Language and Human Nature

Mark Halpern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351509824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Language and Human Nature" exposes a century's worth of flawed thinking about language, to exhibit some of the dangers it presents, and to suggest a path to recovery. It begins by examining the causes of changes in the English vocabulary. These sometimes take the form of new words, but more often that of new senses for old words. In the course of this examination, Halpern discusses a wide variety of verbal solecisms, vulgarisms, and infelicities generally. His objective is not to deplore such things, but to expose the reasons for their existence, the human traits that generate them.A large part of this book is devoted to contesting the claims of academic linguists to be the only experts in the study of language change. Language is too central to civilized life to be so deeply misunderstood without causing a multitude of troubles throughout our culture. We are currently experiencing such troubles, a number of which are examined here. The exposure of linguists' misunderstandings is not an end in itself, but a necessary first step in recovery from the confusion we are now enmeshed in.The picture of the relationship between words and thoughts that is part of the attempt to deal with language "scientifically" is partly responsible for dangerous cultural developments. The attempt by linguists to treat their subject scientifically makes them view meaning as an irritating complication to be ignored if possible. It turns them into formalists who try to understand language by studying its physical representations, with a resort to semantics only when unavoidable. With words practically stripped of their role as bearers of meaning, it becomes easy to see them as unimportant. Halpern's book is a serious critique of such oversimplified theorizing.

CHAPTER 1

The Question of Change in Language

We know, of course, that it is not the English language which does something when it changes. We know that this has something to do with the people who use it. But what?

– Rudi Keller²

The root of the confusion: why does language change?

The educated speaker of English today, especially one “fascinated by words,” is almost certain to hold the view that language is and must always be changing, and that change of any kind is a Good Thing. There may be particular changes he is not happy about, but he is not likely to try to oppose them; he is persuaded that resistence to lexical changes is both futile and something close to politically reactionary. And he will have gotten that idea, directly or indirectly, from the professional academic students of language called linguists. There are many schools of linguists, and they can be quite sharp in criticizing each other, but they are as one in holding and propagating a view of language change of which the layman’s version is a somewhat degraded copy. (By “language change” and similar expressions I will mean, unless otherwise stated, changes in the English vocabulary: newly coined or imported words, or old words in new senses.) Linguists indiscriminately accept the idea of change, seeing it as springing from “the genius of the language” expressing itself through the speech of the common people. They see resistance to any particular change as springing from ignorance and old-fogeyism, if not elitism and racism, and as in any case futile, since change will always prevail. But even while enthusiastically embracing change in their role as linguists, they are not always so welcoming of it in their private capacities; they often refuse to adopt in their own writings changes they have defended in that of others — more on this later. The standard response that one hears when any such change is questioned is some variant of Language is a living, growing thing, and all living things change. Dont interfere with life!

The dogma that language is a living, growing thing has been repeated so often that it has become virtually the one thing that everyone “knows” about the subject — which makes it especially unfortunate that it is false.³ This metaphor may once have served some useful purpose; today its effect is to stifle rational discussion. It is heard whenever Mr. A questions a usage of Mr. B’s: someone, usually Mr. C, will counter the criticism by reciting this one thing everyone knows — and with that remark, reason flies out the window. Do you, A, raise your eyebrows at B’s use of reticent to mean reluctant? think him ignorant for using disinterested to mean uninterested? groan because he speaks of running the gauntlet? “I, C, tell you in response that language is a living, growing thing; thus I refute pedantry — and carry the day.”

So enthralled are we by this cliché that it is almost painful — like massaging back to life a leg that’s fallen asleep — to force oneself to recognize that every word of it is false. Language is not living, not growing, and not a thing; it is a vast system of social habits and conventions, inherited from our forebears, and showing every sign of being an artifact rather than an organic growth. Certainly languages, or at least some aspects of them, exhibit some changes over time — but then, so do the Dow Jones Industrial Average, barometer readings, and the Oregon coastline, none of which we characterize as living or growing. The changes exhibited by our language in historical times make it plain that it changes only when it is changed by us, its users, and never of its own accord, since it has no accord. It is, in a word, inert — we cannot call it dead, primarily because it never lived, but also because we have, rather tellingly, reserved dead language for one whose native speakers are dead.

It is only the liveliness of its users that makes the attribution of life to inert language so nearly irresistible; languages seem to have many of the marks of living, growing things because they are bound up so closely with beings who are indeed alive and growing. And in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries the triumphs of linguistics, or at least that branch of it called phonology, seemed to lend support to the notion that languages possessed lives of their own, and were not simply reflections of human needs and desires. In sound changes, at least, they seemed to follow their own developmental laws, independent of our wishes and efforts, and much was built on that early promise. But that historical moment, which will be discussed later, has passed, and with it any excuse for succumbing to the Fallacy of Linguistic Autonomy.

