Linguistic schizophrenia

      

I was talking the other day with a friend who smarts every time he hears or reads such current indicators of English-in-transition as

Go lay down
Between you and I
I shoulda went
It's important to know your right's.
A chameleon can change it's color.
12 items or less

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I share his distress over a world clearly going to hell. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and on weekends, I put on my descriptive linguist hat and cluck that he needs to stop being an old-maid schoolteacher and recognize that language is an organic phenomenon, constantly in flux, and we're none of us in a position to police our co-anglophones. 

A descriptive linguist (i.e., a real one, not a prescriptive one who likes to tell you how you should use language) is like a good anthropologist. Doesn't scold. Doesn't shame. Stands apart, like a good scientist should (as a good scientist should), and simply describes what he sees.  They see.

Language evolves, and so does our sense of right and wrong. I no longer use "old-maid schoolteacher" to refer to those wonderful lesbians who taught us to say "I should have gone" and not "I shoulda went."

I'm glad I got a middle-class American education, that somebody took pains to instruct me that an apostrophe-s marks possession and the plural-s is written without an apostrophe. School, for me and for countless others like me, was a tool for leaving my working class origins behind and acquiring the rules, linguistic ones most definitely included, of "polite" society. 

This topic came up when I happened upon a video of a scene from the 1954 movie Magnificent Obsession with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Here's the link. Go to minute 1:30 and you'll hear the first Mrs. Reagan say, "You hadn't wrote all those months!"

I went back over it half a dozen times, convinced I must have heard it wrong. I didn't.

Now why, I wondered, did the editors let that through. Because it would have cost too much money to do the scene over? Could it actually be that nobody noticed?  Is it possible that somebody made the decision to keep wrote in the script because they thought written sounds too fussy and breaks the rhythm of the love scene?

My interest in linguistics began with a course back in the early 60s in historical linguistics when I first learned about such fascinating things as the first indogermanic sound shift, between 200 B.C. and 600 C.E. when people began devoicing their b's, d's and g's (making them p's, t's and k's). That's why, to jump over the small details and get to the point, people stopped saying labium and started saying lip, for example. And a whole bunch of other goodies, like the fact that words for father in the Romance languages, padre, père, and pater were all connected to the words for father in the Germanic languages, father, Vater, far, and föður and that they all had a common ancestor. Somewhere in Late Latin times there were people like my friend and me clucking over the fact that some people were saying padre instead of pater and getting away with it. And nobody these days would complain that "these young folks are pronouncing all their s's like t's. And their g's like y's. They're saying that instead of das, water instead of wasser,  foot instead of fuss. And yester(day) instead of gester(n) and yell(ow) instead of gel(b)."  These days, we'd simply say they're speaking English instead of German.

I quickly went from historical linguistics to just-plain linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax) and eventually to sociolinguistics, as I began to realize I was more interested in people than in linguistic forms. And was using linguistics as a key to learning how to become a better teacher of English as a foreign language, rather than as an end in itself.  It was there I found a home among folk who advocated a descriptive approach to language learning, people who categorized "Ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do!" as a legitimate variant of American English and not as "bad" English. And suggested not replacing it with "Nobody is going to tell me what to do" but adding "Nobody is going to tell me what to do" to one's linguistic repertoire and becoming bi-dialectal, and then figuring out when the first variant communicates more effectively and when the second one does. And that implies that you might actually want to communicate. Sometimes the way you speak becomes your identity marker and you take the attitude, "They can damn well learn to understand me instead of expecting me to talk like them." That all depends on who has the upper hand. Language speaks loudly in the realm of power.

To live in the modern world, where change is rapid and sometimes dramatic, it's a wonder we're not all linguistic schizophrenics. In my local grocery store I was delighted when the "12 items or less" sign was taken down at the express checkout and replaced with "12 items or fewer." Somebody else in my neighborhood clearly fits in the schoolmarm category. And good for the grocer that he let himself be persuaded! I say. That they let themself be persuaded.

I can't deny that for all my advocacy of a descriptive approach to language over a prescriptive one, I remain more conservative linguistically than I am about other things. It's hard to shake the idea that people who say "you don't talk good" sound dumb. The word irregardless drives me up a tree. I used to be embarrassed as hell at the fact that my father regularly pronounced these, them and those as deze, dem and doze.  I was well into my thirties (and into sociolinguistics) before I came to realize if he had not spoken that way he would have been shunned by his fellow factory workers.

And as a white boy, I grew up with the idea that black people who said things like "Ain't nobody gonna tell me..." and transposed the s sound with the k sound in the word ask,  pronouncing it as if it were written axe, were dumb - just like my father.

I've been listening with great interest to the House Select Committee hearings on the January 6th coup attempt and I'm like a little boy again, looking up at my new heroes, Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, Stephanie Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Elaine Luria, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

And I have an especially warm place in my heart for Bennie Thompson when at the end of each session he announces that he would like to "Axe people to remain in their seats until the committee has been excorted from the room."

In the first instance, "ask" (pronounced /æks/ instead of /æsk/) - the k sound and the s sound have been reversed. In the second - "escorted" (pronounced /ɛkskɔrtɪd/)- the k and the s sounds have been reversed and then a second k has been inserted.   

And I love him for it. The man who's doing what he's doing is speaking a dialect I once used to look down on. Then, in time, I came to see it as simply an alternate to the one I speak. And now, in my enthusiasm and respect for what this man is up to, it's music to my ears.

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