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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