see here online at booktv.org. >> welcome to the manhattan library. my name is erica parker, i'm elaborate here at mid-manhattan. before we get started out of respect for the speaker and your fellow audience members i would like you to please silence all electronic devices at this time. thank you for joining us for all the talk with john mcwhorter on his book "words on the move: why english won't - and can't - sit still." so language shifts constantly. did you know the word clue derived from clue, a middle english word meaning follow the yarn. in passionat -- follow thread we through the labyrinth. it does not make sense. countless other words have changed this way taking on new meetings or new shades of meaning. in the age of means and texting, lol, dfw, et cetera, language continues to shift. but as john mcwhorter explains, this shouldn't scare us. submit expense of english language is evolving before our eyes, and why we should embrace the change, not fight it. john mcwhorter as an associate professor of english and comparative literature at columbia university. he is the author of more than 15 books including the language folks. he's currently writing his 20th book. please give a warm welcome to john mcwhorter. [applause] >> thanks everybody. i want to talk to you for not too long about a new way of hearing language. i think it's important because i think linguists have failed to explain the realities of how language change works. and what language really is. we are ultimate inpatient, we don't understand what everybody sees it differently than we do. but really there's a lot in common between languages and national history, the way biologists have taught us to see flora and fauna. you would never know it from the way language is taught in the school system. you would never know it from even taking just one but two linguistic classes that certain things are really not hit on. so i want to give you a new way of looking at language that will feel good, all of this makes it so you can walk down the street feeling better about what you hear and possibly feeling better about your own speech what it comes down to is this. language is inherently changeable. language changes. it's not that it might change. it always will change. it must change. if you ask somebody whether they think language has changed him out of the anybody would say no. but i think we can to think what language changes is, first of all, that you need new words for new things, like anybody would say that. you would assume a lot of those words probably are going to come from foreign languages, and that is something in my process is exciting. we all know that slang changes. language of change is much more profound than that, and so see if this works. there we go. there's what we know, and here's what you don't learn. we will always need new words for new things. that's true. but what we are not taught is that language changes as inevitably as cloud patterns change. the analogy is with looking up in the sky and sing the clouds today, if you look up tomorrow and saw the clouds in the same place, that would be utterly bizarre. it's the same thing with language change. it has to change the way cloud patterns have to change. clouds change by wind. language is change because every generation slightly misuse or reinterprets what the last generation said. that's never not happened and it always will. or words will come in from foreign languages, and that's true, but if he took a group of people and for some reason put them in a cave and somehow they could live in the cave with food and everything they needed, but they would indicate and there was no cultural change, no contact with anybody else, and people would somehow managed to reproduce and live in the cave for 2000 years. windows people can out of the cave they would be speaking a whole new language. not because anything new was invented, not because they admit anybody else. it wouldn't be just the slang. they wouldn't understand that people who had gone into the cave. that's because it's inherent to language that change. that's what language changes. or we know that slang and idioms will change, yeah, but it's hard to see a dictionary pick a dictionary is a wonderful thing, but a dictionary page is like a polaroid snapshot and that's really all it is. they can be a beautiful polaroid snapshot, but if you have a polaroid of somebody at 40 and then 10 years later you encounter that person and you showed them the picture of themselves at 40, you don't think the way they were at 40 a somehow the way they really are, any change that is happened since then is somehow wrong or peculiar. people change. languages are the same way. it changes in basically five ways. that's not true but i have fashioned it into five easy to remember ways. one of them is something that cannot i'm going to call creeping implications. words change by creeping implications but what i mean by that is that at any point in time, a word has different resonances surrounding it. there's the quote-unquote dictionary definition, and then there are other things that would make you think of. as time goes by what everybody thinks of the word meaning, moves into, including those residences. so after while the word meaning has changed and after a long while the word meaning is unrecognizable. that is something that happened to almost every word in any language. the words don't change like and/or in other words, like father and brother. those are the exceptions. that's just a boring little collection of 100 or 200 words. most words are always moving along. so, for example, silly first met blessed. audition first meant your hearing. it had nothing with doing the on stage are trying up or something. lewd first meant i learned. you can imagine how i learned might morph into meaning sexually improper but originally lewd meant on learned. mary first met short. gradually came to mean jolly because that which is short is often pleasant. it happened bit by bit. meet first meant all food. loaf was the food for bread. warped we not associate with health food stores, that was the word for vegetable. vegetable came in later. apple first met fruit. so, for example, let's say you are blessed and we imagine what that word means. if you are blessed, then there's reason to think that you are innocent. so edward the first means blessed my many generations later mean that you are innocent. so innocent is probably harmless and that was surrounding the word and the next thing he knew, a word that originally met blessed met harmless. that's fair enough. something is harmless it's probably transeventeen and so the word came to mean weak. you can see this happening century by center. one way is mentally. you might not be on the physically weak but you might be kind of slow or not very bright. so after while that word that meant blessed mint dim. one of the ways you might manifest it is if you're kind of goofy, gradually that meaning came in, such that blessed meant goofy. originally the word meant happy. and so a word that started out meaning happy h again blessed, anderson, harmless, weak, slow, became goofy. all of that was a cynical word, and this is the thing. that's normal. that's what were to do. almost every word in your mouth is doing that. we can't feel it within our lifetime that's how language change work. this has implications. it's not just silly is interesting or almost anywhere you are using and that kind of history. it gives you a sense of why shakespeare can be difficult to hear in real time if you haven't read it first. this is a controversial topic and i know many people say that with the shakespeare as just a matter of poetry or that it has to be performed really well on that it's better when the person has a british accent. all of us know that still, if all of those things are in place, shakespeare if you haven't read it, it's one thing to read it, but in real time if you haven't read it, it's tough. you get tired after about 20 minutes. somebody tells you you are not politically it's not only poetry. it's that words meanings change. a lot of words that we hear sound like english because they are but words don't mean what they mean to us because so much time has gone by. so, for example, he's defending himself against charges. why bastard? wherefore base? when my dimensions are as well compact. my