Words on the Move

Words on the Move Plot Summary

Introduction

No one minds that today the clouds are neither in the same position nor in the same shapes they were yesterday. Yet more than a few mind that today the way people are talking is always changing. When it comes to people using literally to mean what would seem to be its opposite, "figuratively," or like with a frequency that makes it sound more like punctuation than a word, the linguist may preach to the public that our language is dynamic, but to many, the better word would be degraded. One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming. They tell you a word is a thing, when it's actually something going on. In this book, we'll explore how language changes because its very structure makes transformation inevitable. Even if a language were spoken by a community mysteriously condemned to live for millennia in a cave, after three thousand years their language would be vastly different from the one spoken when they first entered. We'll discover how words acquire new meanings, how sounds shift over time, and how grammar emerges from ordinary words – all part of the natural evolution that makes language as changeable as clouds in the sky.

Chapter 1: The Personal Pull: How Words Express Our Feelings

Language is not just a collection of words that name things. It's a living, breathing entity that constantly adapts to express our inner states and feelings. When we examine how words change over time, one of the most common trajectories is from objective meaning to subjective expression. Words start out showing what we mean, but end up being used to show how we feel. Consider the word really. Originally, it simply meant "in reality" or "truly." But over time, it transformed into something we sprinkle throughout our speech to emphasize our personal commitment to what we're saying: "I'm really tired of this weather." This shift from objective reality to personal emphasis represents a pattern linguists observe across languages – the "personal pull" that draws words into expressing our feelings. This personal dimension of language creates what I call the FACE system – ways that language allows us to express Factuality, Acknowledgment of others' states of mind, Counterexpectation, and Easing social interactions. For example, when someone says "Well, I disagree," that little well isn't meaningless filler – it politely acknowledges what the other person has said before expressing a contrary view. Similarly, when young people use totally, as in "She's totally going to call you," they're not being vague but expressing a shared understanding that contradicts some implied doubt. What some criticize as "verbal clutter" or "linguistic deterioration" actually serves sophisticated social functions. Even the much-maligned use of like in "It was, like, her!" carries precise meaning – conveying surprise and countering expectations. These words form the facial expressions of our speech, allowing us to connect emotionally with our listeners in ways that plain, factual statements cannot. When we understand this personal dimension of language, we can see that the evolution of words isn't random or destructive – it's part of how language serves its fundamental purpose of connecting humans through not just information, but shared feeling. This personal pull is as natural to language as gravity is to physical objects, constantly reshaping our words to better express our inner lives.

Chapter 2: Meaning in Motion: Why Words Never Stay the Same

Words are not static entities preserved in the amber of dictionaries – they're constantly shifting in meaning through a process as natural as the changing of seasons. Consider the word reduce. In Shakespeare's time, it meant "to lead back" or "to restore," as when the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V hoped to "reduce" his country to its former peaceful state. Only later did it come to mean "to diminish" as we understand it today. This semantic drift happens because words carry not just their dictionary definitions but clouds of associations and implications. As people use a word repeatedly in certain contexts, these secondary meanings can gradually become primary. The word innumerable originally meant simply "unable to be counted," but since things that can't be counted are usually vast in quantity, it evolved to mean "very many." Similarly, silly once meant "blessed" or "innocent" in Old English, before shifting to "weak" and eventually to its current meaning of "foolish." The path words follow isn't random but follows patterns of human cognition and experience. If a word means "truth," like very once did, it naturally drifts toward meaning "intensity" because we emphasize the truth of statements that seem extreme. If something is short in duration, like merry originally meant, it can easily become associated with pleasantness since brevity is often enjoyable – hence merry's evolution to mean "joyful." These changes aren't signs of linguistic decay but evidence of a natural process driven by how humans think and communicate. Just as money circulates through an economy, words circulate through communities of speakers, picking up new associations and shedding old ones. The mapping between words and meanings is constantly being redrawn, which explains why today's English would sound odd to Shakespeare, just as his English sounds strange to us. When we understand this inherent mutability, we can see that criticisms of "incorrect" word usage often miss the point. The word decimate originally meant "to reduce by one-tenth," but its current meaning of "devastate" isn't wrong – it's simply the latest stage in its journey. Language change isn't chaos; it's the orderly process by which each generation adapts its linguistic inheritance to its communicative needs.

