from 1990 to 1996. By spreading myths such as these, the Misery Merchants do not encourage success among their constituents; they only deepen the sense of misery. They are working 24/7 to make sure that their version of life, one of divisions and hatred, becomes your reality. John H. McWhorter, the black author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, observes that the perpetuation of these myths is doing more today than racism is to obstruct black achievement in this country. As McWhorter puts it, the America of the Misery Merchants "remains a racist purgatory in which all black effort is a Sisyphean affair that renders even just keeping one's head above water a victory".

Because of that ever-looming implication of futurity whenever one said going to, after a while going to started to actually mean the future rather than actual going.

Pseudoephedrine and ephedrine (found in over-the-counter cold and allergy medication) may inhibit lactation, as well.

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.

By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success,” linguist John McWhorter once claimed.

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

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.

Courage is allowing that your own view may be but one legitimate one among many, that there are no easy answers, and that being your own self is a more gracious existence than joining a herd.

we need to start reconsidering our sense of racial classifications. Namely, if we really believe that race is a fiction, we need to let racially indeterminate people make the case for that, by letting go of the idea that anyone with one peep of non-whiteness in them must “identify” as not white. We must ask why someone who doesn’t even appear black must “own” their blackness in the twenty-first century in the way Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor would have preferred them to. Who can’t see, on at least some level, the basic nonsensicality in this requirement—including that even what happened to George Floyd does not somehow justify it?

A key part of their tool kit is that they call those who disagree with them racists, or the more potent term of art of our moment, “white supremacists.” That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to confirm it, we are taught; once the charge is hurled, it’s like you’re caught in a giant squid’s tentacles.

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

we must not be on the alert for hotheads. The challenge of the Elect is precisely that they are no more pushy, arrogant, or otherwise socially unschooled than anyone else—they are just folks.

Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power,” you are to divide people into racial classes, in exactly the way that First and Second Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past fifty years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.

Yogi Berra quotes. It had described something as “too coincidental to be a coincidence.

highly recommend a safety video called,

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

The world's riffs on basic material that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 BC represent six thousand ways of being human

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.

She was ten years old. “That’s about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that’s not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives.” Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it.

Whenever you see someone reading a Japanese newspaper. You just see some lady just reading a Japanese newspaper. You need to put a crown on her head, you need to... to lick her feet, you need to make her some soup. She is doing something that is a human miracle.

I will be straddling a fence throughout. The linguist is taught to describe the way people talk without judgment. We are scientists

Indeed, out of all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, no less than 99 percent were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are also 62 percent of the words most used, such as - and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, from - and so on.

This Elect imperative has infected Unitarianism quite a bit as well, attracting comment from within that neatly illustrates the nature of the mindset. Reverend Richard Trudeau has watched the “zombie” phenomenon: These leaders—at the Unitarian Universalist Association, in our two seminaries, and in the UU Ministers’ Association—have become so committed and intransigent that I have started to think of the ideology that has captivated them as a mental virus with which they have become infected. By this analogy I do not mean to imply that they are mentally ill, of course, but only that they seem stuck in a rut (think Communism, 1917-1989). Victims of this mental virus can be recognized by their calls to “dismantle our white supremacy culture.” Reverend Todd Eklof, similarly alarmed, wrote a book, part of which critiqued this new Elect element in Unitarianism. The Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association censured and expelled him for it; he was also expelled from the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and barred from supervising ministerial interns, leaving Unitarian ministers nationwide with any skepticism of Elect ideology worried about speaking out.

As long as there have been humans, they have helped each other.