2022-08-03
38 分钟From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter, and I want to return us in this midsummer.
to the little scene that I brought us to at the end of one of the recent episodes,
where my daughters and I are walking by a pickleball court,
and the sound of the ball hitting the ground and perhaps the rackets makes one of my daughters say in passing that it's satisfying.
An interesting way of using the word, not utterly incomprehensible to someone like me,
but I wouldn't call that satisfying, even if it is.
That's not the word that I think most of us would use.
And yet, kids today, and by kids, I don't mean people,
say, 30 and younger, the way we often use that word.
But kids, as in people about 12 and younger, are using that word in new ways.
And it's getting me to thinking about the eternal changeability of language and how that's happening in various ways around us all the time.
And it's that key lesson that I always want to get across,
which is that this thing that we're speaking is an eternally.
inherently changeable thing.
It's a thing that's always changing.
It's not a thing that ever just sits.
So this thing called English,
this thing called language that all of us are speaking is always something that's on its way to becoming something else.
Anything that we think it is, is just what it happens to be today.