Much as I appreciate Columbia University professor turned New York Times columnist John McWhorter’s insights on culture war issues, he remains a linguist by profession. Years ago, he contended that ebonics, given the more formal title of African American Vernacular English, was a legitimate language.
As sexy as this issue was to a linguist, it was unpersuasive bordering on counterproductive to regular folk, including black folk, who still thought students, including black students, would do better learning boring, old standard English. The question wasn’t whether slang existed or people used it. Obviously, it did and they did. The question was whether that was sufficient for linguists to declare it “official,” turning street talk into the stuff of textbooks.
McWhorter has since used his soapbox at the Times to advance some chic new views.
It may seem from some of my recent newsletters — championing “they” as a singular pronoun and “me” as a subject pronoun — that there’s something about being a linguist that makes one strangely permissive about what language is supposed to be like.
After comparing it to sea creatures and Cantonese, both of which invariably suffice to persuade anyone already on board, he reaches his pitch.
English doesn’t have as much as Cantonese by way of particles like this. But think about what the “be” in “Don’t be telling me you can’t make it” means — that same skeptical note. Similar is “go and” if we say, for example, “Now he’s going to go and shut it all down.” It conveys disapproval of what’s about to happen, even though by itself “go and” means no such thing (nor does “be”). In terms of marking the passive, the way we’re taught is with forms of “be”: “He was included.” But what about the one with “get”? “He got hurt,” “He got laid off,” “He got hit.” English has a neutral passive — and a special passive that you use for something negative or unexpected. Note how saying, “In the battle he was hurt” sounds more clinical and less real than saying that “he got hurt,” because “be” elides that getting hurt was something bad that came as a surprise.
Conjugating the verb “be” is too much effort?? Is that all you got?
Black English has even more such constructions, using the otherwise neutral verb “come”: “He come saying nobody knew until today” implies that you’re not happy with him. Black English even has a future perfect of disapproval: “I’ll be done left if she tries getting here late again.”
Anything else, or are we done?
Then there are the things that strike people as mistakes, where a linguist just sees the language moving along. Most of what distinguishes the language of “Beowulf” or “The Canterbury Tales” from the English we know is what started as “mistakes.” One example these days, which people often write me about, is “versus” becoming a verb. Kids, especially, hear it as “verses” and for years now have been saying things like “We versed them in baseball last year.”
Groovy as “Beowulf” may be, if you have to go back to Chaucer to find an example, you’re trying too hard.
What occurs to me is that McWhorter’s valiant effort to rationalize why changes that interest him, that he finds legitimate, are very much a matter of a linguist’s concern, much like the height of hemlines holds extreme fascination for a fashion designer. If there is a clothing design that serves its purpose well, and is aesthetically acceptable to most people, then why change it? We can buy clothing, wear it until it’s threadbare and then buy more of the same.
The notion of fashion, hemlines going up this year and down the next, neckties getting wider or skinnier, “hot” new colors, is absurd. The only possible purpose served is to relieve us from tedium, but we all understand that the bigger reason is to get us to throw away, or give away, perfectly fine clothing and go out and buy newer clothing so we can look good, or at least not look horribly out of fashion.
But when it comes to clothing, no one threatens us that if we don’t buy wingtips instead of loafers, we will lose our jobs, be social pariahs and stand there helpless as our children starve.
Words have become the new hemlines. Use the “right” word, even one as despised as Latinx, and all who see you will know how fashionable you are. But where hemlines were a matter of choice, words have become a tool, a weapon, to be worn or else. As for McWhorter, whose views on culture have been mostly moderate and rational, he’s all on board when it comes to “reimagining” words that don’t morph organically as they have since Chaucer’s day but are “reinvented” by the elite woke to be rammed down the throats of the unfashionable groundlings.
There hasn’t been much for linguists to latch onto to make them relevant, even valuable, in their chosen niche to the broader society. They had no runway to send their models, skinny or plus size, down for the public to gaze upon judgmentally. Now, a linguist is so hip and relevant that he’s got a NYT platform to inform the great unwashed about why the plural “they” is the new miniskirt.