A modern language changes when we change it, and the metaphor that makes it autonomous only obscures our real task, which is to consider just why and how we do so. Language has always changed for perfectly understandable human reasons, although until recently those reasons operated without serious examination and therefore with little control. But over the last few centuries, we humans have begun to take charge of our languages as we took charge of our food supply in going from plant gathering to agriculture, and as we will shortly be taking charge of our genetic makeup. And just as taking charge of our food supply and our genetic makeup requires that we become much more aware of how those matters developed before we consciously intervened, so taking charge of our language requires that we understand clearly how it has developed and changed so far. What follows is at least the beginning of an answer.

Six common ways in which we change language

By far the most common kind of change we make in our language today is an addition to its vocabulary, made for the excellent reason that a new creature has been observed in Eden, and Adam is called on to perform again his onomastic function: naming the beasts. There may be occasional objections to the particular token Adam chooses, but no one objects in principle to the coining of new words for new things. And apart from this unexceptionable and linguistically uninteresting kind of change, innovations in language are almost always the result of one of six human traits or motives: Simple Ignorance, Social Climbing, Semantic Inflation, Group Solidarity, Journalistic Convenience, or Effort Minimization.

Simple Ignorance is a mistaken but entirely forgivable reason for making a change in the language — at least I hope it is excusable, because I have been guilty of it, and fear that I may be guilty of it again. My personal errors may not have misled anyone else, but they illustrate one way in which errors arise, and how some errors of this kind go on to become accepted usage. For some years I thought there was a form of light called infrared (rhymes with impaired), because I had seen infra-red spelled without the hyphen, and failed to recognize it. For years I gave full value to the syllable -is- in names like Salisbury. I supposed for some time that internecine referred to something that happened between two parties of Necines — the Necines being a clan apparently more tense and peculiar even than the Oedipuses,⁴ ones so given to fighting among themselves that their name gives us the standard term for such intramural conflicts. And so on; the list of my errors is a long one. (I intrude my personal failings into this discussion because I would have no one think that Simple Ignorance is a bludgeon that I have created to beat others with.)

If Simple Ignorance is considered to subsume Temporary Confusion, it can been seen in a newspaper piece⁵ that claimed that when W. H. Auden visited Yale around 1973, Edward Mendelson (later his literary executor, then an undergraduate), served as his chaperone. The thought of Auden needing — and accepting — a chaperon (if Mr Mendelson filled that role, it should be so spelled) so bemused me that it took a few moments before I realized that the writer meant cicerone. Since then I’ve seen the same blunder elsewhere, and no wonder: two uncommon, Mediterranean-looking words, both referring to specialized kinds of escort, both starting with V and ending with ‘on[e]’ — like twins, they seem born to be confused with each other.⁶

Most of the time Simple Ignorance can be corrected without arousing hostility in the Simply Ignorant; if the correction is made tactfully, most of the S.I. will accept it without resentment, sometimes even gratefully. But sometimes the would-be benefactor is told that he is a pedant, a reactionary, or some other kind of villain for presuming to correct a free-born, native speaker of the language. And while he is no villain, it is true that he is sometimes a hero come too late.

It is clearly too late, for example, to correct the almost universal notion that ilk means type or class or kind or category, or that a cohort is a buddy, partner, sidekick or colleague. But if we give up on these points, it is not a triumph of the new and improved over the old and obsolete, nor even a replacement of the old by something just as good — it is simply loss, and a capitulation to ignorance. The new usage does not even offer the stimulation of novelty, because its users are not aware that it is new; we have all lost, and no one has won. Two penalties will have to be paid for this surrender: we will have lost good words for our own later use, and we will have lost yet another small connection to the literature of our language. Losing ilk, we will not be able to say “Campbell of that ilk” to convey that we are speaking not of just any Campbell, but of the Campbell, nor will readers fully understand some passages of Walter Scott’s; having lost cohort, we will be unable to picture what Byron expected us to when we read

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

Why, the thoroughly modern reader will wonder, was it such a big deal when the Assyrian — whoever he was — dropped in with a couple of his pals? And all we will get in return for the loss of either term in its older and distinctive sense is one more loose synonym for a notion already provided with several terms — not much of a testimonial to the worth of a living, growing language.

Even biblical phrases are subject to inadvertent change of meaning at the hands of those who are not familiar with the source; here, for example, a journalist quotes an authority on his subject without noting any problem:

Notes Lawrence Levine, an employment communications manager whose defenses against passive-aggressive employees haven’t been terribly successful: “Only the quick and the dead have avoided passive aggressives.”⁷

Mr Levine evidently meant that of the living, only the fleet of foot can hope to evade passive aggressives; what he has succeeded in saying, for those who have met the phrase “the quick and the dead” in its original context, is that everyone, living or dead, can do so, which would make the passive aggressives a hollow threat. In this case it is clear what the speaker meant despite what he said, but in many others the result will be ambiguity or — what is much worse — a wholly mistaken belief on the reader’s part that he understands what was said.

