May 1, 2025 • 49 mins
Malcolm sits down with the linguist John McWhorter, to discuss his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. Among other things in their wide-ranging conversation, John makes an impassioned case for the return of “thou.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I was a fan of John mcquarter long before I
met him for the first time. Mccorter is a linguist
at Columbia University and a music lover and a New
York Times columnist, basically a renaissance man. It was maybe
twenty nineteen when we first spoke. At the time, I
was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor
of Los Angeles from nineteen seventy three to nineteen ninety three,
(00:45):
And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I
was struck by something I heard. Listen, there is nothing
there to hide.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has
been an open book. And you know this is another
demonstration of that.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Tom Bradley is black, born in Texas, grew up in
south central Los Angeles. So I went to see mcquarter,
went to his rabbit warren of an office, played him
that bit of tape and said, explain this to me.
Why does a black guy whose parents were sharecroppers from
Texas sound like Carry Grant? And for an hour of
(01:23):
the most wonderful conversation he explained to me exactly why
he did. Fast forward a few years, I was doing
our series on the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and I
got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the
most important journalists in the world in the nineteen thirties.
And I heard some old tapes of her and she
sounded like she was the Duchess of York. Only do
(01:46):
you know where she grew up? Buffalo? So who do
I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo
end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John
mc warter. My point is that there is a certain
kind of question about language, about race, about why we
speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is,
(02:07):
let's call up John mcquarter. I love John mcquarter and
when he said he had a new book coming out
called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him could I interview you
about it? And lucky for me, he said yes. My
name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast
(02:27):
about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going
to run the conversation I had with Jah mcquarter this
spring at the ninety second Street Why, which was delightful.
I did this interview with John right after finishing up
the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen
to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of
(02:49):
time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard
it is, and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot
from someone like Oprah. And that episode was very much
on my mind as I was interviewing the quarter because
I was thinking, oh am I going to measure up.
Where do I land on the Oprah Joe Rogan continuum.
(03:09):
I'll let you be the judge of that. Although I
will say this is not exactly a fair test. The
degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John
mcwarter is very very hell hello everyone, thanks for coming, John,
Thank you for agreeing to join us tonight.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Malcolm, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
No the this is our I wanted to. I was
thinking back when I I first met you, and I
think it was I called you opera went to see
you because I was doing something on the first black
mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. It was Tom Bradley,
that's right, yeah, And I was listening to tapes of
him speaking and he sounded like the whitest guy I
(03:55):
could imagine and I was trying to.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Figure out why I sounded like a Disney announcer.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And you gave wait, tell me a little bit before
we even get into this. It was so much fun
your answer. Explain to me why that would be.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So I don't remember what I said then because it
was before you know what, and therefore it feels like
it was seventy five years ago. But I know that
I probably would have said that he would have grown
up in a time when the unspoken cultural expectations of
oratory culture were such that if you were trying to
make your way in the world, whatever color you are,
(04:30):
as an American, there was an expectation that you would
learn the standard dialect and be absolutely comfortable in it. Frankly,
Booker T. Washington did that too. He was born a slave.
If you listen to recordings, you'd think he was Teddy Roosevelt,
and that's because that's what you had to do, which
was kind of unfair. But I was thinking he comes
from the time when black people were expected to speak
(04:52):
that way if they wanted to have public influence. And
I'm sure that he spoke in different ways when he
did not have the camera on him, didn't I say
that I'm trying.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
To say something along that lines, and we were the thing.
The fascinating question is when it did death stop? It stopped?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, he doesn't.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
No. No, that ended in the late sixties, and there
was a new idea, and in some ways a healthy
idea that to be taken seriously. You don't have to
learn to talk in the standard way. You can express
yourself how you feel like it.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The minute I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh,
I remember I played you with tape. You're like, oh,
And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John.
This is what it means to be a linguist. You're
constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't
let a.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
More or less. Yeah. Although I happen to be what's
called a historical linguist, which means that I'm interested in
how language changes, you can be somebody who's interested in
just how language is right now, in which case that
Tom Bradley question would be less of interest. But for me,
it's all about what was going on in the past,
and especially nowadays, we're at the point where you have
(06:02):
one hundred years it's actually technically one hundred and two
years of people recorded speaking and moving at the same time.
And so there's some sound films starting in nineteen twenty three,
and that to me is history, especially now that we've
got the Internet and so you can just see these
things happening and you can listen to the way people talk,
and so that's something I do. Not all linguists would
(06:24):
be inclined to do that. They would do other interesting things,
but it's a little obsession of mine, especially lately. How
has American English changed over about the past one hundred
and twenty five years. When you can actually hear it,
you can listen to this won't go on for too
much longer, but you can listen to the black musical
theater artist Bert Williams, who has a certain name, but
(06:45):
he first became famous working with George Walker. They're two
black men. You can see them in pictures and you
know they've got the minstrel makeup and they're in these
forced poses and you kind of think, what were they
like and it's hard to tell. There's some recordings of them,
there are a few, and they're like like that. You
can listen to the way they spoke and sang. They
both sound Caribbean, including George Walker who grew up in Kansas,
(07:09):
because Black English vowels were different back then. If you
listen to black people on cylinders from the eighteen nineties
and then then they don't say quote, they say quote
like that somebody's gonna marry me. Somebody's going to marry me.
That's how they sounded. And so these are the obsessions
that one starts to have.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
When you say you have but this sounds like a
fantastic obsession. By the way, how does that like? Is
this something you do sort of for fun? In other words,
do you have places you go to find these historical
or are you just watching a movie from the thirties
and you stop it and you go back five minutes
(07:48):
and you lay up on.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Both of those things. Yeah, and it's not only black people,
it's just people in general. Listen to that vowel. Why
did the person use the word fantastical in that particular way.
There are all sorts of things, and then like, do
I go looking for it? Not necessarily, but if I
find out that there is some four CD player set
called Sad of the deep past. The first thing I'm
(08:12):
thinking is how interesting could most of that be? But
there'll be two things where somebody is black or somebody
is using something colloquial. And so I'll listen to all
four of those damn CDs once because you never know
what you're gonna get, and you get just enough to
put into books and to mention to you and things
like that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
So when did you when did you, at what point
in your in your career life, whatever, did you realize
that this was something of particular interest to you?
Speaker 1 (08:40):
You mean linguistics in general.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
No, No, this thing you're just talking about that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
It's a summer day in nineteen seventy five and my
father's got his beer and he's watching this bad old
movie and it was a movie biography, old one of
Stephen Foster, and the people keep walking through and they
the vowels are different, and I'm gonna write swanee River.
(09:09):
And I asked d why did they talk that way?
And he said, well, you know, things change, and that's
about all he had. But I remember thinking those were
real people and yet they don't talk like us. Why?
And then a seed was gradually planted. There's an episode
of I've ever spoken about this. There's an episode of
(09:30):
the Lucy Show, not I Love Lucy, but her second
show that got bad. And in one of the early episodes,
Lucy gets a maid and the maid is snobbish, and
so Lucy starts buying the maid lunch and at one
point she says, Oh, it's a roast chicken. It's broasted.
And she says, it's broasted. And I was listening to
that when I was about thirteen and thinking, that's not
a word anymore. Is it? That sort of thing for
(09:53):
some reason interests me? And next thing, you know, you've
got so much of it stuck crowding out more important
things in your head. But you can write books about.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
It, John, you gotta do better than that. You can't
say for some reason it interested me. You got to
tell me good, tell us more than that.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
The way people talk is very resonant to me. And
as I've gotten older, I've realized that for other people
it's the way people walk, or the way somebody dances,
of the way people dress. But I know from a
very early age just speech was interesting. It was a
window into the soul. People spoke differently, and that was
about this much blackness. It was just listening to people
(10:34):
in general, getting a sense that my teachers had a
certain accent that the white people on TV didn't have.
In Philadelphia, you say lousy whereas Lucy says lousy. And
I was thinking, well, that's interesting, annoying my southern relatives
by noticing that they had different vocabulary here and there.
You know, I'm this little kid, I talk like missed
and I say, you say Carrie when we would say take,
(10:56):
and they would get tired of that. But I realized
that it was because I was interested in dialect. Also,
one thing I missed, and I think it's partly from
being black, is I never heard Black English as wrong.
I didn't grow up speaking it. I grew up hearing it.
I have a good passive competence. But I remember cousins
(11:17):
who you know very much, spoke it and they would
use features of Black English, and I would listen and
not think nothing. You know, some people just not care.
I would not think that's bad grammar, that's wrong. I
wouldn't think it was exotic. I would listen to it
and think, hmm, that's different from the way I would
put it, And I wonder, why is that based on
(11:39):
something in history. I had one cousin who was using
what we call the narrative, had people who studied Black
English and so, and then we had gone downstairs, and
then we had seen that there was a raccoon in
the basement, and then we had said, hey, let's get
rid of that raccoon. And then we had gone back upstairs.
And I keep waiting for you had what, and then what,
and it was just all had And I remember listening
to Darren doing that and thinking that must be different
(12:00):
instead of him not knowing what had means. And then
years later I found out that linguist had written about that.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Wait, my wife, who's black, Uh, she uses that. That's
where it comes from. What she sticks head in the
craziest places.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
It might be a black thing, yes, or like when
Will Smith says, well, what had happened was he's.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
What she did?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
She said today she said, I had went. I don't
understand this is a highly educated went to Princeton lawyer
in she just takes head and just kind of like
shovels it in randomly into her senses.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That is, that is because it's a good, earthy yet
systematic way of using using the language. It's called narrative had.