When I was a baby lawyer, I used to respond to the cocktail party question that the reason I defended “those people” was because I couldn’t design women’s dresses. I was such a flip smartass. But McWhorter has found a way to capitalize on his historically boring niche of scholarship, and with words morphing hourly as each new grievance of not being included demands that words and phrases grow ever longer and more meaningless, he’s become a valuable voice in the rationalization machine for why change demanded by the unduly passionate requires the rest of us to wear spats, sock garters and bowlers if we’re to be accepted in polite society. Or if we refuse, to be banished to the island of misfit words.
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I’m curious. The first article you linked to was not written by McWhorter, and he wasn’t referred to or cited in that article. So does he consider Ebonics a separate language or a dialect of English (since a language has an army and a dialect doesn’t, as in Scandinavian languages)? Because it seems to me that Ebonics or African American English Vernacular or whatever you wish to call it is a dialect.
Languages evolve and change all the time, which is why we would have great difficulty understanding Shakespeare if performed in the English of the early 17th Century. I seem to remember my Folgers editions from HS having a lot of footnotes explaining what the words meant then as opposed to now (the 1960s).
One example from my experience. Nowadays the word “homogenous” is used interchangeably and preferentially to “homogeneous” and it grates on my 71 year old ears because it was never used when I was growing up.
I agree that “Latinx” is a ridiculous construntion, which can’t even be pronounced in Spanish, and will probably disappear (one can always hope). I don’t know if all the examples you gave are natural evolution or artificial creations. Time will tell. The ridiculous and artificial ones will be consigned to that dustbin of history.
Language evolves, faster than people do I think.
I found your blog a couple of weeks ago. It is great.
Thank you
First, I attached the wrong link in the first paragraph, which I’ve now corrected. Even though inadvertent, I appreciate your point it out to me so that I could correct my error.
Second, language evolves organically. Inventing new inclusive words hourly isn’t evolution. Inventing new words and then demanding that people use them or else is revolution.
I agree with you about that
McWhorter is a classical descriptivist (as am I – it is the rebuttable default for linguists). He is actually terrible – terrible! – at describing linguistics to laypeople, even while critiquing other pop linguists for their supposed inability to do same. The progressive elites who are attempting to induce you to reverentially capitalize black and state your pronouns are prescriptivists. Since you reject those diktats, let me be the first to inform you that you are, in fact, also a descriptivist.
Also, if you think linguists have little to offer the present day, may I suggest trying to issue a voice command to, or even type on, your telephone?
I shall test your thesis: Siri, call home…
Nope. Nothing.
The major weakness of descriptive linguistics is that it makes it impossible to actually say anything about language, because all of your descriptions are occurring by intentional use of the language, suggestive of a prescribed meaning, that you purport to be describing. “Language changes” may seem like a descriptive statement, but it is also implicitly prescriptive in that it is raised as a moral/ethical/imperative /ought style of argument in response to whenever somebody objects to a language change like the “they” pronoun being singular. McWhorter himself can’t help but load qualitative judgments, i.e. prescriptions, about certain linguistic changes; for instance, he’s called the black vernacular refusal-to-conjugate-“be” a “linguistic tuneup”, the word “tuneup” suggesting the language is being repaired or improved.
The distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism is mostly an academic illusion. A pure descriptivist can’t argue with this, because then he’s falling back on prescriptions about what “descriptivism” and “prescriptivism” mean, and if he says “that’s not how people use those words”, then he’s prescribing the manner in which words should be imbued with meaning. “Ought” and “should” are impossible to avoid
It’s worth noting that I don’t think there’s such a thing as “prescriptive linguistics”. Insisting there’s a “right” way of saying something, other than whatever the public- or relevant segment of the public- sees as conventional is not, in fact, a branch of linguistics, and has nothing to do with the science of studying language.
If I could make an analogy, it’s like classifying one’s views about sexual morality as a form of “biology”. It isn’t biology. It’s a believe about what people should do out in the world, which biology has very little to say on.