But to the linguist such losses are negligible (if he acknowledges them as losses at all). He sees them simply as necessary consequences of change, inevitable as well as a sign that the language is alive. When linguists deign to reply at all to protests about specific changes, they do so by treating them as if the matter were already decided, and the protestors were trying to undo the past and bring back the dead. This is Linguistic Triumphalism: it contents itself with pointing out that once a change is accepted by enough users of a language (where “enough” seems to mean “enough to satisfy linguists”), it becomes part of the language, and those who opposed it have lost — and then treating this tautology as if it were the whole story. What it leaves out is that if a change is not accepted by enough users (particularly writers and the most prestigious speakers), it does not become part of the language, and those who opposed it have won. And such rejection of change has occurred many times in the history of the language, probably far more often than the universal acceptance of a change.⁸

Changes in usage of the kind caused by Simple Ignorance do not occur instantaneously; they start off slowly, often in some remote (very lofty or very lowly) and marginal part of the cultural arena, and are quite vulnerable during their infancy and minority. During that period at least they are subject to criticism and defeat, and indeed the infant mortality rate among linguistic innovations is quite high, as is clear from a glance at yesterday’s slang and catchphrases and smart talk. Much of it is now incomprehensible, and many even of those examples that can still be understood strike today’s ear as quaint. Linguists are fond of producing lists of words that are now accepted parts of the language despite the efforts of “purists” to kill them; what they fail to do is acknowledge all the words that purists opposed, and have since passed into oblivion.⁹

“When is misuse not misuse?” asks one eminent linguist, Peter Trudgill (Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Lausanne) rhetorically, and answers, “When everybody does it.”¹⁰ Agreed — but what about when only a few are “doing it”? Is it futile, or in some sense improper, to oppose a usage that only a handful have so far adopted? If not, at what point does it become futile or improper? For example, is it too late to correct the error, noted earlier, of using reticent for reluctant? It is still new, far from universal, and thus not yet incorrigible. It popped up only in the last quarter of the 20th century. It is not limited to the uneducated — the first time I heard it, it was uttered by a computer-industry executive who had been a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley — but it is still far from widely accepted. This, I contend, is an error that one should be able to oppose without incurring the scorn or exasperation of linguists.

One form taken by Simple Ignorance is hypercorrectness, which turns a commendable desire to be correct into a new kind of error, that of obeying a rule where it has no application. It produces such locutions as “Mommy gave some ice-cream to Debby and I,” and “...he is a former All-Star whom the Knicks apparently feel can help them contend for a title.” Hypercorrectness can also spring from Social Climbing (on which see the next entry in this list) when speakers see certain hypercorrect locutions as the mark of superior people, but for the most part it results from misunderstood rules. The typical perpetrator of the hypercorrectness fault has been chided for using “me” when “I” is required, or “who” when “whom” is required, and has come away with the notion that “I” and “whom” are intrinsically better than their alternative forms. As a result he falls off the grammatical tightrope on the left rather than the right, unaware that it is just as far down to the ground on one side as the other.

Social Climbing (which includes simple Showing Off) is a less innocent but still forgivable cause of language change. Into this category fall all the usages that we adopt in the hope that they will cause others to think more highly of us: the fancy, half-understood word; the misspelled or mispronounced French and Latin tags that are supposed to make us sound worldly or learned; the misapplied scientific or technical term that is meant to suggest that we are adepts in one of the modern black arts like electronics or programming; the adoption by whites of the vocabulary and speech patterns of inner-city African Americans in the hope of being taken for street-smart dudes; the insider’s term that makes it clear that we are savvy, in the know, wised up, witting, clued in, or otherwise among the cognoscenti.

These variants of Social Climbing differ in the amount of damage they do. It probably costs the community nothing if some members, hoping to be taken for movie-industry dealmakers, talk of taking a meeting (or even a meet), or doing lunch, but there is potential danger when someone talks of making a quantum jump when he means a very large, s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• A Preface by Jacques Barzun
• Author’s Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Question of Change in Language
• Chapter 2: How Language is Studied Today
• Chapter 3: Linguistic Authority: Rules, Dictionaries, and Teaching
• Chapter 4: Descriptivist, Prescriptivist, and Linguistic Activist
• Chapter 5: The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Controversy–A Case Study
• Chapter 6: A People’s Linguistics
• Chapter 7: Restoring Rhetoric to Its Throne
• Chapter 8: Decadence and Diseases of Language
• Chapter 9: Plagiarism and Misquotation: the Use of Others’ Thoughts and Words
• Chapter 10: What is To Be Done?
• Appendix A: Linguistics as a Science
• Appendix B: Eskimo-Language Terms for Snow and Ice
• Appendix C: AI and the Golem project — the reverse-engineering twins
• Appendix D: Notes on Chomsky and the Chomskyan literature
• Appendix E: A Language of Mathematics? A Proof of Programs?
• Appendix F: The Principal Players Identified
• Appendix G: What is A ‘Foreign Term’?
• References
• Notes
• Index