There are papers about it, noticeably papers. There's one paper
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
So her father, wait, I want to her father grew
up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida, and he would
be growing up in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
He would have gotten that narrative had from Harlem, most
likely from Harlem. Yeah, that's good, solid northern Black English. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Now you said something earlier that you didn't speak Black
English growing up.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Why not? That's deep, Malcolm. Actually, that gets into my
parents and what they were like, and so plenty of
black family speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Area in Philadelphia
was a very integrated neighborhood. The black people in the
neighborhood had become middle class from mostly being working class.
(13:35):
So there was plenty of Black English spoken in the neighborhood.
Close friends of mine spoke it. My mother grew up
speaking Southern Black English, but switched to a kind of
generalized suburban Northern when she moved to Philadelphia. My father
spoke Philadelphia Black English. But and this is something I
really have only wrapped my head around over the past
(13:55):
about year really thinking about it. They were not inclined
to use their vernacular around their kids. They didn't speak
it to us. I remember thinking, Mom gets on the
phone with her relatives and all of a sudden, there's
this other way she has of speaking. I was trying
to wrap my head around it. Whereas, to tell you
the truth, most black moms would have spoken that way,
(14:16):
at least some to their kids as well. And the
truth is both of my parents tried their best. They
were both brilliant people. They provided a materially great existence,
but they were both very closed off people in general,
and that played out in terms of dialect. Then also,
my sister talks exactly like me. If I have a
weird voice, as one other person, it's my sister who's
(14:36):
four years younger, and she sounds just like this. So
it was it was both of us, and I find
myself thinking, sometimes we both do that. But also I'm not.
I'm not an imitator, you know, as much as I
love other languages and trying to learn them and never
never doing it as well as I'd like to. Holly,
my sister went to Spelman and came back with this
(14:57):
new repertoire. All of a sudden she could switch. She
had a kind of black English, she had the cadence,
whereas I never did that. And to be honest, if
I had gone to morehouse, I don't think that would
have happened. I talk the way I talk in other
people imitate me, and I think that's just you know,
neurons or something. You know. I like the way I talk.
I'm not going to talk like someone else. But that
(15:19):
is the reason. And I wish that I had picked
it up for real, because not having that natural competence
means that you come off sometimes as thinking you're better
than people when really it's just that that's not in
your mouth. And I can completely understand what it would
look like from another perspective, but yeah, that's it sometimes.
To be honest, I have wished that I was and
(15:40):
I'm not just saying this because it's you, except I am.
I wish that I was Black Canadian because I think
that's less of an issue there in terms of the
place of American Black English in what it is to
be a black person. But that's just an idle thought.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I remember the first time I saw that kind of
the switching as a kid in Jamaica, seeing my uncle,
you know, a brown skin Jamaican talked to us in
the Queen's English, and he was getting gas, had a
(16:14):
gas pump.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
That was amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I'm maybe nine, gets out of the car and he
starts talking to the guy pumping the gas, and there's
some It wasn't just that he switched into Patuas, it
was that he also his manner.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Completely changed you a different person.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
He was there. They were doing that Jamaican thing where
they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry, yes,
which I'd never seen before. I thought, this is the
coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. That
he could go from literally Malcolm blah blah blah and
then boom, and it was just that kind of.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And that kind of trash talking thing, just like their
papers written about that one. Actually, yeah, that is that
is very common. That must have been wild. Yeah, especially
to see that big a switch, because in my case
it was like from here to here. But with Patuas,
first he's Margaret Thatcher and then suddenly he's Bob Marley.
That must have been.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Or my mother hearing my then I began to hear
my mother when she would get angry, she would lapse,
not into full on bad way. But you could hear
the Jamaican coming out of that idea as well. It's
funny because I'm making the same on some level observations
you are as a child, but I have no I
what sidetracks me at that age is not how people
(17:32):
are speaking, but how they're telling, how they're explaining things.
I get obsessed in the same way that you. I
think it's funny, in the same way that you got
obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves. To me,
it was about we're we're gonna we're playing hearts, and
our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts, and my
brother's starts expanding hearts to my cousin. He's doing it
(17:54):
all wrong. That was my obsessions. I'm sick. I'm just like, why,
why start with the point of the game, like, what
are you doing?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah? And I realized how deeply kind of and it
bothered you. Oh to this day it works.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I always just assumed that people were going to do
stuff wrong, and I would have been listening to what
the grammar was.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
No, no, no, I uh. If the surest way for me
to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that
someone has written for something just like this is this
is I mean, come on, I want to call up
the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back
with more of my conversation with John McCarter. I want
(18:52):
to talk a little bit about your and by the way,
I always find this question, if it's asked to me,
deeply annoying, so you don't have to answer it if
you don't want to. But I wanted to talk about
your kind of place in the culture right now, which
is really interesting to me. And I have a grand,
unified a quarter theory.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I want to hear this because I don't.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Here's my theory. At any given moment, in sort of
popular culture or intellectual popular culture, there is someone who's
allowed to get away with saying anything. You that person.
I think you get to say whatever you want for
a variety of reasons, which i'd like you to unpack.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Can you give me Can you give me one half
of an example of what you mean? Like, I'm allowed
to say it, but no one else is.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
As in, you wrote a beautiful was it or not bad?
I can't remember where you wrote it? A thing about
your own experience with affirmative action, Yes, no, one else
could write that.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
True.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
You write about you in your column are constantly, in
a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules
for discourse, particularly around your code switching column of yesterday,
like all right, not allowed to do that? You know
this way?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
You must forget them the minute I write them this today?
Oh today is what's her name? The Congress from Jasmine Crockett. Yes, okay,
Jasmon Crockett. You said, very gently and nicely, you said
to her, come on, now, you get to do that.
I do you know what?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Who else can do that?
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What you're saying is something I'm feeling as I get
a little older, because I'm pushing sixty and so I'm
no longer the young pup, and i feel like I've
got a certain amount of life experience, and also just
I'm beginning to come off as the kind of person
who you call sir or in the parking lot, okay, boss,
you know that sort of thing, And so I'm beginning
(20:59):
to take those chances to an extent with Jasmine Crockett.
I will say this, I was very careful in the
wording of that because I thought, especially because she's forty
in a bit and I'm about to be sixty. I male,
I have an imperious demeanor. I don't think that she
did anything that was absolutely sinful, and so honestly, in
(21:20):
the editing of that, we were very careful with the words,
and so near the end of it, I say that
her explanation for why she made fun of the man
in the wheelchair was what did I call it, I'm
clever but hopeless. And there was an idea that I
was supposed to say clever but cowardly, and I said, no,
(21:40):
that's too mean. I don't want to call her a coward.
I want to say that the explanation just doesn't work.
So I think part of it, but the fact that
I wrote that at all, I don't know if I
would have written that one twenty years ago, or if
I did, it would have been read as John just
likes to criticize black people, and he does that every week,
when I actually do it very rarely. But I think
what you're talking about is that I'm getting a little
(22:01):
older and therefore feel like I can say things that
I couldn't when I was Coleman Hughes's age like thirty,
where if I say things even if I thought I
was right, it would be you're too young, how dare you?
And I really felt at the time, I need to
respect my elders. I would try very hard to do that,
especially in Black American culture. Don't you don't sass your elders,
(22:22):
You don't sass your parents. Well, now I'm my parents,
and so I'm going to start doing some constructive sassing.
I think that's part of.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
It, part of it as well. I think there's other layers. Well,
one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays
as much attention to language as you do, you're better
at it.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I don't. I'm not.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
By which I mean that. Just the example you just
gave on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless, that
someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of
language might have said cowardly with a quite a you know,
there's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would
be perceived and read. Yeah, and you're but you are
(23:11):
professionally alert to those nuances, and that permits you a
great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically
underestimate how important word choice is and how acutely sensitive
we are to the word the words that are used,
particularly if they're directed at us. I want to talk
about my favorite chapter.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
In the book. What's the favorite.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
It's the it's the chapter about you.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Thank you for not being about they and them? Okay you, Yeah,
that was the one that was the funnest to write.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It's the fun it is, so just sit to work.
Explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
The book is. It's not just a book about they.
I mean there. I think there already is a book
just about they. I couldn't have sustained anyone's attention for
that long. It's each pronoun So there's I, there's you,
there's he, she, it, there's we, and there's a. So
that's seven chapters. Notice that it's a compact and the
idea is to give the history of each one of
those little words, and then to discuss some controversy that
(24:09):
is connected with them. We kind of resist controversy. That
chapter was a challenge because I was thinking, nobody fights
over week. But I got a chapter out of it anyway.
