Words on the Move by John McWhorter

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on September 6, 2016

John McWhorter is spot on when he says that people don’t like the fact that language changes. I’m one of them. We learn the meaning or pronunciation of a word, or rules of grammar, and we don’t want to concede that what we know to be “wrong” has suddenly become right, or at least acceptable. I grind my teeth when I hear someone using impact as a verb, but I have come to accept that people are going to do so whether I like it or not.

As irksome as the truth might be (“Novelty is unsettling,” the book tells us), McWhorter is right: language is mutable. A living language will inevitably acquire new words, change the meaning of old ones, and turn the rules of grammar upside down. I remind myself of that every time I hear someone complain about alleged faults in word usage or grammar (quite a few of those complaints are aired in nasty comments to Amazon reviews). If you think (as I do) that people frequently and persistently misuse the word “literally,” that’s because you have not (as I have not) accepted that the meaning of “literally” has changed. McWhorter tells us that we just need to deal with it. Sadly enough, he’s right.

As cranky as I can get about unsettling changes in the meaning of words, I fully support McWhorter’s mission, which is to make readers understand that the meaning of a word is determined by how people are using it right now, not by dictionary definitions. It takes dictionaries some time to catch up. Dictionaries like American Heritage, where panels of “experts” decide what a word means, strike me as trying to impose authoritarian order on the democratic, or possibly anarchic, evolution of language.

I totally make fun of the way younger people use the word totally, but language belongs to the young as much as it is the domain of stuffy old farts like me. McWhorter explains that totally now implies fellowship or shared sentiment, so “what looks like slackjawed devolution actually contains a degree of sophistication.” He also explains that words of acknowledgement, including totally, are among the most likely to change.

Sometimes changes in language are eminently sensible. Other than high school English teachers, who really cares if a writer splits an infinitive or ends a sentence with a preposition? Good writers have always known that some rules are made to be broken, at least when breaking them makes sentences easier to read. As McWhorter also recognizes, that doesn’t mean rules should not be taught (even rules that serve no real purpose), but the world doesn’t come to an end when a rule is so commonly broken that it dissolves into dust.

A chapter on grammar struck me as less interesting than other chapters, simply because indefinite articles and other words of grammar are less interesting than nouns and verbs. A chapter on pronunciation is a little too wonkish, but parts of that chapter are illuminating. Most readers are familiar with the vowel shift, but McWhortle explains how vowels are still shifting (something we might perceive as regional accents). Does any word have a proper pronunciation? Since the word will probably be pronounced differently a couple of hundred years from now, fretting about what’s “proper” seems pointless to people who are not social strivers or using pronunciation to signal their place in society.

More entertaining is a chapter that explains how new words come into existence. Some are obvious (camera + recorder = camcorder), others not so much (flash + gush = flush). It’s also possible to make new words by changing the accented syllable (e.g., the transition of “suspect” from verb to noun). The last chapter explains why younger people obsessively use the word like and why older people, anal tendencies notwithstanding, should resign themselves to the evolutionary nature of language.

McWhorter writes in a lively, amusing, energetic style, eschewing jargon or explaining it when he needs to discuss the finer points of linguistics. He introduces his personality into every chapter, making even dull material engaging. His wide-ranging discussion touches on Black English, emoticons, and a variety of other subjects. He explains the evolution of scores of words, many drawn from Shakespeare, and then explains why Shakespeare’s plays are so difficult for a modern reader to understand (at last, it’s okay to admit that you’re often baffled by Shakespeare’s meaning). Any fan of words, including stuffy curmudgeons, should find Words on the Move to be educational and amusing.

RECOMMENDED