mind as generous and my shape as to as honest maddens issue? my mind is generous. why generous? people are making fun of him and he's objecting that he is free with his goods. it's not impossible but it's odd. there's a little bump as your listening and he keeps going. he's not going to stop and explain. you can't act your way through it. then my mind is generous to we don't usually talk about a generous brain. that happens about three times the page, there goes the fatigue. generous when shakespeare wrote it meant noble. notice how all of a sudden it makes sense. he is as noble as anyone else. if you are noble, especially back then, part of being a noble involving magnanimous with your folks. as result after while generous came to mean magnanimous and needed a new word for noble, and it was actually noble. so that's why shakespeare is hard. this point bears pushing because i know how angry some people get at the idea that shakespeare might be, get ready for, changed. there is a growing movement especially over the past 20 years not to translate shakespeare, but to adjust shakespeare, especially when the words are such that we can no longer understand what he meant when hearing it life and have not read it. so, for example, mcbeth again, besides, this duncan has borne his faculties so meek. what does that mean? you can have time. so besides this, so clear in his great office, clear what? i'm not clear in my office. i'm sitting in a chair. nobody would say you are looking clear. that's odd but it's a play and he keeps going. his virtues will plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking off. taking all of? where is he going? we think of taking off as flying. what does it mean? but he keeps going. that's hard. you can read the footnotes but let's face it, we are busy. life is hard and after while especially after you have kids you can have time to read. so you are watching it live. suppose you change about to the things it needs. duncan have to board authority so meek, his faculties, authority are born. his authority so meek, not clear in this great office. we can't do what that means. so pure in his great office, the idea being that he keeps his hands clean, that his virtues will plead like angels against the deep damnation, not just taking off but h his knocking o. that's what it meant. it had a slaying flavor. so does knocking off for us. so the issue is that words and meanings change. what this means is there's no such thing as a community of speakers using a word wrong. we hear it that way. we think lately people using such and such to mean this, but is supposed to mean that. we understand its inherent to a word for its meaning to change. we understand that a word isn't something that is. it's something going on. that's the way language has always been. .. >> power of human conversation and we are not doing it in a tighty sort of way such as we do it once in paragraph and never do it again. it's something that we constantly do almost as someone might be cleaning themselves. donald trump, believe me is one of those markers. why does he say that? he wants to indicate his fact. there are many people who were upset, literally being misused because it's supposed to mean by the letter exactly and yet, people seem to be using in construction and people say i was literally dying of thirst and that's just wrong because it means that you're using something to mean its opposite, both the factual and then figuratively. that really gets on people's noses. it really doesn't have to, really. that's what it meant at a certain point. everybody who thought of it meaning only that is now very, very dead. they died not knowing something that you guys and women can all know that literally was never going to say meaning by the letter. no one ever stays still. one thing that words do intend to do is they become less intent that a word that meant by the better who is eventually start meaning something like really, that what was the way it was going to weaken, you just knew that was going to happen, once it means really, of course, people are going to use it to intensify their figurative expression because that's what we to when we speak. next thing you know is i was really dying of thirst and not mean it. you knew that was going to happen. now, often is said as my foot tangles in this wire that this use of literally is new. many ways while it would feel new. i don't know. he is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arriel. this is something who is writing in a much more formal era. so it's not, not new. people think that can't be. i actually see a teacher where somebody compliance about literally, figuratively i stand against it. you can run fast but then you can be fast asleep, you sit fast, stuck fast. it means both rapid and then the very opposite of rapid. has that ever bothered you. are you aware of it now? isn't that kind of neat. you can bolt the chair to the grounded and the world keeps spinning. if you seed a watermelon, chances are that you do not purchase seeds and put them into the watermelon before you eat it. if you're seeding a plot of land it would be counterproductive to take the seeds out of the land. that's three examples and i think there's seven up there up there, there's about 75 called contronyms. to the extent we have probably not known what a person meant. if a person was saying i was literally freeze to go death, what they are telling you is they didn't die and you weren't qon -- confused. contronym is fun. acknowledging their state of mind while outlining your own. that's some awful lot what we mean such as totally the way people below a certain anal uses totally these days. it doesn't mean in total fashion. we are totally going to get tickets for the taylor swift concert. that's not what it means. we are totally going to get tickets for the taylor swift concert, it means we both know that there are reasons why some people would say that we shouldn't get those tickets such as that maybe she's considered a little bit x, y or z or we are busy students or something like that, but we are going to get the tickets. if somebody says, he's totally going to call you, it's not he's going to call you in his completeness, it's he is going to call you even though some people are reason to believe that he's not. it's acknowledgment of standing condition of which all are aware. there's lots of acknowledging markers. this is all language. emily says in the knight's tale, yet of texas -- thy company, a very, very long time ago. so factuality and acknowledgment . the things that you can think of some sort of degradation of language which are really very sophisticated. for example, you might think that to pin add -- adjective. imagine a person looking out of the window and they see a squirrel, hey, i see a squirrel, more specific meaning, hey, that squirrel is gray rather than a black squirrel that i expect. so what you mean is the squirrel is gray. it means it was longer than you want expect anything to be. that's what it means. listen to the way people use that because they to all of the time. it's never profanity, it it's counterexpectational. i want to understand that i'm talking about language as we know it. lol, much ink has been spilled over laugh out loud being used in context -- texting. any number of accounts that lol, quote, unquote, doesn't mean anything. that's because one of the word, you can see the actual text exchange. i like you, i'm pretty sure everyone figures that out before you, lol. what does it mean. i don't know, just assume, why they are sprinkling that in there, you say. it won't cancel for a while, lol. it seems so unsystematic, you know what that is, think about how much we laugh when we talk to each other casually. there's an awful lot of, really, empty laughter that one does. if you don't giggle a little bit making jokes while you're talking specially to people that you know so well, it's unspoken part of being a normal human being to chuckle a little bit when interacting people. lol is how texting has creating and make it clear that everything is okay. we are always indicating that we really mean things and looking at other people's brains and we are always engaging the counter expectational and we are always keeping things easy. lol does that and so it's a face marker just like our involuntary easing laughter when