But that was the point. And of course, when I
was writing it in twenty twenty three on a sun
porch Upstate, I was thinking ha ha, happy linguistic pronouns,
because the book before this was called wok Racism, and
(24:32):
it was a bourbon fueled, angry little screed that needed
to be written in twenty twenty. But it's this book
where I'm screaming on every page, and books like that
are not fun to write. So after that was over,
I thought, I want to do one of the happy
language books, and I thought, what about the pronouns. The
last thing I was thinking was all of this debate
we're having now about TRANSI identity, et cetera. I was
(24:52):
just writing about pronouns. So the book has fallen into
a different atmosphere than I was expecting. But really it's
just me enjoying pronouns. Like in Nine Nasty Words, I
enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
But you so tell us, tell us the problem with you.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
You is a problem. I don't mean that you all
are a problem. Oh there was some Black English too,
We will get there. That was silly. So it used
to be yeah, exactly exactly, Thou Malcolm as opposed to
you in the audience. That's how English is supposed to be.
Thou art sitting in a chair. You are sitting. To
(25:29):
be honest, with the lighting, I can't tell what you're
sitting in, but I presume they are chairs, and so
thou and you. You're supposed to have singular and then
a plural one. In early Middle English and before there
was a duel. So if it's just you too, then
it was yeat and so thou, yeat and you, And
then they had case forms thou if it's subject, thee.
(25:50):
If it's an object, you was the object form. Ye
was the subject form like here yea and then yeat
didn't do that, but the possessive of yeat. If you
wanted to say, you two's book, ink book, get that
and so got it wrong. No, ink was the object
form yeat and then ink. So I've done it all
for you too, my children, I've done it all for ink.
(26:12):
Inkor was the possessive. So you had all of these
U forms and everything's chugging along, and today all we
have is you, not even ye and you, just you.
Thou is gone, know thee just you? It all just
falls away now is the one we miss. It's like
I had a disease. Yeah, that was the one we miss.
We need thou, we need that we need it back
right now, but now we can't. We can't do it now.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
So let's convince us about why we need to have
thou back.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Well, if you think about it, if you're going from
English to almost any language you're likely to learn. Notice
the first thing you learn is that there's something like
dot and then there's some plural form. You never learned
that the word for you is the same both in
the singular. If there's a chart in front of you,
the singular and the plural. That's not how languages work.
And so all over Europe this is preserved. This difference
(27:03):
is preserved. There are different spheres of influence that it
has in different languages and at different times. But if
it's Rush, it's supposed to be THEE and lie. You
don't have lee used for everything. You don't have THEE
use for everything. English is different in that way. English
is a very odd language in certain corners of its being.
And to tell the truth, it's it's obscure. We need
(27:25):
a singular versus a plural form. And we try to
create a plural form by saying y'all or use or
yen's and we're told that that's just funny. It's just slang.
It smells like fish or bubblegum or marijuana. It's not
it's not a real word. And yet all we're trying
to do is be a normal language.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
So what's your preference here? There's two there's two parallel
strends of argument here, and I want to figure out
which side you're on. So you originally is the plural,
that is the singular singular. What has happened is that
you has come to encompass both, and we've developed these
colloquial forms y'all, et cetera, to take up the plural position,
(28:08):
and we we've moved you to the singular. Do you
think you should remain the singular or should you be
moved back into the plural position?
Speaker 1 (28:19):
I understand. I'd like to see thou come back. I
think we need thou. There was nothing wrong with it.
It's just like German, do we need thou? The problem
is that Thou sounds antique. Thou sounds like somebody in
a periwig who's about to die of yellow fever because
it's so far back. But if we bring in you,
then we have to accept y'all as legitimate, or you
(28:41):
guys or use And that's really tough too, because of
the aforesaid odors of those words.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Why did I was thinking of?
Speaker 1 (28:49):
You know?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
So if someone wrote the hymn how great Thou art today,
it would be how great you.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Are, how great you are?
Speaker 2 (28:54):
And say it's not it's not as good God to thee,
how great you are you are? It doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
That was great for art, yeah, but art thou. But
it would be hard to use out on the street,
I think, do I say it in the book? No,
that was about something else. You could not say thou naked?
You know it just it wouldn't seem quite right. It
was I have to use you.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
But no, you've said the problems with both positions. But
come on, you're not answering my question.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Try if you had to.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
If I make you languages are and you get to
push you to the singular a pro position and either
reinstate thou or or establish use and y'all, which what
which move were you making?
Speaker 1 (29:50):
If I were the czar, like if I could do
an executive order, and yeah, I would, you would be
in the singular and I would enforce that you all
was more widely accepted. I would say that the Wall
Street Journal has to start allowing you all, and it
has to start being taught in school with a teacher
with a stick at a black That's that's the way
(30:10):
I would do it Already. When I teach about language,
I say it's going to be I U he she
we y'all. They I always say that because you need
you need a y'all. Yeah. That center.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
One of the things that it had not occurred to
me until I read that chapter was that in the South,
y'all is only is the plural, that is to say,
and if it is, if it's addressed to a person
you're invoking. Isn't that nice to see in others? I
hadn't realized it. So if I go to the South,
then I say, well, ye, that's what y'all think, and
(30:42):
I mean just you, Yeah, I've committed a violation.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, because they don't use it to mean the singular.
But when they say it's one person, you're at a
seven eleven and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't
mean y'all that one person right there. It means it's
implying that there's somebody out there in the car or
something which is is the following. It's a politeness strategy.
So with du and VU, you can address a single
(31:07):
person as VU as if they're people, and so you're
not hitting the person like this. If you say y'all
come back now, you're kind of saying voo come back now,
You're you're taking away the directness to say you you
one individual, I hope you come back and buy another
slim gym. It's a little direct as opposed to y'all
come back. It's a very courtly thing that y'all.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I want to go back to something you said. Well,
we need to distinguish between the plural and singular you.
But what problem does it create for as when we can't.
Is it just a lack of specificity.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's just that you need to pause and clean something up.
And you'd rather not have to imagine never having to
say I don't mean you all, I mean just you,
or I mean just you not you all over there.
There are larger tragedies, but nevertheless, that is one of
those things where oh, that is one of those things
where we have we have a ding like for example,
(32:03):
in French, you're driving a rental car and you're in
a big hurry and all the other cars are parked
in a line, and you pull into a space and
you don't really park it right, and the butt of
the car is kind of pushing out, so you run
down into the little hut and you say, I'm sorry,
but my car is sticking out. There's no way to
put it that way. In French, nothing can stick out.
You can say I didn't park properly, you can say
(32:25):
that the row is uneven, but if you try to
say the car is sticking out and I'm sorry, they
don't have it. Now. Does that mean that it's hard
to be French? I doubt it, but it would be
nice if they had that word. It would be nice
if we had a thou, or if we could use
y'all in the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
So what I would like to see is the country
divided on this question, so there's a there would be
Thou districts, and then they would be y'all.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
That would be adorable.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
And then, because I don't like y'all to be honest,
I do like thou.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
I would like Thou to come.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Back, Thou, Thou art, Thou art reading. It just sounds
like somebody who died one hundred and fifty years ago,
but I could get used to it.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Is that This is another interesting language question, though, is
that because is that going to be as true for
our children? Well, our children had the same associations with Thou.
I mean once, why do I think I sang that him?
For a reason? I grew up singing that him all
of my associations without biblical. If we move into us
(33:29):
into a world in which people's association with religious practice
is vanishing, then doesn't that free us up to go
back and pick up a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
It's possible. It's funny you say religious because I forgot something,
which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friends
Select in Philadelphia in the late seventies, and back then
there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers who
were still using THEE and thy and in natural speech,
the ones who were super Quaker as in dressing Quaker.
(34:04):
And I remember there was this one teacher who would
come and, you know, look at your paper and say,
don't get to put thy name on thy paper. And
he meant it straight, he didn't mean it ironically, And
you know part of why I don't like that, And
I never thought about this. You're making me think about
a lot of things I haven't thought about. Because one
day he decided to take a long trip in a
canoe and he happily, you know, pulled out into the
(34:26):
Delaware River, and you was talking about when he was
going to come back, and no one ever saw that
man again. And I must admit that I associate thou
with that man, and that is much to arbitrary. So
I can't laughing at this man's demise, but I need
to stop that. I would enjoy their being thou, but
(34:48):
I'm trying to imagine it imposed on a whole society,
and I cannot see my ten and thirteen year old
feeling differently about it. But then again, there are aspects
of them that I may never know. I'll ask them
next time I see them.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
And what about the you mentioned this in I believe
in passing the English use of one, you do yes one?
The English uppercrust resolve this problem by if I say
one in the eight way that English one doesn't think
that does one?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
What am I doing? Am I explicitly freeing up you
to be in the plural form? Is that?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
What I'm doing? Well? In that case, we use you colloquially, well,
why suddenly can I not talk? And he had a
stroke that night? You colloquially, but we would actually say
you can't do that, can you? And so you gets
dragged even into that one usage which ended up replacing
it was originally a word mon, which was not man,
but it was mon, and then mon just dropped away.
(35:41):
Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves for some reason.
But you have the one, and you're saying, does that allow.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Exactly why they're doing that? Why why does the English
upper class use one instead of you?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Because you was overstretched, because not only is it used
in the singular and the plural, but you also use
it for this indefinite. Real Germanic languages, normal European languages
have some dedicated pronoun, as we call it, for the indefinite.
That's one thing that a pronoun should do. That book
shold have an extra chapter. In Old English it was mon,
then mon shortened to muh, and so you would say,
(36:16):
you know, you gotta do it, and you would say,
muh gotta do it. That's not very accurate Middle English,
but you get my point. And then it just that
muh flew away and you ended up being dragged in
for that too. We work that little word so hard
it's a miracle that we don't trip over our linguistic
shoelaces with it more. But languages aren't usually like that.
