A Digression on Language by a Hobbyist

In the late 1970’s, while working as a temporary sign language interpreter in a classroom for the deaf, Susan Schaller noticed a student standing aloof by the doorway, arms wrapped around himself like a straight-jacket. She tried to engage the man, signing “Hi, I’m Susan,” which he promptly responded back to by signing, “Hi, I’m Susan.” She signed, “No, I’m Susan.” He replied, “No, I’m Susan.”

After asking around, Schaller discovered that this student, whom for the purposes of anonymity she nicknamed Ildefonso, had been dropped off to the class weekly by his uncle. He was 27, and had been born deaf into a hearing family. Still, he had no aptitude for sign language beyond simple imitation. She would sign “this is a table” and he would sign back “this is a table.” There was no communication. According to Schaller, Ildefonso was so isolated that he didn’t even realize he was deaf. He didn’t realize there was such a thing as sound.

She spent weeks attempting to develop Ildefonso’s capacity for communication, but to no avail. She would sit across the table from him and point to objects, then sign the word for that object. He would only replicate the sign. The major breakthrough came out of frustration. “I’m going to ignore him” she told herself. And so, as he stood off by the side, she would sit at a table and show a picture of a cat. She would mime petting the cat, and then she would sign the word cat. Then she would stand up, walk over to the empty chair and sit down, and pretend to get it. “Ahhh.” Over the course of days and days, she performed this exercise while Ildefonso stood there, often looking bored. Then it happened. In Schaller’s own words:

He looks around the room as though he had just landed from Mars and it was the first time he ever saw anything. Something was about to happen. He slaps his hands on the table — Oh! Everything has a name! — And he looks at me in this demanding way and I sign “table.” And he points to the door and I sign “door.” And he points to the clock and he points to me, and I sign “Susan.” And then he started crying. He just collapsed and started crying.

This is such a moving moment because it depicts the irruption of language, something that we are born into, and most if not all of us take for granted. Things have labels and we call these labels “words.” They are not physical objects out in the world. They are not personal, in the sense that we do not own a language by definition. Language is constructed and shared. Yet, these sets of words are also deeply personal because they are used to comprehend and express oneself.

Years later when Susan Schaller talked to Ildefonso, he was very cursory about what it was like to be languageless. All he could say was that it was a dark time in his life. Learning words was like a light coming on. Otherwise, he couldn’t remember. Helen Keller gives a more personalized account in her essay, “The Day Language Came into My Life.” Here she is describing the moment that she discovered there were words:

Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me…The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free…Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

Language and Thought

The extent to which language effects thought is a controversial one in contemporary linguistics. In the 60’s and 70’s, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida proclaimed that “language constituted thought.” Put another way, we may have sensations, but those sensations stay just what they are—sensations, until we have the stream of words running through our head that transforms those sensations into consciousness. Furthermore, to them language was deferential, and all words only have meaning based on other conceptually linked words (to use the Claude Levi-Strauss example: How can we have a “raw” carrot, say, if we don’t have the concept of a “cooked” one? How can we have the concept of “carrot” without the concept of “Potato” or “Broccoli? How can we have the concept of “vegetable” without the concept of “Fruit” or “Meat?” So on and so on ad infinitum). No individual word has self-contained meaning. Since our consciousness is composed of words, and all these words have inherently unstable meanings that are only tangentially connected to the outside world, our view of the world is entirely mediated by language. And, of course words shift meanings. Language is always in development. Therefore our thinking is always developing.

I have to admit to being tremendously taken in by this line of thinking in college. Structuralist and Post-Structuralist philosophy is incredibly fun to tinker around with. Unfortunately, not many linguists today take it seriously. For one thing, very few of its claims can be tested empirically.

Another theory, less all-encompassing, that arose in the early 20th century and remained big until the 1990’s, was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This theory proposed that, although language wasn’t the entirety of thought, it did direct it in very powerful ways. Every language has different eccentricities that colors its speakers view of the world. Sapir-Whorfism survives today in a very attenuated form, through Linguists such as Lera Boroditski and George Lakoff. The latter argues in his book “Metaphors We Live By” that the particular set of metaphors that a culture uses helps define the way they think. One example would be the metaphor of Argument is War. To quote Lakoff:

This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

ARGUMENT IS WAR

'-Your claims are indefensible

-He attacked every weak point in my argument

-His criticisms were right on target

-I demolished his argument

-I’ve never won an argument with him

-You disagree? Okay, shoot

-If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out

-He shot down all of my arguments

He goes on to imagine a culture that doesn’t use this particular metaphor in their everyday language. Maybe they talk about argument in terms of performance and what is aesthetically pleasing. Wouldn’t that culture’s worldview be different from ours?