we talk. all of those things and as you can imagine, the long list of factuality and part of the language as you using past sense or pluralizing a noun. very often you can hear people that speak standard language and they also use a different kind of speech among another, we are teaching about black americans since we are in america, why do they do that, why do they have to be different, why does president obama sound different when he talks to the naacp. i know a lot of people that actually heard the president as fake in that. they think, well, if he can talk one way, why he would talk the other. nonstandard dialect is another kind of easing and it's something that probably every second in the world does to some extent by switch to go a different language in a situation, or if not that, then a different dialect. it's very much part of language. once again, you a way of hearing language in a more positive way and so it can be one thing to listen to all of the littal easing and actually even lol's, what's all of this trash? why do people sound like edward and they never, they never have and all of the face markers have sophistication of their own. so those are the big two. then there are other assets. that sounds like a disease. the last time i'm going to use that term but there's expecter -- chapter about it. so, for example, can, you can do it. can came from no. you can to this, that you can identify, that originally came from the verb to know as did canny, cunning, couth. there wasn't the word couth, it meant could. that's normal. you feel odd, wet muscle that you're kind of stuck with it. ought is that way. look at that word. think about how to say it. where did ought come from? it was the word for owed. you can hear it used that way in shakespeare. ought meant owed. you owed something to somebody, you ought them. next thing you know you ought to do something. ly, first was like which meant body. so what happens is that what we think of an ordinary words become pieces of grammar that just basically manage the traffic between these words. so richard the third let us two. richard rogers in 1930, having some liquor and writing a song, let's go. now, already for richard rogers what he's thinking what he was saying let us go, when we say let's go, really we are saying letz, let's go. a whole new gram at cali -- grammitcal and they would hear a prefix. let's go. that's what i would say to my daughter. i would never say let us go. where did the prefix come from? let us, perfectly ordinary. it's happening all of the time or walked. imagine if you made up a language and you've come up with a word for ambulating and it would be kind of corny to say yesterday specially if you meant an hour ago. how are you going to put it in the past, you certainly wouldn't think of adding some little bit of stuff to the end of the word? you might if you already spoke a language that did that but if you can put yourself in the mind of somebody of just naming things out of the blue, how do you put it in the past, you wouldn't make up a suffix. suffix happened by accident. walk started as walk did and i keep saying over and over again you will keep saying walked. comes out as an actual word and did becomes a suffix. all prefictions and suffixes started as whole words. languages changes in not only meaning new changes but some words grab onto other words and stop being words at all. a fascinating process. if english was allowed to move on with nobody have any judgments, there would be new grammar we hear practicing. young people using the quote all, i'm all -- no, i want you to buy balloons. well, that's the youth butchering the language, but if the youth were allowed to keep going the way you did to make old english into modern english, i'm all,i maw. you're all, you raw. he's all, he zaw. we could be a language where we could laugh at other people for not knowing how to do our irregular verbs, it would be like all the stuff. maw, raw, zaw. i'm all, you're all. it's happening all of the time. beautiful. now then there's sounds. sounds are always changing and linguist never share with the general public how sounds were because teaching you're always afraid people are going to be bored. i thought somebody needs to do a chapter about the sounds that doesn't get lifty and keeps the reader moving on. i worked so hard on that chapter and the idea just to get across that the sounds are not aieou, that has no meaning except it's to give to small people when you're teaching them how to read. that's not anything how the vowels work. look at that there and that column that you have on the left, that's the front of a head cut in half, if i may, for those of you who have seen bracing bad, imagine the head cut in half, except from the other direction. his nose and lips and so beet, bait, bat. those are said up front. it doesn't feel like it but then look at the column in the back boot, boat, bat. all further back. the back of the neck is over on the right and the front of the face is in the front. that's where all the vowels are. it's the sound of those words, not the barbaric way that we spell them. if you know where all of those sounds sit, that's where the chart is meant to show, ways that people pronounce them start to make a sense that otherwise just feel like why do they keep saying it like that. for example, in california, there's something that's been happening for, i think, 25 years, somebody says this, but the truth is that think think they were saying bit. somebody about 30 who grew up in la, they might say instead of a little bit, a little bet. now, they are saying a little bit. we can read, but really they're saying a little bat, a little bat. in the same way that person if they say bet, they've saying something along more like bat. we made a bat and sounds like i'm imitating a young girl. really, i'm producing those kind of vowels. a bit of a bet, a bit of a bat. hard at imitating that person is to do those vowels. notice that even if i don't do that, a bit of a bat. that's what the person says. every second one of my students at colombia that is those vowels. you can write about it or hear it, why do they do that? if you look at the chart, you can see that vowels just are always moving around. they are like bees in a hive and so in any language it's not whether the vowels are going to move, it's where they are going to move. they never sit still. the vowels are always moving. and so bit is falling into bet and because bet is being moved out, it goes to bat, perfectly normal. the sound all is leaching out of the speech of increasing numbers of americans. it makes it harder to teach the international phonetic and alphabet every year. i am 51 born in pennsylvania, i caught a fish and you sleep on a cot it's different. it's become the majority by some accounts. you have cock and caught as the same sound. you sleep on a cock and yesterday you caught a fish. that's probably true for many people in this room. that's been happening for a while. there's no reason, it's certainly not cultural, it's because vowels move and you can see how it would work, bought and then next thing you know you cock a push. i used to tell students who had what linguist called a caught, cot murder, if you have a trouble hearing aw, ipa of mainstream american english, then what do you say when a kitten crawls up your leg and goes miaw. anybody would say aw and there was the aw. it's at the point this actually happened this fall, i told the class if you're having trouble hearing aw, what would you say if a cat climbed on your leg and say miaw, half of the class said aww. you never know exactly where it's going to happen but kind of like a chess board. certain moves that would never happen and in any language the vowels are turning around in that fashion. even spelling makes more sense. i made a fist. you think about made is spelled. m-a-d-e. why would it be spelled that way ? that's the way it was originally produced. it did a pit stop and went up to bait. moved to the a sound. and so spelling even makes more sense if you understand sound change. these things are so deliciously arbitrary. i cannot stand those small towns up in new england, i hate to say that, i know people find it quaint, those towns where everything is brown and everything is clean. i have never understood it. the only way i can get anything out of