Our changing language

One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming. They tell you a word is a thing, when it is actually something going on.

John McWhorter, Words on the Move

Time changes things. The color of your hair and the tautness of your skin. Clothing styles. Moral standards. Even rivers and mountain ranges. Yet one of the most difficult changes to accept is that relating to the language we speak everyday. Whatever our political preferences, we tend to be conservative when it comes to language.

Columbia Professor John McWhorter makes the case in Words on the Move (2016) that such change is inevitable, no matter how valiantly defenders of the language fight against it. Yet even those defenders of the language don’t want to go back to the English spoken by Chaucer. Rather they want to preserve the English they learned in school as children. Never mind that in the years since they have helped change the language by adopting teen slang in their youth, by using new words that came with new technology and by accepting cultural changes, such as using the pronoun they instead of he to refer to a person of either sex.

Language changes in a variety of ways. New words come into the language all the time, while others words drop out from lack of use. The meaning of words change. Pronunciation changes. Grammar changes. The people who make dictionaries will always have a job because their work, like that of a dish washer in a restaurant or a mortician, never ends.

McWhorter writes in an engaging, witty style, which is fortunate for him because much of what he says is bound to irritate some, if not most, readers. He is tolerant, for example, of those who use the word literally when they mean figuratively. Like other words that once represented truth, such as actually and really, literally now means something less than swear-on-the-Bible truth.

Phrases such as you know and and stuff, and even the word like, used by young people as a stand-in for the word said, are all acceptable to McWhorter. To him they are just natural, even sensible, changes in the way English is spoken. He argues that "casual speech full of likes is not, in truth, tentative or messy, but empathic and polite."

The way English is written changes, as well, but much more slowly. The fact that written language changes more slowly than spoken language explains, McWhorter says, why the spelling of English words seems so screwy. "Speech moved on; spelling stayed put," he writes. Often words are spelled the way they were once pronounced, not the way they are pronounced today.

If you are someone who still owns a dictionary in book form, it is out of date. Even if you just bought it new yesterday.