I think people who believe strongly in prescribing “correct” and “incorrect” meanings pump themselves up by portraying it as “linguistics”. We’ve seen this in other areas as well (to choose another example involving biology, creationists sometimes insist they are just doing an alternative version of science and in some sort of “debate” with supporters of evolution). It’s a category error, and I think an important one.
There is an entire branch of thought that is dedicated to telling other people what they should or must do. And it’s an important one. But it has zero to do with linguistics, and your critique of McWhorter (that like any scientist, he is not immune from biases based on his moral intuitions) does not mean that what you believe in is on the same plane as what he is doing, anymore than the fact that, say, sex researchers often have pretty pro-sexual freedom views mean that a conservative who thinks everyone should be celibate is doing sex research.
Not the slightest clue what you’re trying to say. And your analogy is not at all helpful.
All of this linguistic jujitsu gives the chattering classes, the people who earn their living thru wordplay, something to write about. And they like it because it makes think they have contributed something important to society.
“Hemlines” – or what we wear – are actually a great example of something that gets capriciously policed by society and institutions. Early on we learn about mob reactions to wearing something dorky or nonconforming, we learn that there are superficial ceremonial requirements for “serious” contexts, for many these requirements extend to participation in school and work, and in the courtroom these norms can cost someone their freedom.
McWhorter is explicitly anti-w*ke. He’s actually staking out a position on two fronts here, between the reactionary traditionalists who think of the most recent norms as timeless and the authoritarian social engineers who want to be the new grammar evangelists.
Why must someone always bring up space aliens so as to fuck up a useful analogy within normal parameters? Yes, Pepe, there are always outliers, so let’s never have any useful discussion when we can dive down the rabbit hole of pointless extremes.
Hey I’m just saying that if invented pronouns are the hemlines of grammar, McWhorter can explain why people started wearing ties without telling us how wide they have to be.
Uh huh.
Yes, there were and remain norms of “appropriate” clothing, but that has nothing to do with the point that they needlessly change annually within the norm, thus giving designers something to do during the day and a way to make a living and, possibly, gain some degree of prominence for doing nothing useful.
FFS, focus Peepee.
I thought it was about McWhorter. Laying that on him is like blaming anthropologists for planking.
[Between us, McWhorter doesn’t actually have anything to do with hemlines per se. It’s an analogy.]
[TFW you speak metaphorically using their analogy and it cancels out and they take you literally.]
Cunning, indeed.
So this be all about going and bowing to a woman’s dress on a pole??
Something you can get into, right?
Dammit Admiral! Would you quit it with that hideous photo?
A few corrections. As Joe Clark points out linguists seek to describe language, so AAVE having internally consistant grammar and native speakers is enough to make it a language. Everyone’s feelings on the subject are irrelevant. I’m not sure what you think happens when a language is identified, but no one has ever suggested teaching AAVE to anyone. To Philip Pomerantz, linguists don’t find the difference between dialect and language particularly meaningful, but by most definitions AAVE is a dialect of English.
On the McWhorter’s collumn, it essentially doesn’t mention recently created woke terms. Honestly, as a linguist I’m pretty skeptical whether they will sucessfully enter the language. Past efforts, like the attempts to ban split infinitives (an effort to make English more like Latin), make the plural of octopus “octopodes” (to better fit the Greek root), or ban the singular “they” with indefinite antecedents have failed dramatically. They leave behind only bits of entertaining trivia and a few prescriptivist idiots who who try to follow rules that no one else recognizes.
Being ignorant of how actual living black people talk uptown and that there was a huge push for ebonics in schools does not make your “corrections” come off as particularly corrective. But then, it’s not as if anybody gives a shit what some random ‘nym who calls himself “Whorf” has to say anyway.
Except that none of the “Ebonics” proposals were about teaching AAVE in schools. They were about teaching standard American English using AAVE. It’s much easier to learn a language when someone explains the differences between it and your native language. This holds true for dialects and there’s a lot of evidence to prove it. There are several schools systems in other countries that do similar things with other languages and their dialectal varients quite successfully.
That’s twice now that I’ve had to fish your comments out of the spam folder because you’re not using a real email. Usually, I only do so once. I will not do so a third time. You’re not special and can comment like everyone else or not.