those tinny places is to go to a bookstore and you go in the back and you find interesting thing. last time i was in one of those little towns i went to a bookstore and i found this wonderful guy speaking american english from the mid-1880's and it was absolutely bizarre what this ernst man said was proper ways to pronounce things in 1887. these are edith people, these are the way these people spoke. age of innocence, they didn't like like michelle. so i made up this paragraph based on the person's idea. one might compensate for celibac y by sampling a juicey nectarin or buy a balcony seat and take in a melodrama. dishonest person seeking to isolate you. another one is buffet. not buffet. that was considered striving. sounds are always changing. they are changing in acuter way than that. nobody has ever called the back shift until me i wanted to have that name. it's called the back shift, you don't want to hear what it's called in the linguistic journals. rebel, outlaw, record. if you rebel, then you're not a rebel, you're a rebel, if you outlaw somebody, you're an out-law. if you record something you made a record. if you speak english you know this subconsciously. you just do it without thinking. and what it means is that when somebody becomes a thing, then the accent shifts backwards and creates all sorts of thicks -- things that you don't think about. now the old movies and tv shows are available and you can hear how funny people sounded because that didn't happen in the past. eddy canter, a quarter of this room will need to know, he was a very popular musical theater and sometime movie star in the first 20th century. he had a status, he came off kind of like a less creepy pee wee herman and popular as jimmy kimmel. big deal. some people have seen all of them, many times and you hear him say funny things. so at one point at the end of one of his movies in 1932 he says i learned it from a boy scout and i thought, what is a boy scout, why is this not a boy scout? boy scouts were new. these are not the ranger scouts, these are the boy scouts. it becomes an established concept, you start saying boy scouts. by the time it was fully established cantar -- voiceover on, the movie 1950, talks about going to a super market. no, super market. why didn't they do a retake, when market was the ordinary term the big weird one was super market, super market only happens because of the back shift. there is one episode of the show in 1964 and she's talking about well, i was going a cross word puzzle and my husband said cross word puzzle. they only happened in the 20's when she was a young woman, she would have learned it, let's go do that ning the paper, old habits die hard and there you go . episode of 1972, they're all having something called chinese food. it's late, i don't feel like cook, let's have chinese food. it's not just one of them, she says, yeah, let's have some chinese food, well, what is chinese food. why is it like martian food, you think to yourself, it's '72, chinese is not default yet. we call it chinese food. but to them it was still kind of a novelty, that's because of the back shift. we have shifted it backwards certainly mary harper say chinese now but back then it was new. because of this sound change we get into the final kind of change, this is called compound. i never liked that term so i came up with a different one. but it starts out with something really boring. i remember finding this one the dullest things i had ever heard when i was taught linguistics, the way that some words are created is that two words come together and they make one and some people find that interesting in itself. there's a black board and a blackboard is some plank that you paint black. then there's a blackboard, chalk, not even black anymore. where black board came from was that black and board came together. it became a blackboard, god, who cares? [laughter] >> there's the back shift. think about it. you're going to have a get a blackboard to go to the pink boards as opposed to put it up on the blackboard. a bird might be blue, there's something called a bluebird and you have the back shift. but still, frankly, you know, that's not something one would want to share outside of one's home. what gets interesting is that there are the dumb ones like those, blackbird and bluebird. you hear about things cup board. i don't know what a cup board is. i remember hearing a word when i was younger and i didn't think about it as a board you put cup on. breakfast, we know it's about breaking effect. you didn't really know that till you were about ten. you to read it. it's really just the word breakfast. still, you can see it in the spelling. but then there are other ones where it's not even in the spelling. you should go out into the world, daisy. where did that name come from? why is she daisy, why is the flower a daisy? a daze eye. a sheriff is a sheriff. say that over and over again and sheriff. those two words came together just like blackboard came to mean black board. blackboard in the future might be something like blaward. know that i had, changed to sheriff but forgot to change it here. originally housewife, say that over and over again and unfortunately it comes out as that. [laughter] >> then you have one where you would never know, barn, you would think that barn was probably the first word ever invented, barn unitary and large. no, it was the barely arn was where you put your yarn. world started out as two words and it's so weird and complicated that i'm not going to explain. there was no european word. where and eld and here we are. word sex compounding creates a lot of word and after all they blend together so you never knew that they were ever two. so this brings us to the end and it means that it's not only literally that we could learn to like, but like in the way people use it these dais. it's so easy to hear it's trash, you listen to like, well, it's not systematic and something is wrong with people today. for some reason today, it happened today. not before, you know, difficult and what we are talking about is people using it like this. this is a guy who is 15i heard on the subway a couple of years ago and i scratched what he said. we thought we were having the room to ourselves, we are standing there and they were like grand kids, grandparents all over the place and then they all ran out of the train and i thought, boy, that was a strange sequence of sentences and i was trying to think of why it had grabbed me. the whole situation that he was talking about he didn't make sense. it had something to the with a barmitzfa. he was an alpha male. you can find factuality and expectation. this guy was making it clear that he really meant what he was saying and making it clear that you might expect that there wouldn't be grandparents where the barmitzfa was going the take place for system reason, but they were. another kind of really or this is like the only way to make it work. that's better than saying, this is the only way to make it work, boom. light has a certain graze politeness to it. let's take our pill now but they're not going to take it. it makes it gentler to pretend that you two are going to take the horse pill. well, this is like, the only way to make it work. so i don't care about that like. like has done many different things. it's actually quite beautiful, and so there was a dramatic word, pronounced leek and it meant body of all things. one it drifted in meaning like the shakespeare word and it became grammar, like became ly. it changed in sound. leek became like and communed with other word, like, like minded. all those things that like did and we listen to like and we don't like him. i think he deserves better. there's a book about language change. i forget which one, just published, red, and at the end, the author says, maybe some proffer their flowers pressed dry and books, there are those with afictionate feelings towards the inflatable doll and, of course, surely most of us seek life, language, lives. so my message is language could never not change and the things that you hear and think of desecrations are exactly how old english became middle english and middle english became modern english. one of the oddest things in the world to wrap your head around there's no other way for a language to change. if you don't think it was wrong that lat