Hidden Brain - Episode 57: Slanguage

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

Young people have always used language in new and different ways, and it has pretty much always driven older people crazy. But the linguist John McWhorter says all the "likes" and LOLs are part of a natural – and inevitable –evolution of language. This week on Hidden Brain, why language can't "sit still."

If you have teenagers or work closely with young people, chances are you've had mystifying conversations like this one. LIT, it means that it's going to be exciting or fun and that you should be there. Like that party is going to be lit. My producer Maggie Penman recently went on a slang-finding mission in Washington DC. She ended up talking to a group of college students from American University. Yeah, Tert is another one.

Like, but like, I don't know what's Tert. Like, Tert, it's one of those words that you just can't really define. You just have to use it in the context. Tert, it's gonna be lit. Tert is used to describe lit. Yeah. So fun. It'll be lit at 11 p.m. and it'll be turned at 1 a.m. and then it'll be

ratchet at 2 a.m. Ratchet? Ratchet. Yeah, ratchet's like, oh my gosh, everybody's sloppy. This isn't fun anymore. This is just ratchet. Young people have always used language

in new and different ways. And it is pretty much always driven older people. Crazy. Onsleek is usually used in relation to somebody's eyebrows. Yeah, why? Why? Why? Because eyebrows are a big trend right now. If you do great eyebrows, you're like pretty. So that's like the new thing to do. And usually it's an in it came from Instagram. Whenever somebody like I just saw it like five minutes ago on somebody's Instagram,

they had great eyebrows. They had obviously just penciled them in. And and all the comments were like um gee those eyebrows are on fleeeeg Extra ease. Oh like 12 ease at least more the ease the better All those likes and literal ease and extra ease might sometimes great on your nerves But my guess John McQuarter says the problem might be with you, not them. Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. John McQuadar is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He's also the author of a new book, Words on the Move, Why English, Won't, and Can't Sit Still, Like, Literally. So this is like literally hidden brain,

and I'm Shankar Vedantam. This week's episode is going to be lit, it's going to be turned, and it's going to be on fleek. We hope it's not going to be ratchet. We hope it's not going to be ratchet. John McWater, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you. Many of us have dictionaries at home or at work, John, and you say that dictionaries in some ways paint an unrealistic portrait of a language. They give us a sense that the meanings of words are fixed when in fact they're not. Yeah, dictionaries are wonderful things, but they create an illusion that there's such thing as a language that stands still. When really, it's the nature of human language to change. Each generation hears things and interprets things slightly differently from the previous one. And I mean, just in terms of even sounds changing in the way that you put words together

changing bit by bit. And there's never been a language that didn't do that. I love this analogy you have in the book where you mention how, you know, thinking that a word has only one meaning is like looking at a snapshot taken at one point in a person's life and saying, this photograph represents the entirety of what this person looks like. Exactly. It's as if you saw a person, I'm not going to say it for, because then the person is growing up, and if I use that analogy, then it seems like I'm saying that language grows up, or it moves towards something,

or it develops. Imagine you meet somebody, they're 39, and you take their picture picture and then 10 years later when they're 49 you say, well that picture of you at 39 is what you really are and whatever has happened to you since then is some sort of disaster, something that shouldn't have happened. How come you aren't exactly the way you were 10 years ago? That's the way words are too. But it's so hard to feel that.

Partly because our brains are on writing, as I say, in the book. We can't help as literate people thinking that the real language is something that sits still with letters written all nice and pretty on a page that can exist for hundreds of years. But that's not what language has ever been. Only a couple hundred languages.

If you want to be conservative about it, a hundred languages are written in any real way. And then there are 6,800 others. Language is something that's spoken, and spoken language, especially always keeps changing. It's inherent. One of the points you make in the book, of course, is that the evolution of words in their meanings is what gives us this flowering of hundreds or thousands of languages, is that the evolution of words in their meanings is what gives us this flowering of hundreds or thousands of languages, mistakes and errors, are what turned Latin into French. Yes, that's exactly true. What we think of today as a word undergoing some odd development

or people using some new construction is exactly how Latin turned into French. It's exactly how old English turned into modern English. And I don't think any of us are thinking that it's a shame that we're not using the language of Bayo Wolf. So I think that nobody would say that they don't think language should change. But what most people mean is that there'll be slang, that there'll be new words for new things, and that some of those words will probably come from other languages.