There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called barrack,
(36:38):
and all they have is I we than you. And
then there's one word that means he she it, and
they one word like quack. It's not quack, but it's
just one thing. But we're more like that than we
are like the European languages that were actually related whips.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
It's sorry to be a dog with a bone here,
But why don't we all use the English.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
One in order to give you a break?
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, because if its says or to give one a break.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
But we can't because if you use one in that way,
you sound like you have a big mustachio and you
walk with a cane and you're in black and white.
In an old movie played by an actor named c
Aubrey Smith, one mustn't do that. It's too high.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
As a kid, we would make fun of this because
my father would. I think I think he reduced this
locution and that he abandoned it because you're trapped once
you start with the one. One one doesn't think that
one should do that does one? And then you realize
this is an endless stream of ones in your future.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Or Fats Waller saying one never knows, do one? But
that was arch he was. He's saying that while he's
knocking back the gin. That was funny. In his real life,
he certainly wouldn't have said, you know, one never knows,
and so one, for arbitrary reasons is marked, and so
it has that upper crust meaning, and most of us
(38:01):
our only upper crust on occasion, and so we need
something more casual. And it ends up being yeah, poor
little you all the time.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, it's a heartbreaking chapter. It's we'll be right back
with more of my conversation with John mccorter. We have questions.
(38:33):
Some of these questions are really good.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
The questions are always fun.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
How does English compare with other languages in terms of
words on the move, the shifting of words meaning over time.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Words are on the move. That was the title of
one of my books. Actually, words are on the move
all the time in all languages. Some of them are
moving faster than others. But there's no such thing as
a language where the words just stay where they are,
And it can be hard to process that the words
are on the move because it usually not always, but
usually happens very slowly. But words meanings are always kind
(39:07):
of morphing. Obnoxious used to mean vulnerable to harm. And
so don't render yourself obnoxious by wearing too few clothes
to the jousting tournament, or that's not the you take
my point. So it only came to mean noxious because
it sounded like noxious, and so we now use it
(39:29):
to mean that. If you look in a grammar guide
in about nineteen hundred, there's always some person, the kind
of person who says one and has that mustache, who
is complaining. People are using obnoxious to mean annoying, when
really it's supposed to mean subject to harm. Sniff sniff.
We're gonna have to deal with this. This is a
sign of the lack of educator. And so that is
what happens to all words. And that's true in Japanese, Hungarian, Tahitian.
(39:51):
There's no language where that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Someone would show me. I don't know if it's true
as a Canadian that in Quebec. The French that is
spoken is archaic French. So why is Quebecua French not
moving at the same pace as French French. So that
does suggest a different different languages move at different rates.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
That's a very good question, and the answer to it
is that Parisian French is one thing, the French of Quebec,
and it's actually very similar to Cajun French is a
different It is a different grouping of dialects, and so
you can say that these things are older. But the
thing is that those dialects have changed a great deal
(40:33):
since they were moved over to Quebec. And the Quebec
dialect is very different than what it would have been
in say, the late sixteen hundreds and the seventeen hundreds.
It's just that you can still see the likenesses. It's
not that Quebec stayed the wall. This was and so
all languages move along. And the truth is, I have
not done a study of the Jual spoken in for example, Montreal.
(40:55):
I'm sure that that variety has changed more in the
past three hundred years than French standard French in Paris,
because written languages change more slowly. So if a language
is just allowed to do what it wants to do.
Some language in a rainforest spoken by indigenous people, it's
never written down. That language moves along considerably, such that
(41:17):
you might even have a little bit of a problem
understanding your great great grandparents. Once it's on the page
and your brain is kind of on writing, as I
put it, and you think that the real language is written,
then it tends to slow language change down. So what
we know is how language changes where when they the
new they comes in, we're thinking, good lord, what happened?
(41:37):
That would not shock people as much if this were
an unwritten language. Language changes very quickly until it's yoked
to the page, which is true of only about two
hundred of the seven thousand languages that there are the
idea that you think of the language in writing, and
then you think of speaking as just a sloppy way
of how it's done on the page. That's only a
very few languages, and we happen to be speaking one
(41:59):
normal human language gets to mind its own business, and
so it's faster for them.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
What are your thoughts on Black American English being adopted
by younger generations in the slang they use. I'm assuming
this question is about by younger and in some cases
non black generations.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I think it's great, and I know that there is
a strain of thought that says that non black people
are stealing Black English features and appropriating them and that
there should be a line. But for one, there could
never be that line. That line couldn't happen, especially with
the mainstreaming of hip hop, and it's getting to the
(42:38):
point where you can be a thoroughly mature person and
not really remember when rap was listened to by basically
all kids. That happened really in the nineties. But once
you've got that and you've got that music in people's ears,
and just in general, I think that it's a sign
that there is less of a color line than there
used to be, and we all know that we still
(42:58):
have work to do. But there was a different time.
There was nineteen fifty and then there was nineteen eighty,
which was very different from today. And I think that
this business of supposing that non black people aren't going
to borrow what is probably the most vibrant slang in
the United States, it will never happen. It's actually a
good sign that it is happening, and it really is
(43:20):
at the point where if you're going to look at
how modern English is changing, which is mostly the words,
two times out of three it comes from either black
black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source
of our new words. And really it's a word I
try to avoid two words holistic because it just makes
(43:42):
everybody happy to hear the word holistic and also the
word dynamic. It's dynamic. What the hell does that mean?
But yeah, I think that black English jumping into mainstream
English is quite dynamic, and I enjoy watching it. So yeah,
I'm not giving the right answer because I know there
are people who think that it's appropriation. That's complicated though,
and I think that's an over application of the appropriation concept.
(44:06):
I think, yeah, we have.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
To end sadly and ask you one nice question, and
that is one of my it's my favorite question for
someone like you. Let's imagine you were made language are
of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell
me the the the three language fixes you would impose
(44:31):
on all of us. We've done you, we want you
want y'all, We've given that to you. I want three
new ones and then we're done.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I want people to stop saying it is what it is,
because I find that the chilliest, most dismissive expression that's
got the stop. There's something, there's something pickier. You can't
just walk into this Roman start yelling. That's how the
sentence should be. You can't simply walk into this. You
(45:00):
can't just walk But everybody says you just can't walk
into this roman start yelling. That is now ordinary American
and English, and I have no right to have any
problem with it, but it's it's kind of like you
wanting the order in the monopoly directions. It doesn't make
any sense. It's you can't just walk in, but people
say just can't all the time. There was an episode
(45:21):
of The Lucy Show where somebody did it, and so
I know that it's not new, but it really it
hurts me. And then let's see what else. This is
one that I really didn't like when I started hearing
it in the nineties. Yeah yeah, yeah, people say when
they're having a conversation, they'll say, oh yeah, yeah yeah,
but they also make it in an orange color. You're
(45:43):
trying to say something, they say yeah, yeah yeah, But
and it sounds pushy to me, kind of like you
shut up and that's not what they mean. But to me,
it's just one one yeah. Would do. What they're trying
to do is take their turn in the conversation and
they say yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same way that
now both you and I probably use exclamation points in
our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind be
(46:06):
there in a second game. And so that that has
been And so now if you want to really exclaim,
if you want to say something like the tangerine is
the best flavor, then you have to use two exclamation points. Yeah.
So yeah, yeah, yeah is kind of long for what
used to be just yeah, But it's just this kind
of natural that it's kind of like, you know, sections
(46:26):
of DNA replicating yeah, and you know that's that was
a weird analogy.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
But yeah, no one uses more exclamation marks points in
in email than me. You know this?
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Are you really doing this?
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (46:40):
It's so exaerine.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
It's to the point now where I think that with
people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two,
they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so why
is not so cold today? He's cut back to two
exclamation So I gotta I gotta like three and four
that Saturday.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's right, And all that is is that you're being
cheery and polite. Yeah, that was not the way we
wrote emails thirty years ago or even twenty. But now
I'm doing the exclamation points because I'm thinking if I
just have a period, it makes it look like I'm angry,
and that's how punctuation change.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
You might be you, but you might well be angry John.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I have my days, but I would disguise it by
using a meaningless exclamation boy.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
All right, one one last one for the road.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
So it was you just can't It was yeah, yeah, yeah,
And then there was the what was the first thing?
Is what it is? And it is what it is.
People have got to stop that. So I would I
would have those three and then maybe yes, it's a.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Correct response to it is what it is. It isn't
what it is? Is that what? Yeah? But yeah yeah yeah,
but it isn't what it is.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
In this case, and so you can't say that. And
what they're really saying is stop. It's kind of like yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's stop talking about that like it is what it is,
and therefore there's no point in dwelling on it, and
now let's talk about RFKA Junior or something. And what
I wanted to talk about was the tangerine ice cream.
So that's that's how that goes.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
John, This has been great fun. This is a wonderful book.
You should all go and get it and give it
to your friends as well. And thank you for joining
us tonight, and thank you Jones, thank you Malca, thanks
for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about Faces,
(48:39):
an episode on raccoons, and another on English muffins. Revision's
History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and
Ben Adaph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji, mixed and
mastered by Sarah Buguerer, Engineered by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original
score in music by Luis Kara. Our executive producer is
(49:00):
Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Gretacombe. I'm
Malcolm Glappa.
Bushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I was a fan of John mcquarter long before I
met him for the first time. Mccorter is a linguist
at Columbia University and a music lover and a New
York Times columnist, basically a renaissance man. It was maybe
twenty nineteen when we first spoke. At the time, I
was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor
of Los Angeles from nineteen seventy three to nineteen ninety three,
(00:45):
And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I
was struck by something I heard. Listen, there is nothing
there to hide.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has
been an open book. And you know this is another
demonstration of that.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Tom Bradley is black, born in Texas, grew up in
south central Los Angeles. So I went to see mcquarter,
went to his rabbit warren of an office, played him
that bit of tape and said, explain this to me.
Why does a black guy whose parents were sharecroppers from
Texas sound like Carry Grant? And for an hour of
(01:23):
the most wonderful conversation he explained to me exactly why
he did. Fast forward a few years, I was doing
our series on the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and I
got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the
most important journalists in the world in the nineteen thirties.
And I heard some old tapes of her and she
sounded like she was the Duchess of York. Only do
(01:46):
you know where she grew up? Buffalo? So who do
I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo
end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John
mc warter. My point is that there is a certain
kind of question about language, about race, about why we
speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is,
(02:07):
let's call up John mcquarter. I love John mcquarter and
when he said he had a new book coming out
called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him could I interview you
about it? And lucky for me, he said yes. My
name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast
(02:27):
about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going
to run the conversation I had with Jah mcquarter this
spring at the ninety second Street Why, which was delightful.
I did this interview with John right after finishing up
the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen
to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of
(02:49):
time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard
it is, and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot
from someone like Oprah. And that episode was very much
on my mind as I was interviewing the quarter because
I was thinking, oh am I going to measure up.
Where do I land on the Oprah Joe Rogan continuum.
(03:09):
I'll let you be the judge of that. Although I
will say this is not exactly a fair test. The
degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John
mcwarter is very very hell hello everyone, thanks for coming, John,
Thank you for agreeing to join us tonight.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Malcolm, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
No the this is our I wanted to. I was
thinking back when I I first met you, and I
think it was I called you opera went to see
you because I was doing something on the first black
mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. It was Tom Bradley,
that's right, yeah, And I was listening to tapes of
him speaking and he sounded like the whitest guy I
(03:55):
could imagine and I was trying to.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Figure out why I sounded like a Disney announcer.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And you gave wait, tell me a little bit before
we even get into this. It was so much fun
your answer. Explain to me why that would be.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So I don't remember what I said then because it
was before you know what, and therefore it feels like
it was seventy five years ago. But I know that
I probably would have said that he would have grown
up in a time when the unspoken cultural expectations of
oratory culture were such that if you were trying to
make your way in the world, whatever color you are,
(04:30):
as an American, there was an expectation that you would
learn the standard dialect and be absolutely comfortable in it. Frankly,
Booker T. Washington did that too. He was born a slave.
If you listen to recordings, you'd think he was Teddy Roosevelt,
and that's because that's what you had to do, which
was kind of unfair. But I was thinking he comes
from the time when black people were expected to speak
(04:52):
that way if they wanted to have public influence. And
I'm sure that he spoke in different ways when he
did not have the camera on him, didn't I say
that I'm trying.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
To say something along that lines, and we were the thing.
The fascinating question is when it did death stop? It stopped?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, he doesn't.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
No. No, that ended in the late sixties, and there
was a new idea, and in some ways a healthy
idea that to be taken seriously. You don't have to
learn to talk in the standard way. You can express
yourself how you feel like it.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The minute I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh,
I remember I played you with tape. You're like, oh,
And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John.
This is what it means to be a linguist. You're
constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't
let a.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
More or less. Yeah. Although I happen to be what's
called a historical linguist, which means that I'm interested in
how language changes, you can be somebody who's interested in
just how language is right now, in which case that
Tom Bradley question would be less of interest. But for me,
it's all about what was going on in the past,
and especially nowadays, we're at the point where you have
(06:02):
one hundred years it's actually technically one hundred and two
years of people recorded speaking and moving at the same time.
And so there's some sound films starting in nineteen twenty three,
and that to me is history, especially now that we've
got the Internet and so you can just see these
things happening and you can listen to the way people talk,
and so that's something I do. Not all linguists would
(06:24):
be inclined to do that. They would do other interesting things,
but it's a little obsession of mine, especially lately. How
has American English changed over about the past one hundred
and twenty five years. When you can actually hear it,
you can listen to this won't go on for too
much longer, but you can listen to the black musical
theater artist Bert Williams, who has a certain name, but
(06:45):
he first became famous working with George Walker. They're two
black men. You can see them in pictures and you
know they've got the minstrel makeup and they're in these
forced poses and you kind of think, what were they
like and it's hard to tell. There's some recordings of them,
there are a few, and they're like like that. You
can listen to the way they spoke and sang. They
both sound Caribbean, including George Walker who grew up in Kansas,
(07:09):
because Black English vowels were different back then. If you
listen to black people on cylinders from the eighteen nineties
and then then they don't say quote, they say quote
like that somebody's gonna marry me. Somebody's going to marry me.
That's how they sounded. And so these are the obsessions
that one starts to have.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
When you say you have but this sounds like a
fantastic obsession. By the way, how does that like? Is
this something you do sort of for fun? In other words,
do you have places you go to find these historical
or are you just watching a movie from the thirties
and you stop it and you go back five minutes
(07:48):
and you lay up on.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Both of those things. Yeah, and it's not only black people,
it's just people in general. Listen to that vowel. Why
did the person use the word fantastical in that particular way.
There are all sorts of things, and then like, do
I go looking for it? Not necessarily, but if I
find out that there is some four CD player set
called Sad of the deep past. The first thing I'm
(08:12):
thinking is how interesting could most of that be? But
there'll be two things where somebody is black or somebody
is using something colloquial. And so I'll listen to all
four of those damn CDs once because you never know
what you're gonna get, and you get just enough to
put into books and to mention to you and things
like that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
So when did you when did you, at what point
in your in your career life, whatever, did you realize
that this was something of particular interest to you?
Speaker 1 (08:40):
You mean linguistics in general.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
No, No, this thing you're just talking about that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
It's a summer day in nineteen seventy five and my
father's got his beer and he's watching this bad old
movie and it was a movie biography, old one of
Stephen Foster, and the people keep walking through and they
the vowels are different, and I'm gonna write swanee River.
(09:09):
And I asked d why did they talk that way?
And he said, well, you know, things change, and that's
about all he had. But I remember thinking those were
real people and yet they don't talk like us. Why?
And then a seed was gradually planted. There's an episode
of I've ever spoken about this. There's an episode of
(09:30):
the Lucy Show, not I Love Lucy, but her second
show that got bad. And in one of the early episodes,
Lucy gets a maid and the maid is snobbish, and
so Lucy starts buying the maid lunch and at one
point she says, Oh, it's a roast chicken. It's broasted.
And she says, it's broasted. And I was listening to
that when I was about thirteen and thinking, that's not
a word anymore. Is it? That sort of thing for
(09:53):
some reason interests me? And next thing, you know, you've
got so much of it stuck crowding out more important
things in your head. But you can write books about.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
It, John, you gotta do better than that. You can't
say for some reason it interested me. You got to
tell me good, tell us more than that.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
The way people talk is very resonant to me. And
as I've gotten older, I've realized that for other people
it's the way people walk, or the way somebody dances,
of the way people dress. But I know from a
very early age just speech was interesting. It was a
window into the soul. People spoke differently, and that was
about this much blackness. It was just listening to people
(10:34):
in general, getting a sense that my teachers had a
certain accent that the white people on TV didn't have.
In Philadelphia, you say lousy whereas Lucy says lousy. And
I was thinking, well, that's interesting, annoying my southern relatives
by noticing that they had different vocabulary here and there.
You know, I'm this little kid, I talk like missed
and I say, you say Carrie when we would say take,
(10:56):
and they would get tired of that. But I realized
that it was because I was interested in dialect. Also,
one thing I missed, and I think it's partly from
being black, is I never heard Black English as wrong.
I didn't grow up speaking it. I grew up hearing it.
I have a good passive competence. But I remember cousins
(11:17):
who you know very much, spoke it and they would
use features of Black English, and I would listen and
not think nothing. You know, some people just not care.
I would not think that's bad grammar, that's wrong. I
wouldn't think it was exotic. I would listen to it
and think, hmm, that's different from the way I would
put it, And I wonder, why is that based on
(11:39):
something in history. I had one cousin who was using
what we call the narrative, had people who studied Black
English and so, and then we had gone downstairs, and
then we had seen that there was a raccoon in
the basement, and then we had said, hey, let's get
rid of that raccoon. And then we had gone back upstairs.
And I keep waiting for you had what, and then what,
and it was just all had And I remember listening
to Darren doing that and thinking that must be different
(12:00):
instead of him not knowing what had means. And then
years later I found out that linguist had written about that.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Wait, my wife, who's black, Uh, she uses that. That's
where it comes from. What she sticks head in the
craziest places.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
It might be a black thing, yes, or like when
Will Smith says, well, what had happened was he's.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
What she did?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
She said today she said, I had went. I don't
understand this is a highly educated went to Princeton lawyer
in she just takes head and just kind of like
shovels it in randomly into her senses.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That is, that is because it's a good, earthy yet
systematic way of using using the language. It's called narrative had.