Lakoff’s examples are likewise fun to play around with. Time is Money (“How do you spend your time these days?”), Consciousness is Up, Unconscious is Down (“I woke up at 7, after having fell asleep at 1.”), More is Up, Less is Down ( “My income has gone through the roof, even after the stock market dropped”). Everyday we speak hundreds of metaphors that are so ingrained in us that we don’t even recognize them as metaphors. And of course, according to Lakoff, these systems of metaphor are going to shape our thinking. We think of the future as up ahead, something to look forward to, and the past as behind us. Imagine a culture that speaks about future as behind us (since we can’t see it) and the past in front of us (since we can see it). Those are very different ways of thinking.

To other linguists, this connection of language to thought is extremely exaggerated. John McWhorter, in his book “The Language Hoax,” argues that often times adherents to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis misunderstand different cultural approaches that really amount to the same result. Suppose a culture doesn’t have words for numbers above 2 (Linguist Daniel Everett describes such a culture, the Piraha, in his book Language: The Cultural Tool) Does that mean they are incapable of counting above two? In a way. For numbers slightly larger than two, like 4 or 8, they can always say “two 2’s,” or “two sets of two 2s.” But they cannot says something like 116 apples. McWhorter argues that this is more a function of their living conditions. He says, “Piraha lacks numbers for a reason: an isolated hunter-gather culture has no need for a word for 116, or to do long division, or to speculate on the nature of zero.” Ultimately, the living circumstances influence their thought, rather than the language itself.

I’m not a linguist, so I don’t pretend to have an opinion on either side. How much does language have to do with consciousness or thought is beyond me. And even here I’ve only given you a very imperfect summary of a spattering of ideas.

Branded on the Tongue

One thing that can be said about the language a person uses is that it does impart an impression on those around them (I use “them” deliberately; the English language does not have a proper ungendered way of referring to a hypothetical individual whose sex is undetermined). George Orwell once said of the British working class that they were “branded on the tongue.” We all know what he means by the phrase, and can cite specific examples. We may hear a thick southern accent, or someone say “Axe you a question” instead of “ask,” or more subtly, someone use the word “irregardless,” and we instantly pass down a verdict on that individual. This snap judgement gets shakier and shakier, however, the more you pry into it, and you begin to realize how much your own way of speaking is a product of these linguistic deviations.

Take “irregardless,” which even as I type it now, has a bold, squiggly red line beneath it. “Regardless” is the word that the person is searching for. Adding the prefix “irre,” some would argue, is at best superfluous, and at worst conveys the opposite meaning, “regardful.” Yet, no one would bat an eye if I said “Work has been overwhelming lately.” We know what “overwhelm” means. But what is the “whelm” that’s being over’ed? Well, if you look back to the 1800’s you will find in the dictionary that “whelm” meant….well, essentially, to overwhelm. Language works sometimes like tectonic plates. Words collide, or get ripped apart. You can bet that academics in the 1900's thought the same as we do now of the yokels adding the redundant prefix to “whelm.” They lost that argument, and today we don’t think twice about the overwhelming consensus on it.

Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more the substitution of “overexaggerate” in place of the simple “exaggerate.” I used to joke that the only way you can “overexaggerate” is if someone told you to exaggerate just a little, and you went way over that amount, otherwise “exaggerate” will do. But “exaggerate” is only going to the same process that “regardless” is, and that “whelm” did.

Why does this happen? I think the reason for it is probably overdetermined (“over” and “determined” were first coupled together, as near as I can find, in 1917). My completely unacademic guess is trifold. One reason is that words undergo a sort of inflation. Just like if you print too many bills, if a word is used to often its currency gets weak. It doesn’t pack the same punch it once did. So over time people unconsciously add an enhancer to it. The second reason, is that it probably started as a malaprop. Malaprops typically start with the same letter and contain roughly the same amount of syllables. It’s possible that people began a sentence with another word buried deep down in their subconscious, like “overestimate,” but since that was not ready at hand in the moment, “overexaggerate” is what resulted. Same with “irregardless.” It could be that the word they were originally looking for was “irrespective.” These mistakes either occurred repeatedly amongst many different people because of the language landscape at the time, or they just caught on like a meme. The third reason is rhythm. We don’t realize that a lot of what we say is based on flow. The rhythm of English is something approximating iambic pentameter. If the words we are choosing in the moment don’t fit that rhythm, then irregardless of necessity, we will inject other words or syllables to make it sound right. Think of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream Speech." Would it really have sounded as impactful if he said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise and live out the true meaning of its creed?” No, it needed to be “rise up.” Even though there is only one direction to “rise.”