But I don't think that it's always clear to us that language has to change in that things are going to come in, that we're going to hear as intrusions or as irritating or as mistakes. Despite the fact that that's how you get from, say, old person to modern person, and nobody wishes that we hadn't developed our modern languages today from the ancient versions. I want to talk in the second half of our conversation about why the meanings of words change but I want to start by talking about how they change. Let's start with the word literally. It turns out as you point out that in common usage literally literally means the

opposite of literally. The second button literally makes our breaks the shirt. Look at it. It's too high. Dr. Harris, you are literally the meanest person I have ever met. In the first days, literally the first day, literally stupid, literally making... We're literally unfiguratively, literally... Yeah, and it irritates people. But there's a different way of seeing, literally. If you take literally in what we can think of as it's earliest meaning,

the earliest meaning known to us is by the letter. And so somebody says something literally. Somebody takes a point literally. Well, if you have a word like that and if it's an intensifier of that kind, you can almost guess that literally is going to come to mean something more like just really. So what happens is that once literally comes to feel like it means really, people start using it in figurative constructions such as I with literally dying of thirst. Now many people hear that and they think,

well, that's no good because now literally can mean it's opposite. But we have plenty of words like that in English where it doesn't bother us at all. For example, if you take seeds and put them in the ground, that's one thing. But if you see the watermelon, nobody assumes that you're taking seeds and putting them in the watermelon, you're taking them out. Those are called contrainins and literally has become a new contrainim. It should be thought of as fun.

So you make the case that the meanings of words change all the time. It's a bold argument that we should in some ways welcome it when people do their own thing. But I have to say, I noticed that you had a book out a few years ago that seemed to say the opposite. And it was titled, Doing Our Own Thing, The Decredation of Language and Music, and why we should like care. Does the New John McQuater have a disagreement with the Old John McQuater?

That's a very rich question. And you know, it's given to the point where I've been in the business a while and there are Decisions I made back in my relicking 30s, which I wouldn't make now and doing our own thing was one where I allowed a Subtitle that I shouldn't have because the publisher thought that that would make it sell better and I think it did But that book wasn't really about the degradation of language and music. To this day, I hear sometimes that I've written somewhere that rap is terrible music and that it makes people pull their pants down and kill each other. And I think a lot of it is because of just the music in that subtitle, when actually I didn't say anything like that. Actually, a lot of people really hated that book.

That book disappointed a lot of people who thought they were going to get something like Lintrust's each shoots and leaves. I never wrote such a book and their people mad at me to this day for tricking them by allowing that subtitle. One of the things I found really interesting is that the evolution of words and language is constant. So, new words are as likely to evolve as old ones. So, LOL was an internet abbreviation, meaning laugh out loud or laughing out loud, but LOL and common

usage today doesn't necessarily mean historical laughter. No, because LOL was an expression, it was a piece of language, and so you knew that its meaning was going to change. The only question was in which way. And then ended up becoming less direct reflection of hearty laughter than an indication of the kind of almost subconscious laughter that we do in any kind of conversation that's meant as friendly. It can be almost counterintuitive to listen to how much giggling and laughing you do. In ordinary, actually rather plain exchanges with people, it's part of a general running indication that everything's okay between you and the other person, just like

one's expected to smile a little bit in most interactions. So, LOL starts out as meaning hardy, hardy, hard hard. But then, it becomes something more abstract. But the reason that it seems so elusive is because we don't really think about the quote-unquote meaning of things like, our conversation easing laughter. We actually also heard this idea from the students Maggie talked to in Washington. We make fun of people who use LOL and text messages, but I see that I'm using it more than ever, but more in a sassy way. So if my roommate were to say something long lines of, can I have the room from 10 to 12

and I'm trying to take a nap, I'll be like, LOL, no. So just to kind of ease it, like ease the hit of the rejection. As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang. He's a defender of language on the move, but I wanted to know if there were things that irritated even him. Oh yeah, I'm a human being, and so even though I insist that there is no scientific basis for rejecting some new word or some new meaning or some new construction. I certainly have my visceral biases. And so for example, can I get a hamburger? Can I get some chicken? I've always found that a very grating way to ask for something at a store.