There are papers about it, noticeably papers. There's one paper
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
So her father, wait, I want to her father grew
up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida, and he would
be growing up in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
He would have gotten that narrative had from Harlem, most
likely from Harlem. Yeah, that's good, solid northern Black English. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Now you said something earlier that you didn't speak Black
English growing up.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Why not? That's deep, Malcolm. Actually, that gets into my
parents and what they were like, and so plenty of
black family speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Area in Philadelphia
was a very integrated neighborhood. The black people in the
neighborhood had become middle class from mostly being working class.
(13:35):
So there was plenty of Black English spoken in the neighborhood.
Close friends of mine spoke it. My mother grew up
speaking Southern Black English, but switched to a kind of
generalized suburban Northern when she moved to Philadelphia. My father
spoke Philadelphia Black English. But and this is something I
really have only wrapped my head around over the past
(13:55):
about year really thinking about it. They were not inclined
to use their vernacular around their kids. They didn't speak
it to us. I remember thinking, Mom gets on the
phone with her relatives and all of a sudden, there's
this other way she has of speaking. I was trying
to wrap my head around it. Whereas, to tell you
the truth, most black moms would have spoken that way,
(14:16):
at least some to their kids as well. And the
truth is both of my parents tried their best. They
were both brilliant people. They provided a materially great existence,
but they were both very closed off people in general,
and that played out in terms of dialect. Then also,
my sister talks exactly like me. If I have a
weird voice, as one other person, it's my sister who's
(14:36):
four years younger, and she sounds just like this. So
it was it was both of us, and I find
myself thinking, sometimes we both do that. But also I'm not.
I'm not an imitator, you know, as much as I
love other languages and trying to learn them and never
never doing it as well as I'd like to. Holly,
my sister went to Spelman and came back with this
(14:57):
new repertoire. All of a sudden she could switch. She
had a kind of black English, she had the cadence,
whereas I never did that. And to be honest, if
I had gone to morehouse, I don't think that would
have happened. I talk the way I talk in other
people imitate me, and I think that's just you know,
neurons or something. You know. I like the way I talk.
I'm not going to talk like someone else. But that
(15:19):
is the reason. And I wish that I had picked
it up for real, because not having that natural competence
means that you come off sometimes as thinking you're better
than people when really it's just that that's not in
your mouth. And I can completely understand what it would
look like from another perspective, but yeah, that's it sometimes.
To be honest, I have wished that I was and
(15:40):
I'm not just saying this because it's you, except I am.
I wish that I was Black Canadian because I think
that's less of an issue there in terms of the
place of American Black English in what it is to
be a black person. But that's just an idle thought.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I remember the first time I saw that kind of
the switching as a kid in Jamaica, seeing my uncle,
you know, a brown skin Jamaican talked to us in
the Queen's English, and he was getting gas, had a
(16:14):
gas pump.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
That was amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I'm maybe nine, gets out of the car and he
starts talking to the guy pumping the gas, and there's
some It wasn't just that he switched into Patuas, it
was that he also his manner.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Completely changed you a different person.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
He was there. They were doing that Jamaican thing where
they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry, yes,
which I'd never seen before. I thought, this is the
coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. That
he could go from literally Malcolm blah blah blah and
then boom, and it was just that kind of.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And that kind of trash talking thing, just like their
papers written about that one. Actually, yeah, that is that
is very common. That must have been wild. Yeah, especially
to see that big a switch, because in my case
it was like from here to here. But with Patuas,
first he's Margaret Thatcher and then suddenly he's Bob Marley.
That must have been.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Or my mother hearing my then I began to hear
my mother when she would get angry, she would lapse,
not into full on bad way. But you could hear
the Jamaican coming out of that idea as well. It's
funny because I'm making the same on some level observations
you are as a child, but I have no I
what sidetracks me at that age is not how people
(17:32):
are speaking, but how they're telling, how they're explaining things.
I get obsessed in the same way that you. I
think it's funny, in the same way that you got
obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves. To me,
it was about we're we're gonna we're playing hearts, and
our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts, and my
brother's starts expanding hearts to my cousin. He's doing it
(17:54):
all wrong. That was my obsessions. I'm sick. I'm just like, why,
why start with the point of the game, like, what
are you doing?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah? And I realized how deeply kind of and it
bothered you. Oh to this day it works.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I always just assumed that people were going to do
stuff wrong, and I would have been listening to what
the grammar was.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
No, no, no, I uh. If the surest way for me
to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that
someone has written for something just like this is this
is I mean, come on, I want to call up
the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back
with more of my conversation with John McCarter. I want
(18:52):
to talk a little bit about your and by the way,
I always find this question, if it's asked to me,
deeply annoying, so you don't have to answer it if
you don't want to. But I wanted to talk about
your kind of place in the culture right now, which
is really interesting to me. And I have a grand,
unified a quarter theory.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I want to hear this because I don't.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Here's my theory. At any given moment, in sort of
popular culture or intellectual popular culture, there is someone who's
allowed to get away with saying anything. You that person.
I think you get to say whatever you want for
a variety of reasons, which i'd like you to unpack.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Can you give me Can you give me one half
of an example of what you mean? Like, I'm allowed
to say it, but no one else is.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
As in, you wrote a beautiful was it or not bad?
I can't remember where you wrote it? A thing about
your own experience with affirmative action, Yes, no, one else
could write that.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
True.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
You write about you in your column are constantly, in
a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules
for discourse, particularly around your code switching column of yesterday,
like all right, not allowed to do that? You know
this way?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
You must forget them the minute I write them this today?
Oh today is what's her name? The Congress from Jasmine Crockett. Yes, okay,
Jasmon Crockett. You said, very gently and nicely, you said
to her, come on, now, you get to do that.
I do you know what?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Who else can do that?
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What you're saying is something I'm feeling as I get
a little older, because I'm pushing sixty and so I'm
no longer the young pup, and i feel like I've
got a certain amount of life experience, and also just
I'm beginning to come off as the kind of person
who you call sir or in the parking lot, okay, boss,
you know that sort of thing, And so I'm beginning
(20:59):
to take those chances to an extent with Jasmine Crockett.
I will say this, I was very careful in the
wording of that because I thought, especially because she's forty
in a bit and I'm about to be sixty. I male,
I have an imperious demeanor. I don't think that she
did anything that was absolutely sinful, and so honestly, in
(21:20):
the editing of that, we were very careful with the words,
and so near the end of it, I say that
her explanation for why she made fun of the man
in the wheelchair was what did I call it, I'm
clever but hopeless. And there was an idea that I
was supposed to say clever but cowardly, and I said, no,
(21:40):
that's too mean. I don't want to call her a coward.
I want to say that the explanation just doesn't work.
So I think part of it, but the fact that
I wrote that at all, I don't know if I
would have written that one twenty years ago, or if
I did, it would have been read as John just
likes to criticize black people, and he does that every week,
when I actually do it very rarely. But I think
what you're talking about is that I'm getting a little
(22:01):
older and therefore feel like I can say things that
I couldn't when I was Coleman Hughes's age like thirty,
where if I say things even if I thought I
was right, it would be you're too young, how dare you?
And I really felt at the time, I need to
respect my elders. I would try very hard to do that,
especially in Black American culture. Don't you don't sass your elders,
(22:22):
You don't sass your parents. Well, now I'm my parents,
and so I'm going to start doing some constructive sassing.
I think that's part of.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
It, part of it as well. I think there's other layers. Well,
one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays
as much attention to language as you do, you're better
at it.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I don't. I'm not.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
By which I mean that. Just the example you just
gave on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless, that
someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of
language might have said cowardly with a quite a you know,
there's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would
be perceived and read. Yeah, and you're but you are
(23:11):
professionally alert to those nuances, and that permits you a
great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically
underestimate how important word choice is and how acutely sensitive
we are to the word the words that are used,
particularly if they're directed at us. I want to talk
about my favorite chapter.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
In the book. What's the favorite.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
It's the it's the chapter about you.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Thank you for not being about they and them? Okay you, Yeah,
that was the one that was the funnest to write.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It's the fun it is, so just sit to work.
Explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
The book is. It's not just a book about they.
I mean there. I think there already is a book
just about they. I couldn't have sustained anyone's attention for
that long. It's each pronoun So there's I, there's you,
there's he, she, it, there's we, and there's a. So
that's seven chapters. Notice that it's a compact and the
idea is to give the history of each one of
those little words, and then to discuss some controversy that
(24:09):
is connected with them. We kind of resist controversy. That
chapter was a challenge because I was thinking, nobody fights
over week. But I got a chapter out of it anyway.
But that was the point. And of course, when I
was writing it in twenty twenty three on a sun
porch Upstate, I was thinking ha ha, happy linguistic pronouns,
because the book before this was called wok Racism, and
(24:32):
it was a bourbon fueled, angry little screed that needed
to be written in twenty twenty. But it's this book
where I'm screaming on every page, and books like that
are not fun to write. So after that was over,
I thought, I want to do one of the happy
language books, and I thought, what about the pronouns. The
last thing I was thinking was all of this debate
we're having now about TRANSI identity, et cetera. I was
(24:52):
just writing about pronouns. So the book has fallen into
a different atmosphere than I was expecting. But really it's
just me enjoying pronouns. Like in Nine Nasty Words, I
enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
But you so tell us, tell us the problem with you.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
You is a problem. I don't mean that you all
are a problem. Oh there was some Black English too,
We will get there. That was silly. So it used
to be yeah, exactly exactly, Thou Malcolm as opposed to
you in the audience. That's how English is supposed to be.