inbecame french and people using like in brand-new way. if it was okay in the past in the logical sense it's hard to defend the idea of the change shouldn't happen now. we worry that we are not going to communicate. we will always be able to communicate. and so you can think of the language change as just a parade . i literally can't even about five years ago, that's cool. i like that. i wish i could say it without sounding fake whereas other people writing pieces about it saying that it sounded hesitant and dull. it's just more fun to love that your language will always change . a word is not something that is, a word is something going on. in otherway of put it, words on the move. i wrote it. spectators of how and why language changes. thank you very much. [applause] >> if you have questions, go to the microphone, raise your hand. [inaudible] >> when i read shakespeare, i read it in italian and if you're in a very remote area, will the language evolve less rapidly, how does that work? >> it's interesting you mention shakespeare and other languages. because shakespeare is translated in modern versions, very often a european gets shakespeare in the way that we don't. there were russians behind me who were happily quoting in russian including their children. they got it in the way that we get tony kushner where i must admit, even i must admit thinking, this is hard and i haven't read it in a few years, it wasn't because i'm not poetic, although i'm not, it's because the language has changed. language change is ordinarily much faster than we are used to and if a language are written in very few languages, only 200 languages are written in any real way. it marchs along and people don't think of it as frozen on the face, there's much less resistance to the spoken language changing even if there's some that they'll use in ceremonies or something like that, but the idea that it's this way and not that way and i'm going to beat somebody on the way for saying it that way less, and so some languages have been document today turn upside down structurally within a century. once you have print, print creates an illusion, i say that as somebody who lives in print. i love it but language on the page is an obstacle perceiving linguistic reality because you think that's it, that's sitting still and that might be the way it is when really language has been mostly spoken. so english changes much more slowly these days than it ordinarily would. shakespear, shakespeare to hear, i have to make the point that the changes are subtle, but i have to make the point because obviously shakespeare was using a language that we are using. yeah, our brains are on writing the way i put it in the book and it's a wonderful thing in many ways but it also makes you cranky about language change and it's kind of a disease. [inaudible] >> now, when i grew up, that was the word that was not used at all and would have been admonished had you used that at all. i was wondering kind of if you lament the change in that kind of word becoming popularized to the extent that, i think, now people by in large do not know they're saying a as a -- vulgarity and does that bother you, if your daughter started using that word, would you correct her. the big taboo was about religion and to say oh, my god is wrong. there are still some people who said that taking the lord's name in vain. then specially starting in the 180's -- 1800's, you did not talk about kissing and that has changed much in the media, in terms of ordinary conversation and i will say i'm 51 and so i'm beginning to not even to pretend that i'm young, youngish, i'm fundamentally a rather starchy person. i don't particularly like how people are in casual setting. i don't think there's anything wrong with it. it doesn't sit my sensibilities. when i was in college a person was less likely to say it. i'm going to go pee and describe it. to me it's must you talk about that? however, nobody's going to stop and that marks me as somebody who can't jump so to speak. but we do have taboos, so there are certain things are not said, think about the words that i'm not going to say because c-span is here, those are really the taboo words. i have made the argument that -- and i i am going to say these, damn, hell, fuck and shit are no longer profanity. they are just salty and i do put my money where my mouth is in that. my soon to be 5-year-old because frankly i'm not so starchy that i don't curse a lot at home, my 5-year-old has picked up shit and as make sense in 2016, the word for that for her she's already picked up that if it refer to a child it's poo but otherwise she doesn't know the word feces. actually a couple of months we were outside and there was something a dog had done and, of course, there are all the people around us and she with her shirley temple smile, daddy, watch out for the shit. [laughter] >> everybody heard and a part of me started to say, you don't say that in public and i really checked myself, you know what, by the time she's 11 she will be saying with her friend and that's only six or seven years from now which is a heart beat. that was very funny and that's a very real word, but try to only use it around me for a while because there are some people such as in your school who have been -- and i told her, i said a lot of the parents in your school have a certain idea which frankly doesn't quite make sense that you're not supposed to say that word until you're 11 or 12. she said why, daddy? i said i will explain it to you in a few years. frankly it's not profane. i know many parents would disagree with me about it but there are words that i would never want her to use. if she has erupted with the n word or some other word out there, then i would have covered her mouth and run into the house. so we have our profanity but i don't think it's about those bodily fluids. >> that pisses me off. we hear newscasters say it. using the word that angers me. >> it's changed. >> it's so common now and it's disturbs me. >> it's changed. no, it doesn't mean you're in europe anymore. >> that changed. >> just like that sucks. you have to allow. i'm sorry. [laughter] >> i come from language from a background more of like -- that for me applies what you're trying to his connect and probability. [inaudible] >> the word has different multiple different meanings. [inaudible] >> and to the extent that that seems like a cotton ball or something with a kind of a core and kind of a blur, that thing moves. not only is it always larger than we might think, what a word means but moves along on the grid and that's what words are. a word is nothing as tighty as the dictionary puts. but any number of things mean and gets into the fact that we no longer keep imply and infer separate. it's because of the nature of words and meanings in the approximate way that they correspond. >> i have a question of how we prefer language. i see it in english that we translate things to more modern ways. many languages arabic and gone extensive traditional arabic training and when i read the quran i will be able to understand it even though it's very old. we don't have that process in arabic to preserve the meaning with new words. how would languages like that who don't have that transition preserve ancient texts? >> that's very sensitive. if you're an arabic speaker you have the advantage that because you often have to not only have to be able to read or speak this language that's preserved, but then what you learn at home as a child is something different you're bilingual, to be an arabic speaking person, if you're e shipsian, for example, i don't think you think of yourself speaking the e -- egyptian language. you speak latin and italian. that's a wonderful thing because of the position of the quran and the quran isn't supposed to change. shakespeare should be adjusted. most of you sitting for italian for three and a half hours, barbaric. it needs to be translated. the same way -- only if you're a scholar and really interesting should you have to deal with that. chaucer, maybe you give it to people in middle english but more effective if translated. these things should be preserved. some people have said that the answer to the shakespeare problems is to teach students in shakespeare english. we have enough to do. those things should be preserved but usually things should be done in the