It seems kind of elliptical. Would it be possible that I obtained? And then if you are going to be that elliptical, why use the casual word get? And it sounds a little bit abrupt and grabby like you're going to get something instead of being given. All of these are very subjective things. It's not necessarily may I please have, but may I have, I'll have, but not can I get a,

I find it just vulgar for reasons that as you can see, I can't even do what I would call defending. It's just how I feel. And we're all gonna have feelings like that. And when I listen to people having their peas, I don't think, stop it. But what I am thinking is, you should realize that even if you don't like it, there's nothing wrong with it in the long run. Because, for example, Jonathan

Swift didn't like it that people were saying, kissed instead of kiss it, and rebuked instead of rebuked. He didn't like that people were shortening the words. How does that sound now? We don't want to be like that. Alright, I think it might be time for me to confess one of my pet peeves that has to do with the word momentarily. Growing up, I understood this word to mean for a very short time, as in John McQuatter was momentarily surprised. But I find that people now usually use the word to mean very soon, as in we're going to board the plane momentarily. The dictionary says both uses are correct.

But you know John something nauseate me every time I hear the word used wrong. And after listening to you I realize I might have to finally give in. When we come back I'm going to ask you about why languages change and whether there are hidden rules at shape why some words are more likely to evolve than others. We'll be back momentarily. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. John, you've noted that humans have been using language for tens of thousands of years, but for most of that time, language was talking. Writing came along relatively recently. Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words are so often on the move?

Yes, Shankar, that's exactly it. Language, as it evolved, was just talking to an extent that can be very hard for we literate people to imagine. There was no way of transcribing an approximation of what people said and nobody would have thought of doing it. Language was talk. When language was like that, of course, it changed a lot. Fast, because once you said it, it was gone, and if people heard the sounds a little differently, and produced them a little differently, if there were new meanings of words very quickly, whatever the original meaning was, wouldn't be remembered. There was no such thing as looking up what it originally meant. And so language changed, just like the clouds in the sky,

but then you start writing things down down and you're in a whole new land. Because once things are sitting there written on that piece of paper, there's that illusion. And it really is an illusion that what language is is something that sits still. There's a way of speaking right. And the way you speak right is not by speaking the way the people around you in your life speak, but by speaking the way the language is, as it sits there all nice and pretty on that piece of paper where its reality exists. Would it be possible to use what we have learned about how words and languages evolve to potentially write what a dictionary might look like in 50 years or 100 years?

You could have fun doing such a thing. The fact is that language change can always go in one of many directions as a chance element to it. So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. Endings are going to tend to drop off. So if you took a bunch of those tendencies, you could make up, say, the English of 50 years from now. But some of the things would just be complete chance. You would never know, for example, that,

give you an example I've actually been thinking about. Women under about 30 in the United States, when they're excited or they're trying to underline a point, putting up at the end of things. And so somebody will say, well, who was it who you thought was going to give you this present? You were! And I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that.

I know was there, or something along the lines of, babe! And as odd as that sounds, I can guarantee you if you watch any TV show with women under a certain age, or if you just go out on an American street and listen, you'll find that that's a new kind of exclamatory particle. That is the most random thing, and I would really guess that in a few decades, men will be doing it too, those sorts of things tend to start with women. You couldn't have predicted this. I know, move! You can't know, but you can certainly know that if we could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd.

Something new will have started by then. Just like if we listen to people in 1971, they sound odd in that they don't say like, as much as we do. That hasn't started then. Imagine how we would sound to them if they could hear us. Well, if you're so upset about it, maybe you can think of a way to help her. Right.

You know, lots of people blow off steam about something they think is wrong, but very few people are willing to get involved and do something about it. I'm willing to get involved. So all this raises a really interesting question. You know, we spend years teaching children about how to use language correctly.

As someone who works in media, I often find that people who can write well are often people who know how to think well. So I often equate clarity of writing with clarity of thought. How do you balance the imperative of teaching correct usage, which I think is probably important, with the reality that this edifice that you're teaching is constantly crumbling. It's a matter of fashion, pure and simple. People do need to be taught what the socially acceptable forms are. But what we should teach is not that the good way is logical and the way that you're comfortable doing it is illogical. It should just be, here is the natural way. Then there's some things that you're supposed to do in public because that's the way it is, whether it's fair or not.