Thou art sitting in a chair. You are sitting. To
(25:29):
be honest, with the lighting, I can't tell what you're
sitting in, but I presume they are chairs, and so
thou and you. You're supposed to have singular and then
a plural one. In early Middle English and before there
was a duel. So if it's just you too, then
it was yeat and so thou, yeat and you, And
then they had case forms thou if it's subject, thee.
(25:50):
If it's an object, you was the object form. Ye
was the subject form like here yea and then yeat
didn't do that, but the possessive of yeat. If you
wanted to say, you two's book, ink book, get that
and so got it wrong. No, ink was the object
form yeat and then ink. So I've done it all
for you too, my children, I've done it all for ink.
(26:12):
Inkor was the possessive. So you had all of these
U forms and everything's chugging along, and today all we
have is you, not even ye and you, just you.
Thou is gone, know thee just you? It all just
falls away now is the one we miss. It's like
I had a disease. Yeah, that was the one we miss.
We need thou, we need that we need it back
right now, but now we can't. We can't do it now.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
So let's convince us about why we need to have
thou back.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Well, if you think about it, if you're going from
English to almost any language you're likely to learn. Notice
the first thing you learn is that there's something like
dot and then there's some plural form. You never learned
that the word for you is the same both in
the singular. If there's a chart in front of you,
the singular and the plural. That's not how languages work.
And so all over Europe this is preserved. This difference
(27:03):
is preserved. There are different spheres of influence that it
has in different languages and at different times. But if
it's Rush, it's supposed to be THEE and lie. You
don't have lee used for everything. You don't have THEE
use for everything. English is different in that way. English
is a very odd language in certain corners of its being.
And to tell the truth, it's it's obscure. We need
(27:25):
a singular versus a plural form. And we try to
create a plural form by saying y'all or use or
yen's and we're told that that's just funny. It's just slang.
It smells like fish or bubblegum or marijuana. It's not
it's not a real word. And yet all we're trying
to do is be a normal language.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
So what's your preference here? There's two there's two parallel
strends of argument here, and I want to figure out
which side you're on. So you originally is the plural,
that is the singular singular. What has happened is that
you has come to encompass both, and we've developed these
colloquial forms y'all, et cetera, to take up the plural position,
(28:08):
and we we've moved you to the singular. Do you
think you should remain the singular or should you be
moved back into the plural position?
Speaker 1 (28:19):
I understand. I'd like to see thou come back. I
think we need thou. There was nothing wrong with it.
It's just like German, do we need thou? The problem
is that Thou sounds antique. Thou sounds like somebody in
a periwig who's about to die of yellow fever because
it's so far back. But if we bring in you,
then we have to accept y'all as legitimate, or you
(28:41):
guys or use And that's really tough too, because of
the aforesaid odors of those words.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Why did I was thinking of?
Speaker 1 (28:49):
You know?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
So if someone wrote the hymn how great Thou art today,
it would be how great you.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Are, how great you are?
Speaker 2 (28:54):
And say it's not it's not as good God to thee,
how great you are you are? It doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
That was great for art, yeah, but art thou. But
it would be hard to use out on the street,
I think, do I say it in the book? No,
that was about something else. You could not say thou naked?
You know it just it wouldn't seem quite right. It
was I have to use you.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
But no, you've said the problems with both positions. But
come on, you're not answering my question.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Try if you had to.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
If I make you languages are and you get to
push you to the singular a pro position and either
reinstate thou or or establish use and y'all, which what
which move were you making?
Speaker 1 (29:50):
If I were the czar, like if I could do
an executive order, and yeah, I would, you would be
in the singular and I would enforce that you all
was more widely accepted. I would say that the Wall
Street Journal has to start allowing you all, and it
has to start being taught in school with a teacher
with a stick at a black That's that's the way
(30:10):
I would do it Already. When I teach about language,
I say it's going to be I U he she
we y'all. They I always say that because you need
you need a y'all. Yeah. That center.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
One of the things that it had not occurred to
me until I read that chapter was that in the South,
y'all is only is the plural, that is to say,
and if it is, if it's addressed to a person
you're invoking. Isn't that nice to see in others? I
hadn't realized it. So if I go to the South,
then I say, well, ye, that's what y'all think, and
(30:42):
I mean just you, Yeah, I've committed a violation.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, because they don't use it to mean the singular.
But when they say it's one person, you're at a
seven eleven and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't
mean y'all that one person right there. It means it's
implying that there's somebody out there in the car or
something which is is the following. It's a politeness strategy.
So with du and VU, you can address a single
(31:07):
person as VU as if they're people, and so you're
not hitting the person like this. If you say y'all
come back now, you're kind of saying voo come back now,
You're you're taking away the directness to say you you
one individual, I hope you come back and buy another
slim gym. It's a little direct as opposed to y'all
come back. It's a very courtly thing that y'all.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I want to go back to something you said. Well,
we need to distinguish between the plural and singular you.
But what problem does it create for as when we can't.
Is it just a lack of specificity.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's just that you need to pause and clean something up.
And you'd rather not have to imagine never having to
say I don't mean you all, I mean just you,
or I mean just you not you all over there.
There are larger tragedies, but nevertheless, that is one of
those things where oh, that is one of those things
where we have we have a ding like for example,
(32:03):
in French, you're driving a rental car and you're in
a big hurry and all the other cars are parked
in a line, and you pull into a space and
you don't really park it right, and the butt of
the car is kind of pushing out, so you run
down into the little hut and you say, I'm sorry,
but my car is sticking out. There's no way to
put it that way. In French, nothing can stick out.
You can say I didn't park properly, you can say
(32:25):
that the row is uneven, but if you try to
say the car is sticking out and I'm sorry, they
don't have it. Now. Does that mean that it's hard
to be French? I doubt it, but it would be
nice if they had that word. It would be nice
if we had a thou, or if we could use
y'all in the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
So what I would like to see is the country
divided on this question, so there's a there would be
Thou districts, and then they would be y'all.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
That would be adorable.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
And then, because I don't like y'all to be honest,
I do like thou.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
I would like Thou to come.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Back, Thou, Thou art, Thou art reading. It just sounds
like somebody who died one hundred and fifty years ago,
but I could get used to it.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Is that This is another interesting language question, though, is
that because is that going to be as true for
our children? Well, our children had the same associations with Thou.
I mean once, why do I think I sang that him?
For a reason? I grew up singing that him all
of my associations without biblical. If we move into us
(33:29):
into a world in which people's association with religious practice
is vanishing, then doesn't that free us up to go
back and pick up a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
It's possible. It's funny you say religious because I forgot something,
which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friends
Select in Philadelphia in the late seventies, and back then
there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers who
were still using THEE and thy and in natural speech,
the ones who were super Quaker as in dressing Quaker.
(34:04):
And I remember there was this one teacher who would
come and, you know, look at your paper and say,
don't get to put thy name on thy paper. And
he meant it straight, he didn't mean it ironically, And
you know part of why I don't like that, And
I never thought about this. You're making me think about
a lot of things I haven't thought about. Because one
day he decided to take a long trip in a
canoe and he happily, you know, pulled out into the
(34:26):
Delaware River, and you was talking about when he was
going to come back, and no one ever saw that
man again. And I must admit that I associate thou
with that man, and that is much to arbitrary. So
I can't laughing at this man's demise, but I need
to stop that. I would enjoy their being thou, but
(34:48):
I'm trying to imagine it imposed on a whole society,
and I cannot see my ten and thirteen year old
feeling differently about it. But then again, there are aspects
of them that I may never know. I'll ask them
next time I see them.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
And what about the you mentioned this in I believe
in passing the English use of one, you do yes one?
The English uppercrust resolve this problem by if I say
one in the eight way that English one doesn't think
that does one?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
What am I doing? Am I explicitly freeing up you
to be in the plural form? Is that?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
What I'm doing? Well? In that case, we use you colloquially, well,
why suddenly can I not talk? And he had a
stroke that night? You colloquially, but we would actually say
you can't do that, can you? And so you gets
dragged even into that one usage which ended up replacing
it was originally a word mon, which was not man,
but it was mon, and then mon just dropped away.
(35:41):
Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves for some reason.
But you have the one, and you're saying, does that allow.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Exactly why they're doing that? Why why does the English
upper class use one instead of you?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Because you was overstretched, because not only is it used
in the singular and the plural, but you also use
it for this indefinite. Real Germanic languages, normal European languages
have some dedicated pronoun, as we call it, for the indefinite.
That's one thing that a pronoun should do. That book
shold have an extra chapter. In Old English it was mon,
then mon shortened to muh, and so you would say,
(36:16):
you know, you gotta do it, and you would say,
muh gotta do it. That's not very accurate Middle English,
but you get my point. And then it just that
muh flew away and you ended up being dragged in
for that too. We work that little word so hard
it's a miracle that we don't trip over our linguistic
shoelaces with it more. But languages aren't usually like that.