vernacular. call me martin luther with no disrespect to the arabic tradition. >> given that language changes -- >> this is for courtesy, do somebody over here. >> anyway, given that language changes and it does to communally, how do we teach grammar to those individuals who want to speak what they think of properly? >> you have to teach what's considered the proper -- the proper language and so my idea is not that we ignore what's considered the standard. it's just that i would like us to hear people not using the standard as using something different rather than deficient. i remember knowing somebody who dumped a guy partly because she said he keeps making gram at call error. oh, no. he's a nonstandard speaker. talking about my daughter, she has to know what the standard is. i wouldn't keep that away from her. we are talking about things like saying fewer books instead of less books. the idea that if somebody says less books, you don't hear them making a mistake as if they went two plus two equals five. i will give you another one. some people say like too much and it would be fake if i did not say that. there are young people who say like in twice a sentence and for me it's fine if they are talking to their friends. i think it's wonderful but if they're trying to sound authorititive, like it or not, like is always going to sound approximate. nothing i write will change that . there are standards. i wish there weren't. standards must be stop but stop hating the way everybody sounds when they are not being standard . >> when i was a kid in the brownsville and later in the project, i had black friends and puerto rican friends, the f word never came up. you got mouthwashed up with soap. i never heard it but then when i went -- a few days into basic training when i was 19 suddenly we all had to speak to our parents and made us call our parents up. >> what year? >> '68. early '68. sudden every other word was f and my father had to get on the phone and said you have to stop. you told me what i was doing and i had to stop. i also recently heard that -- about 10-15 years ago that in the civil war i thought the f word wasn't used but it was used in sexual term. but i wonder if you know when anything was going -- when they were stressed out or angry what were they saying, shit. >> what did john boose say? >> or when the union was getting the confederate so the union was overwhelming the other, about to get overwhelmed, what would they say? >> you know, it's a very interesting question. and it shows you what it's like when you have a difference -- this comes back to the arabic point between former speech and casual speech. so we think that those civil war soldiers all talked like shakespeare because anybody could write that way after eighth grade. they didn't talk that way. we don't know exactly how they talked because they couldn't be recorded. you get little hints and so, for example, washington was working not on the brooklyn bridge but on the eve's bridge in st. louis, the man were erupting in great many oaths today. the man didn't sound the way he wrote to his wife but you can only know so much. slang dictionary only tell you so much. tarnation was something that a lot of people, eternal damnation , darn is not a word. so that's one. i'm pretty sure that they were not hauling off and yelling fuck. there's no evidence of that. it was used many a more pristine sentence. it's hard to know, what did they say when somebody presented on their toe or shot them. [laughter] >> they are very quiet. i listened to an early recording, benjamin, the 23rd president, he had no features, he had no traits, but he did make a recording and you can hear him talking but he never says fuck. so it's hard to say. [laughter] >> thank you. >> i'm going to ask about literally. [inaudible] >> they resolved themselves in context and sometimes if i say my head literally exploded, everybody knows that didn't happen. >> there you are. >> right. if i had to wait on line, a hundred people on line, they don't know that they were actually a hundred people or 23 people or maybe said there's more than a 100. is it wrong to try to hold a line somewhere other than possible utilities just so we can hear now in real-time, not go centuries and understand each other? you are probably more of a connector that i am i respect this. there's diversity of personality, literally hundreds . but i understand what you are saying. i understand. >> i mourned the loss of beauty in our vocabulary and sometimes i have totranslate my own sentences when i'm speaking . can you say anything about the sat words and where they are going or where they gone? the sat, you know, the vocabulary words of yesteryear. christine, co-patients, i could go on. egregious, our personal favorite . >> expatriate, expatriate is to go on too long, that was one of my favorite. it's funny you ask that. i had an unpleasant session with a student a few weeks ago where we read a passage of mine from a book i wrote a good time ago that i said there was something to teaching students some of those words that you might not get in ordinary conversation but would make it easier to read advanced texts. i had a couple of those students who were deeply offended by the notion that students should should be subjected to that, especially those that were socioeconomically disadvantaged. i very much take their point. however, part of being an english speaker is too often be wary of words. for example, if we heard about italians cherishing the outer layer of their vocabulary, i don't imagine, i'm not deeply immersed in counterculture, you don't imagine there being too much respect for that, their sense that that's our language. i don't imagine russians saying no, we don't want to know putin's words, were just going to use our kitchen sink words but it's part of the american to have that, call it democratic feeling?maybe individualistic feeling that expatriate is not necessary. i'm on the fence. on the one or had you can be articulate with a small vocabulary but there's some words in the dictionary that are stupid ruthless , there's a word route . ruth supposedly means mercy but i get it. it's a fun word. yes, there are words. we should also learn that to be articulate meant in boulder speech because people can be so very articulate with a small vocabulary, a lot of it is how you put the words together. that comes to mind. >> i just wanted to, you had mentioned your daughter used the word. [bleep]. you tried to explain to her context or times when she could use the word and you said that if you ever heard her say the n-word, thank you for that. i feel like i'm in a losing battle on that one. you had some highly educated, intellectuals who make the argument that it's a way of disempowering the word or taking away the speech and i reject that but i want what i want to hear is your pushback against the argument that it's disempowering or turning it into something that's ours because i think it's coarsening society. and really a very negative thing i hate to say that i'm not quite with you on that although i take your point if that word is used as a slur , then that's our taboo and there you go. if that word is being used out there now by, not just black men but white guys as soon as our backs are turned are using it because, if they are using it tomean buddy , they've one. i don't think we can stop it. two, and i'm not trying to be cute in saying this, word meanings change. that word has become too, there's a slur but then there's this word buddy because that kind of word in many languages often comes to mean buddy. so in russian that word is used in thatway, there's a list of examples. let's talk about my daughter , let's talk about her. what's stunning is first at some point she's going to learn about the slur and that's going to be easy, don't say it, just stop and if anybody else says it, walk away but then she's going to ask one day, daddy, how come i'm always walking down the street and they can do it? i'm not owing to tell her they shouldn't do it either because they only mean buddy and you can't stop it. and it's subtle. the sound changes also but no. especially because, no offense but utopianism. you know how people use that word. you're not going to stop anybody from using it so i hear it as different and i feel sorry for the white guys who have have grown up