300 Years of Language Peevery

Self-styled language experts — and let’s face it, that includes all of us — have lamented the decline of English for centuries. From shifting pronunciations to newfangled words to evolving grammar, everyone from Jonathan Swift to John McWhorter has a pet peeve or two. What’s yours? Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support. * TRANSCRIPT * JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and yeah, Christmas. A Christmas show, a show about Christmas words, but do you really want that? Think about it: “Here's where the word Christmas comes from, and there it went.” “What's the etymology of tinsel?” Do you really? I don't really, but I know that, well, Christmas did happen and podcasters are supposed to do this and so what I will do is: There are these albums, real albums. Well, not exactly real, but this is the era of the LP. And the Firestone Tire Company used to put out these Christmas Carol LPs to make you buy Firestone tires. This was back in the mid 60s, and my parents had some of the Firestone Tire LPs. They had beautiful covers. They look like, you know, classic Rudolph Christmas presents. And for people of a certain age — and I'll admit that I am at that point — the Firestone Christmas albums somehow often come off as what Christmas, as in tacky American Madison Avenue Christmas, is all about, at least sonically.  And my favorite cut from the ones of those that I have had forever — this is what I remember my parents playing in the late 60s, early 70s, Charlie Brown Christmas, The Energy Crisis, and Firestone Christmas LPs — was Gordon McRae — yes, Gordon MacRae from the film of Carousel, etc. He's always pulling up his pants to show that he's masculine. Gordon MacRae, who was all over the variety shows back then, he's singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” and he's trying to sound what they would have called in 1965, soulful. This cut is both bad for the reasons you'll completely understand, but also good. It's actually kind of a good arrangement, and Gordon is trying his best and I play this in my home every Christmas season. People who know me are familiar with it. This is Go Tell It with Gordon 1965. Here we go.  [“Go Tell It On the Mountain” sung by Gordon MacRae] So a little Christmas, okay. But, you know, I don't feel like doing a Christmas show; I just want to do some stuff. And what I've been thinking about lately, just randomly, is how utterly — talk about random — how utterly random people's linguistic pet peeves always seem, about ten minutes, literally, maybe, you know, five generations after they put them forth. You see it throughout history. And I want to share that with you because you really have to see how brilliant people have these notions about what they just don't like and feel like there's some authority behind it, and I can't pretend that I'm not one of those people sometimes. And yet you read these people later and they sound so — well, you know — and so I just want to give you some examples. We're going to go through some history very quickly. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, a wise person. It's 1712, when he writes a piece called A Proposal for Correcting and Proving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. (I'm not sure what that “ascertaining” means, but you know, the meanings of words change, you know, as Justice Scalia liked to show us.)  So A Proposal for Correcting and Proving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, and Swift had a problem with the way people were beginning to speak English, which seems so deliciously, deliciously quaint today. Here's what he said: “What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable” — in other words, drudged, disturbed, rebuked, fledged. He thought they should be drudg-ed, disturb-ed, rebuk-ed and fledg-ed, like we say bless-ed. So: “Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.” That's what he said. So he didn't like that people were leaving out the E sound in the past tense or past participle forms. So not disturbed, but disturb-ed. Not full fledged, but you're supposed to say full fledg-ed. You wonder why you say bless-ed now? It's because that's the way it was pronounced at a certain time. Here is Swift kind of straddling the errors, where you could say disturb-ed or disturbed; he thinks disturbed is slangy. “And a thousand others every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse,” he doesn't like what he's hearing. Can you imagine? Now, of course, very quickly, while he was living, the non-voweled pronunciations were becoming the standard, except in the occasional example of one of the verbs where the old pronunciation stayed when you're being kind of quaint.  So: “he was blessed with an ability to do math very quickly.” You don't say “he was bless-ed” with the ability,” but “oh, well I am a bless-ed person, etc.” And you're thinking of [hums Amen chord] (that's supposed to be an Amen chord). OK? But generally it's no longer bless-ed and you certainly don't say rebuk-ed. And this is Jonathan Swift, who I think we can agree was quite the brilliant person. He wasn't an idiot. He was one of the smartest people who ever lived. But he didn't like hearing the past tense forms shortened because that was new to him then.  And yes, I know some of you were thinking: that accent that I did badly, that plummy British accent — that didn't exist when he was writing in 1712. That British accent that we think of as so gorgeous, Stewie Griffin wonderful, that only really came in after 1800. Not to mention that Jonathan Swift was originally Irish, but still the way he wrote, it sounds like it was in that accent. That's my favorite example. So he's thinking that we're supposed to say, “Well, I was disturb-ed” and we're thinking, “No, sorry, Jonathan, it changed, and you must accept it.” But that made perfect sense to him at the time. He thought he was speaking from a mountaintop. That was 1712.  1762, Robert Lowth. He's a bishop. He's an intellectual. He's a leader. He's British. He's about to be appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's a very important man. He knows many, many things. He knows his Hebrew. He knows his English because he speaks it and of course, Latin and Greek. And in 1762, he writes what he calls A Short Introduction to English Grammar. This was the first classic grammar of English. There had been some before, but this one really got around and it set what people thought of as the proper English, to an extent, forever. There are things in this that we talk about now that really only started with him. But what's interesting about Robert Lowth and the short introduction to English grammar is that if you actually read it — and you should, because it's short, frankly — you know, this is when people have to write things in blood with a quill, so things don't usually get that long unless somebody really is obsessed with something, like Isaac Newton. And so you can read this in, you know, one third of an afternoon and every now and then you run across something that this person said — and it wasn't really that long ago. We're talking about 250 years ago, that is 10 seconds. I mean, people were already writing about this when it was less than 200 years ago. Here's this person, and he has these notions of how one should express oneself that now sound utterly ridiculous. An example: I spit if I must — never understood why some men feel the need to, you know, kind of go and spit on the ground. I've never felt the need to do that, but apparently — I get the feeling most men in the world need to kind of [makes phlegmy sound] spit. No, you take care of it more gracefully, but let's say that you're going to spit. So how did you do it yesterday? You spat. Now, if you're going to make it into a participle:  I have — and you probably pause a little — but it's spat. “I have spoken.” “I have spat.” No; Lowth thought it was spitten. “I have spitten.” Is that what it is? That's what he thought it was. I don't even need to check it out. There were people saying all sorts of things instead of spitten at the time. But he liked spitten. And so for him, it was, “Well, you know what? I have spitten.” And therefore, I have certain authority or vulgarity or something.  This is even better; a chick, that's one hen or rooster or something. Chicken is two chicks. And so one chick, two, three or four chicken. And if that sounds stupid, remember: ox and oxen? So there are many oxen. Here's a chick [makes odd clucking sounds] whatever they do sound-wise. And then if there are two or three of them, then look at them chicken. That's what Robert Lowth thought. And remember, this is not some middle English from 4,000 years ago. This is like ten minutes ago. And he thinks that chicken is the plural of chick. That's not the way it is now.  Now it's easy to get from, you know, chick to chicken being one thing. I once had a friend, a very literate friend who had this little problem. Like, I have problems like that. I do not know the difference between bought and brought. I know intellectually, but I cannot do it in fluent speech. I brought myself a Slim Jim at 7-Eleven yesterday. I bought the chair over. Both of those sound great to me. There's some kind of kink. There's some neuron. This perso