There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called barrack,
(36:38):
and all they have is I we than you. And
then there's one word that means he she it, and
they one word like quack. It's not quack, but it's
just one thing. But we're more like that than we
are like the European languages that were actually related whips.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
It's sorry to be a dog with a bone here,
But why don't we all use the English.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
One in order to give you a break?
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, because if its says or to give one a break.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
But we can't because if you use one in that way,
you sound like you have a big mustachio and you
walk with a cane and you're in black and white.
In an old movie played by an actor named c
Aubrey Smith, one mustn't do that. It's too high.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
As a kid, we would make fun of this because
my father would. I think I think he reduced this
locution and that he abandoned it because you're trapped once
you start with the one. One one doesn't think that
one should do that does one? And then you realize
this is an endless stream of ones in your future.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Or Fats Waller saying one never knows, do one? But
that was arch he was. He's saying that while he's
knocking back the gin. That was funny. In his real life,
he certainly wouldn't have said, you know, one never knows,
and so one, for arbitrary reasons is marked, and so
it has that upper crust meaning, and most of us
(38:01):
our only upper crust on occasion, and so we need
something more casual. And it ends up being yeah, poor
little you all the time.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, it's a heartbreaking chapter. It's we'll be right back
with more of my conversation with John mccorter. We have questions.
(38:33):
Some of these questions are really good.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
The questions are always fun.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
How does English compare with other languages in terms of
words on the move, the shifting of words meaning over time.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Words are on the move. That was the title of
one of my books. Actually, words are on the move
all the time in all languages. Some of them are
moving faster than others. But there's no such thing as
a language where the words just stay where they are,
And it can be hard to process that the words
are on the move because it usually not always, but
usually happens very slowly. But words meanings are always kind
(39:07):
of morphing. Obnoxious used to mean vulnerable to harm. And
so don't render yourself obnoxious by wearing too few clothes
to the jousting tournament, or that's not the you take
my point. So it only came to mean noxious because
it sounded like noxious, and so we now use it
(39:29):
to mean that. If you look in a grammar guide
in about nineteen hundred, there's always some person, the kind
of person who says one and has that mustache, who
is complaining. People are using obnoxious to mean annoying, when
really it's supposed to mean subject to harm. Sniff sniff.
We're gonna have to deal with this. This is a
sign of the lack of educator. And so that is
what happens to all words. And that's true in Japanese, Hungarian, Tahitian.
(39:51):
There's no language where that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Someone would show me. I don't know if it's true
as a Canadian that in Quebec. The French that is
spoken is archaic French. So why is Quebecua French not
moving at the same pace as French French. So that
does suggest a different different languages move at different rates.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
That's a very good question, and the answer to it
is that Parisian French is one thing, the French of Quebec,
and it's actually very similar to Cajun French is a
different It is a different grouping of dialects, and so
you can say that these things are older. But the
thing is that those dialects have changed a great deal
(40:33):
since they were moved over to Quebec. And the Quebec
dialect is very different than what it would have been
in say, the late sixteen hundreds and the seventeen hundreds.
It's just that you can still see the likenesses. It's
not that Quebec stayed the wall. This was and so
all languages move along. And the truth is, I have
not done a study of the Jual spoken in for example, Montreal.
(40:55):
I'm sure that that variety has changed more in the
past three hundred years than French standard French in Paris,
because written languages change more slowly. So if a language
is just allowed to do what it wants to do.
Some language in a rainforest spoken by indigenous people, it's
never written down. That language moves along considerably, such that
(41:17):
you might even have a little bit of a problem
understanding your great great grandparents. Once it's on the page
and your brain is kind of on writing, as I
put it, and you think that the real language is written,
then it tends to slow language change down. So what
we know is how language changes where when they the
new they comes in, we're thinking, good lord, what happened?
(41:37):
That would not shock people as much if this were
an unwritten language. Language changes very quickly until it's yoked
to the page, which is true of only about two
hundred of the seven thousand languages that there are the
idea that you think of the language in writing, and
then you think of speaking as just a sloppy way
of how it's done on the page. That's only a
very few languages, and we happen to be speaking one
(41:59):
normal human language gets to mind its own business, and
so it's faster for them.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
What are your thoughts on Black American English being adopted
by younger generations in the slang they use. I'm assuming
this question is about by younger and in some cases
non black generations.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I think it's great, and I know that there is
a strain of thought that says that non black people
are stealing Black English features and appropriating them and that
there should be a line. But for one, there could
never be that line. That line couldn't happen, especially with
the mainstreaming of hip hop, and it's getting to the
(42:38):
point where you can be a thoroughly mature person and
not really remember when rap was listened to by basically
all kids. That happened really in the nineties. But once
you've got that and you've got that music in people's ears,
and just in general, I think that it's a sign
that there is less of a color line than there
used to be, and we all know that we still
(42:58):
have work to do. But there was a different time.
There was nineteen fifty and then there was nineteen eighty,
which was very different from today. And I think that
this business of supposing that non black people aren't going
to borrow what is probably the most vibrant slang in
the United States, it will never happen. It's actually a
good sign that it is happening, and it really is
(43:20):
at the point where if you're going to look at
how modern English is changing, which is mostly the words,
two times out of three it comes from either black
black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source
of our new words. And really it's a word I
try to avoid two words holistic because it just makes
(43:42):
everybody happy to hear the word holistic and also the
word dynamic. It's dynamic. What the hell does that mean?
But yeah, I think that black English jumping into mainstream
English is quite dynamic, and I enjoy watching it. So yeah,
I'm not giving the right answer because I know there
are people who think that it's appropriation. That's complicated though,
and I think that's an over application of the appropriation concept.
(44:06):
I think, yeah, we have.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
To end sadly and ask you one nice question, and
that is one of my it's my favorite question for
someone like you. Let's imagine you were made language are
of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell
me the the the three language fixes you would impose
(44:31):
on all of us. We've done you, we want you
want y'all, We've given that to you. I want three
new ones and then we're done.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I want people to stop saying it is what it is,
because I find that the chilliest, most dismissive expression that's
got the stop. There's something, there's something pickier. You can't
just walk into this Roman start yelling. That's how the
sentence should be. You can't simply walk into this. You
(45:00):
can't just walk But everybody says you just can't walk
into this roman start yelling. That is now ordinary American
and English, and I have no right to have any
problem with it, but it's it's kind of like you
wanting the order in the monopoly directions. It doesn't make
any sense. It's you can't just walk in, but people
say just can't all the time. There was an episode
(45:21):
of The Lucy Show where somebody did it, and so
I know that it's not new, but it really it
hurts me. And then let's see what else. This is
one that I really didn't like when I started hearing
it in the nineties. Yeah yeah, yeah, people say when
they're having a conversation, they'll say, oh yeah, yeah yeah,
but they also make it in an orange color. You're
(45:43):
trying to say something, they say yeah, yeah yeah, But
and it sounds pushy to me, kind of like you
shut up and that's not what they mean. But to me,
it's just one one yeah. Would do. What they're trying
to do is take their turn in the conversation and
they say yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same way that
now both you and I probably use exclamation points in
our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind be
(46:06):
there in a second game. And so that that has
been And so now if you want to really exclaim,
if you want to say something like the tangerine is
the best flavor, then you have to use two exclamation points. Yeah.
So yeah, yeah, yeah is kind of long for what
used to be just yeah, But it's just this kind
of natural that it's kind of like, you know, sections
(46:26):
of DNA replicating yeah, and you know that's that was
a weird analogy.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
But yeah, no one uses more exclamation marks points in
in email than me. You know this?
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Are you really doing this?
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (46:40):
It's so exaerine.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
It's to the point now where I think that with
people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two,
they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so why
is not so cold today? He's cut back to two
exclamation So I gotta I gotta like three and four
that Saturday.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's right, And all that is is that you're being
cheery and polite. Yeah, that was not the way we
wrote emails thirty years ago or even twenty. But now
I'm doing the exclamation points because I'm thinking if I
just have a period, it makes it look like I'm angry,
and that's how punctuation change.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
You might be you, but you might well be angry John.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I have my days, but I would disguise it by
using a meaningless exclamation boy.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
All right, one one last one for the road.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
So it was you just can't It was yeah, yeah, yeah,
And then there was the what was the first thing?
Is what it is? And it is what it is.
People have got to stop that. So I would I
would have those three and then maybe yes, it's a.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Correct response to it is what it is. It isn't
what it is? Is that what? Yeah? But yeah yeah yeah,
but it isn't what it is.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
In this case, and so you can't say that. And
what they're really saying is stop. It's kind of like yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's stop talking about that like it is what it is,
and therefore there's no point in dwelling on it, and
now let's talk about RFKA Junior or something. And what
I wanted to talk about was the tangerine ice cream.
So that's that's how that goes.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
John, This has been great fun. This is a wonderful book.
You should all go and get it and give it
to your friends as well. And thank you for joining
us tonight, and thank you Jones, thank you Malca, thanks
for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about Faces,
(48:39):
an episode on raccoons, and another on English muffins. Revision's
History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and
Ben Adaph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji, mixed and
mastered by Sarah Buguerer, Engineered by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original
score in music by Luis Kara. Our executive producer is
(49:00):
Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Gretacombe. I'm
Malcolm Glappa.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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