listening to rap and they think they can use it because they really do mean buddy. i see where they are coming from but then as some people telling them that when they do it, they are using the word bull connor used. that's tough for them.what they do is they do it when nobody can hear so for example, my office if the door is closed, i've heard people, walking by doing it they would never do it if my door open. it's a slur but the word for buddy , michael eric dyson told me her sample is used it that i think it's hearsay. >> you deserve that one. >> a really interesting group of people here, i think everybody is saying in that conversation a great way of speaking so thank you. getting back to your question, the triangle saying that you had at the end, it is a triangle essentially when we are talking about the random distribution and it's on both sides and is much more dimensional thanthat . is it because of randomness, because everything has a misuse so i'm curious to hear your thoughts about it and the science and really just hear the reasons why everything is taken in that context, we are not talking to people, just like they are not really offended methods. >> if you're talking to someone and they would be what you mean by literally 100 people or like you said, i don't really care. it's in that conversation so it's really multiple events collide into an accident and then you look back and you call that coincidence. but then we ask, the questions will happen 100 percent of out of habit. >> i get your point. >> i'm curious just like what you think about the concept system that is language, and you said earlier that there's never going to be a day where someone doesn't understand the other person but we imagine americans speaking various differentversions of dialects , dialectical of english, of whatever it is. >> i'm going to leave the part about coincidence because that's very interesting. that's a sign of my confession but what you are talking about is alarming in terms of how linguists tend to see language because there's an idealization which is that we are making statements and being the first, that is so little of what languages, we say things for reasons, say things to make people do things, we say things that stirred along the edges of what you think, you use words like totally in ways that have to do with mutual thought patterns rather than anything you are stating all by yourself. language philosophy teaches us that our conception of language is being about sentences that are right or wrong on a piece of paper. even more scientifically erroneous than i even begun to guess, i think that if linguistics started all over again it would be a field unlike the end because what we are doing when we speak is so much more than putting forth an entity and then a predicate aboutit. however what i'm saying , you always understand each other, it's not on the individual level for it so for example with trump, quite often we listen to him as if he were making statesmanlike pronouncements, thinking about how they would be heard and then the larger implications when really for reasons so theological and psychological and frankly i think psychometric, he doesn't mean them that way. heat we settle on these things and you could see that he's just bsn. he's improvising. he's been sarcastic, he's exploring and reporters listen to him as if this was obama saying something and were trying to get used to what trump means by language. there's a great deal of misunderstanding of one on that level, whether it was that language never breaks down to the point that we can't even pretend to know what one another are saying. it can feel like it but yes. >> can you explain how children see because these original terms were not solved, meaning those receiving those. that's the only way and he has seen, he's always seen that and. [inaudible] [laughter] >> it's like the whole camel going through the needle. there's nothing hotter than finding out what the hebrew bible actually said. and first, there's the just went and then that meant some and you get all the other translations. it's enlarging to know how distorted our view of these things are which is why i believe in translations for example. now that i've been folded, i'm going to insult orthodox jews in saying it, the idea of studying talmud without thinking about exactly what the translation would be in dealing with all these things, i always thought no, really it should be directly translated into today's vernacular, there's a great deal of that. i wish that vernacular translation work more fulfillment and yet we are stuck with what we've got. it's a document, we can't live by them and if you do, translate them to the language you have and if you discover mistakes, fix them. don't allow them to sit in modern defense but i'm not running the world. so here we are. >> do you think there's some relationship between culture, when i listened to shakespeare see clarity i feel like nowadays people can talk circles and there is no clarity, no thinking about it. recently i read a book about the governor from the election that said there's no word therefore meaningful in those stages. it's from 1870 but it's a sort of beauty. >> first i want to correct myself about the town mood and say i am vastly undereducated. it's wonderful for it to be engaged in the original and only that people do because at least you do know what it's saying. in terms of your question, what is your original understanding. your original language. mandarin? okay. i think that in any language, the way it's used colloquially and modernly is going to be quite different than what's done on the page and that's certainly true with mandarin and chinese. your familiar with the difference between what you can read and what people say. mandarin is difficult for linguists because you will put the sentence on the board and if there are chinese speakers in class able are hard to agreeing what is actually a proper sentence because people have different senses of what's real as opposed to what's on the page. how far you can get away from it. so you're reading things in an older instance and things on the page and reading mark twain and youare hearing what going on now . mark twain and have had the same experience, there was the way he wrote and then the way people spoke around him. so we today feel like something different is going on because people didn't write the way they spoke as much as in the past and there was no way to record how people spoke so you get little incidents, if you see a silent film of people walking down the street and walking in front of the flatiron building you can see that it's a point where you can watch clear well-preserved films, 110 years ago now. how did they talk. they did not talk the way the magazines and newspapers did in english but we can't hear them. when we get sound but the sound is bad and everybody is reading from a script. so they drop in a little slang. you still don't know how those people sounded. fitzgerald writes novels where he gets in a little bit but still fitzgerald looks normal so he's still wonders how those people at the party in great gatsby talk. it's tough. today you know how everybody talks. so the path seems cleaner in that way. it was, people have always spoken messy. as mandarin, they spoke outside the page or television. for me, i'm trying unsuccessfully as i think i've aged past it to teach you myself mandarin.and i'm finding that one of the difficulties is there such a difference between what's on the page and then what i read about how people actually talk. their blogs and things and i think you wrote this? it's a different language and mandarin already, no offense is unknowable. these things are just the way life goes. >>. >> you brought it down to a nonacademic way of saying. >> the language is unapproachable to communicate . and therefore it results in better testing rates, being advised to read and it's unrealistic to say everyone should read or can't hear what i'm saying. how do you make the difference between a technical language that people need to do their job in the communication of society which understands what we are talking about? >> isn't that easier today when with the internet and social media in that you can log or you can write things that are written for the general public to understand or is that not