It goes without saying that there may be many other causes for this phenomena, or that the particular reasons I listed are entirely wrong. This is only my uneducated hypothesis.

Now let’s look at “Axe.” Close your eyes and imagine your impression of the person saying, “let me axe you a question.” Now, imagine doing what many of you will be doing this Thursday on Thanksgiving, sitting around a table loaded with all sorts of culinary delights. Someone across the table asks, “can you pass the mashed potatoes, please?” If that very same person was asking that question a thousand years ago, in early/middle English, the word wouldn’t have been “mashed.” It would have been “masked.” As in, I press down the potatoes and make a mask out of them. Letters get switched and slurred all the time. And if you think you don’t do it, you’re wrong. I always think of that scene from Annie Hall where Alvy Singer complains about someone supposedly being antisemitic. “He asked, ‘Jew eat yet?’ Not ‘did you eat yet?’ but ‘jew eat.’” The D has turned into a J. Alvy Singer wouldn’t have much to complain about now. When I hear people ask the very same question, often I just hear, “Jeet yet?” Obviously, there’s much more of a record today, so we know the “proper” pronunciation. Suppose this deviation was taking place before the printing press. We would all now think “Jeet?” was a proper, grammatical question. Letters are doing what they have always done; Rearranging themselves. What may be considered lower class currently, often times, will later win the day.

Finally, accents are the pathways to which language becomes what it is. The thick southern accent might be viewed among many in the north east as the dialect of a country bumpkin, but let’s play with this. Think of someone with that accent saying the word “too.” Do you hear it? It sounds like “ta-oo.” It shouldn’t surprise you by now to learn that this change in the sound of vowels is nothing novel. Try to apply that same pronunciation to the word “Moose.” “MaUSE.” Doesn’t it kind of sound like “mouse?” Well, before The Great Vowel Shift that took place between 1400 and 1600, that was how it was pronounced. Likewise, “mouse” was pronounced exactly like it is spelled: “MaOOS.” Over time, those two pronunciations switched. This is still happening, so what you think is the “correct” pronunciation will soon no longer be so. If you happen to be reading this where I am writing it, in Rochester, NY, you are in the center of the biggest vowel change taking place in the world, the Northern Cities vowel shift. In this vowel shift, someone would pronounce “hot pot” more like “Hat Pat.” And when one vowel changes, all the others do. In Rochester, Syracuse, Detroit, and Chicago, everyone wouldn’t blink if you said “My Kyet cot a Byet.”

Things change. The beauty of language is that is universalizes. The study of it breaks down class, and race, and education. The trans-Atlantic accent that was once required in academic circles and among newscasters, seems now like an affectation, a sad attempt to appeal to Anglophilia (In this clip, William F. Buckley accuses James Baldwin of trying to sound British while unknowingly doing the exact same thing. I guess it seemed unusual for a black man at the time to do this, but for a white person, no one noticed). Does anyone talk like that anymore? No, it was only a historical strand that died out.

New Developments

As the world becomes more technologically advanced, what will become of our language? In many ways, I think the mechanisms for change will stay the same. I remember almost getting whiplash from the eyeroll that I would involuntarily do whenever I was with someone and they excused themselves by saying, “BRB.” Even now it’s hard not to scoff. I mean, for fuck sake, you’re not even saving yourself the time that you would in text-speak—it’s the same amount of syllables. Or even more nauseating, when someone defines a moment by saying “Hashtag” out loud. But I check myself. Do I feel the same way when someone says “FUBAR,” or if someone says “End of discussion. Period.”? There will always be elements of language that don’t make sense or that seem annoying and attention-grabbing. An older one that I never got was, “Between a rock and a hard place.” Why is that still used? It sounds like someone gave up half-way into their metaphor. “Between a rock….and ummm, something else that is also hard.” That’s the other thing about language: it makes you second-guess your assumptions. You reevaluate yourself.

Language just happens. It makes as much sense to complain about the particulars as it does to complain that a species of animal isn’t the most sensical form of that animal. All one has to do is look at that species carefully, and attempt to understand its origins. Once you do, maybe things will feel a little more connected, and a light will turn on.

This article is hugely indebted to:

The Lexicon Valley Podcast, and, overall, the books of John McWhorter

The History of English Podcast

The Yale Course on Literary Theory

George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By

Susan Schaller’s A Man Without Words