You can even teach people to have a little bit of fun with the artifice, but it's exactly like, it was maybe about 20 years ago, that somebody, a girlfriend I had told me that, if I wore pants that had little vertical pleats up near the waist, then I was conveying that I was kind of past it. That was somehow a dad's fashion and that I should start wearing flat fronted pants. That is utterly arbitrary that those little slits in American society look elderly.

But for various chance reasons, that's what those slits came to mean. So I started wearing flat fronted pants. That is exactly why you should say fewer books instead of less books in some situations. And yes, Billy and I went to the store rather than the perfectly natural Billy and me went to the store. Sometimes you just have to suck it up.

But I think that we should learn not to listen to people using natural language as committing errors, because there's no such thing as making a mistake in your language if a critical mass of other people speaking your language are doing the same thing. You make the case that concerns over the misuse of language might actually be one of the last places where people can publicly express prejudice and class differences. And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused, they often feel angry about it. And you think this anger is actually telling.

Yeah, I really do. I think that the tone that many people use when they're complaining that somebody says, Billy and me went to the store, is a little bit in commensurate with the significance of the issue. And I can't help surmising that part of it is that the educated American has been taught and often well that you're not supposed to look down on people because of gender, because of race, because of ability.

But might we allow that there's probably a part of all human beings that wants to look down on somebody else? What a cynical thing to say, but that doesn't mean that it might not be true. And if that is true, then the educated person can look down on people who say, Billy and me went to the store or who are using literally quote unquote wrong and condemn them in the kinds of terms that once were ordinary for condemning black people

or women or what have you. So I just think that it's something we need to check ourselves for. It might irritate you slightly to hear somebody say something like I need less books instead of fewer books, but does a person who says that really deserve the kind of sneering condemnation that you often see? Something's off. And I think it's because there's a lowly or part of our nature that grammar allows us to vent in the absence of other ways to do it that have not been available for some decades for a lot of us. One of the ultimate messages I

took from your work is that, you know, we can choose to have languages that are alive or languages that are dead and dead languages never change. And some of us might prefer those but if you prefer life the unpredictability of life then living languages in many ways are much more fun. Language is a parade and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. If the language stayed the way it was it would be like a pressed flower in a book or as I say, I think it would be like some inflatable doll rather than a person. I think that it's better to think of language as a parade, that either you're watching or

frankly, that you're in, especially because the people are never going to stand still. It's never happened, it's never going to. And if you can enjoy it as a parade, instead of wondering why people keep walking instead of just sitting on chairs and blowing on their tubas and not moving, then you have more fun. I want everybody to have the fun I'm having.

John McQuatter, thank you so much for joining me on Hidden Brain today. Thank you for having me, Sunker. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Maggie Penman. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Renee Clour, and our supervising producer Tara Boyle. This week we also want to welcome two new people to our team, our new producer, Raina Cohen, and our spring intern Chloe Connelly. We're excited to have them on board.

Our Ranzang hero this week is Casey Herman. Casey's a producer on how I built this and the Ted Radio Hour. In a former life, he walked in IT, which is something he never should have told his colleagues. We now bombard him with computer questions. Casey always has a friendly ear if he want to run an idea by someone smart. Casey, thanks for all the help. For more hidden brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and listen for my stories on your local public radio station.

If you liked this episode, please tell one friend who doesn't know about hidden brain about our show, and tell us on social media whom you've tapped. We're always looking for new people to find the show. We have another request for you. Have you ever considered making a dramatic change in the way you consume the news? Many people say they've changed how and how much they listen to the news after the 2016 presidential election. If you've ever made a big change in your news habits, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you've changed and how it's affected you. We might feature your story in an upcoming episode that looks at whether there are healthy and unhealthy ways to consume the news. Call and leave us

a message at 661-772-7246. That 661-778-brain. I'm Shankar Vedanthan and this is NPR. I'm going to some early, so I hear everything. This is a new up and coming one, so be ready. LMK is something people used to say in text. Yeah, let me know. But now everybody goes, she was really wearing that, let me know. But now everybody goes, is she really wearing that? Let me know.

Or like, LMK. Whoa. Yeah.