what you ... >> that's a whole different issue, identifying truth and dealing with the fact that it's so elusive to identify what anybody would think of as truth if you think through the layers of it. but i think it's inevitable that any field is going to have jargon. it is not inevitable that in any field impenetrable sense is used so in certain worlds we are familiar with humanity has a way of writing that has become accustomed, i don't think it's a bridge, i don't think i'll people are being obscure but many literalists are afraid is that it's impenetrable to the outside world. i think that's changed. for science, you need, linguistics is written in jargon that impenetrable to outsiders too. what i'm talking about is diachronic theory and the way this would be flex, it's in flagship journals all being talked about is deadly dull and loaded with a jargon that you would think was the grip of linguist meaning. you forget how impenetrable it is so i consider myself to be doing my job by taking it in front of the community and communicating what is the good part in relatively ordinary language but that doesn't work or all scientists. it's clear that higher math, that can't be done. i tried with physics and realize there's a point beyond which only physicists can understand and i can only have approximate understanding. >> i've never actually read him. as getting that sort of thing across. >>. >> haven't heard of them. >>. >>. [inaudible] thank you so much for all the talk and i have records for a question, certainly about the national phonetic opposite and we we come from and i've heard about it. then, yes . my next question. if you take away this my show, what would you say, what would you think would be the decision to belittle into 16th-century america? social media, how it was in the internet. >> i think your question ... >> all the future of america's english. >> donald trump is going to have no influence on the english language. social media has not influenced the way he speaks in any appreciable way because social media is writing. social media has affected writing in the way that it's a kind of writing that's more like speech. henry higgins does not exist. as wonderful a character as he is. i get the feeling i've never going to be allowed to play that role for some reason but he is an interesting character but no linguist would ever have experienced like that. he wouldn't look down on life. he would be taking down what she said in the international phonetic alphabet. every suite is the model for that character but he will be taking it down and thinking about how interesting her cockney speeches in terms of its difference from what the king received. i know one linguist who you could say is someone who's a stickler for standard language rules and things to recoil lightly at the idea of the breaking of those rules. even he intellectually understands there's no such thing as broken language. and he's a character and has gotten in trouble for some socio-politically odd statements. i only know one person like that. and no linguist would be like him. >>. [inaudible] >> what is that? >> how you know that it exists. >> the phonetic alphabet is used by all language but the spelling systems are different, the idea is to transcribe what sounds actually are instead of setting proclamations that i use here. so it's one of the basics of linguist training to be able to transcribe things in that alphabet and in languages that are new, often interim grammatical systems that exist because in many ways it's better than any other system you will come up with, although to write the language completely phonetically is often awkward for various reasons but it lists what henry higgins has depicted in doing his part of the linguist toolkit. it doesn't translate well to the general public as people are used to the related different version of it that's used in many dictionaries and it's ugly, it's aesthetically unpleasant. you get used to seeing our words spelled the way they are for better or worse and so the ipa doesn't translate well. i do not mention it as a footnote in words on the move but you have to use it, it's our alpha moment. >> one question, you obviously studied and you say the same thing happening with other languages involving speech, agent hebrew or the type, has that changed in pronunciation and as time goes by? >> is moving along, hebrew is moving along and it's not such a proud creation. new kinds of grammar, >> always. because vowels have to move. when they talk about the difference between cathartic non-station, all that is because you would expect that different people speaking a language in different places would have their vowels move in certain ways. there is no language still, they couldn't because people are always hearing things a little bit differently so cost, cops, you can't stop it. it's interesting which means any language is gradually pulling away from its writing system and less the writing system keeps up with it almost never does go that's one of the awkward parts of being a modern human being, that you're going to learn to write something that you don't like in speech, it's unfortunate, some people have to deal with less than others. we in the french and danes have a major burden. >> there are a lot of young people who say acts instead of past and they are told that incorrect by the school system. doesn't that make that a nonstandard dialect and that word will ever enter usage? >> no. ask is another one of those exceptions like life. ask in itself is me. it comes from an old english form, ask me and it just so happens there were various words where they toggle the words and so a mask used to be a max. of fish used to be a fish which was a fix. ask happened to be one that became ask, that happened to settle in as the word used by a certain group of english speakers happened because of the auger fee and happenstance to be this: english became the standard so all of a suddenask sounded low-rent and ask, sounded proper whereas for many people before that, it sounded odd . so the reason black people and many southern white people say acts is because they are have always been people in england who still say asking a lot of those people were the ones that were sent across the ocean to work in hot springs america which for example if you are going to leave england, probably not going to be the people who talk like downton abbey, they stayed home. it would be the vernacular speakers a lot of ladies learn the language alongside people saying asked. today, you have the easing and safe paradigm so many black speakers say ask like anybody else but when you relax you say acts. unfortunately, that one speaks out for american english speakers in particular were black speakers in particular, is the first thing that black people will mention about black english, is ask. that's not going to change, especially because asking can be thought of as a formal activity. when somebody hears ask, it sticks out because ask involves a certain ceremony and here's this vernacular form. i wish people didn't hear acts that way but i don't think it's going to change so that i would tell people that one that you should not use in a formal context but it's a two-way street. i met a white woman asking me very nicely why does my black student say acts at the office? i said if you are having a good time at the office, if you ask some sort of casual relationship with the boss, much longer than saying asked while you are talking about what happened downstairs wednesday but i said i hope you say it in board meetings and things like that. ask is unfortunate, it's like people say like every two seconds. it's a hard hat of the degree, axes like that but that's the one thing in black english where i say folks, sorry. america is not going to get used to that one so that's the lighter. >> thank you for your time. >> thank you. [applause] >> here's a look at books being published this week. in the true flag, stephen kinzer recalled the political debate from over a centuryago led by political officials, business leaders and public intellectuals which include the likes of theodore roosevelt , andrew carnegie and mark twain. larissa fleming report on a syrian woman's attempt to flee her country on a fishing boat along with 500 refugees whenir

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