Chapter 3: From Words to Grammar: The Birth of Language Structure

Grammar doesn't fall from the sky fully formed – it emerges from ordinary words that gradually lose their independence and transform into something more structural. This process, called grammaticalization, explains how languages develop the tools they need to express complex relationships between ideas. Consider the peculiar phrase used to, as in "She used to live in Columbus." If we break it down literally, it makes little sense – in what way was she "using" living in Columbus? The answer lies in history: use once meant "to have the habit of doing." Over time, as it was employed to talk about habitual past actions, it morphed from a full verb into a grammatical marker that puts statements into the past habitual tense. This pattern repeats throughout language. The word can began as a verb meaning "to know" – you can still see traces of this in words like cunning and canny. But knowing how to do something implies ability, and gradually can shifted from expressing knowledge to indicating capability. Similarly, going to, which originally described physical movement toward a destination, evolved into a way of marking future intention: "I'm going to finish this tomorrow." What's fascinating about grammaticalization is that we can see it happening right before our eyes. The phrase be like ("She was like, 'I didn't even invite him'") has recently emerged as a way to quote speech, taking on a grammatical function that would have been unimaginable a century ago. Likewise, totally has evolved from meaning "completely" to serving as a way to acknowledge shared understanding. Even the most basic elements of grammar have humble origins in regular words. The -ly suffix that forms adverbs started as the word like, and the -ed that marks past tense may have begun as did. Grammar, then, isn't some separate system imposed on words – it's what words become when they're used so frequently that they wear down like stones in a river, becoming smooth, small, and essential to the language's structure. Understanding grammaticalization helps us see that the line between "word" and "grammar" is blurrier than we might think. It reveals language as a perpetual recycling machine, where yesterday's vocabulary becomes today's grammatical glue, constantly refreshing the resources speakers have available to express their thoughts.

Chapter 4: Vowels as Processes: The Shifting Sounds of Speech

When you hear someone from upstate New York pronounce cat more like "kay-it," or a Californian saying bitch as "betch," you're witnessing not random quirks but systematic sound changes that have shaped English for centuries. Vowels, it turns out, don't sit still – they're constantly in motion, shifting like bees in a hive across the space of your mouth. To understand these shifts, we need to visualize vowels not as letters but as positions in the mouth. The vowel in beet is made high in the front of the mouth, while the vowel in boot is high in the back. The vowel in bat is low in the front, and the vowel in bot is low in the back. These positions aren't fixed – they're always subject to subtle movements as new generations of speakers slightly misreproduce what they hear. The most dramatic example in English history was the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between 1400 and 1700. Words like meet used to be pronounced "mate," and mouse was once "moose." These changes didn't happen randomly – they followed predictable patterns as vowels moved around the mouth like a game of musical chairs. When one vowel moved, it often pushed others out of their positions, creating a chain reaction that transformed the entire sound system. Similar shifts continue today. In the Northern Cities Shift affecting places like Buffalo and Chicago, the vowel in cat has moved upward toward the position of bet, while bet has shifted backward toward but. In California, bit is collapsing into bet, which explains why "bitch" sounds like "betch." These aren't errors or laziness – they're the same systematic processes that have always driven language change. What's remarkable is that these shifts happen without speakers being consciously aware of them. Most Detroiters don't realize they're saying something closer to "jab" than job, just as most medieval English speakers didn't notice meet shifting from "mate" to its modern pronunciation. The spelling system, frozen in the pre-Great Vowel Shift era, masks these changes and makes them seem unnatural when they're actually inevitable. Vowel shifts remind us that speech is not something static that can be permanently encoded in letters. It's a physical process involving lips, tongue, and jaw – one that's constantly, subtly evolving as it passes from speaker to speaker across generations. What seems like an accent or dialect difference today may be the standard pronunciation of tomorrow.

Chapter 5: Lexical Springtime: When Words Mate and Multiply

Words don't just change in meaning and pronunciation – they also combine to create entirely new words through a process as natural as reproduction. This lexical mating is one of the most creative forces in language evolution, constantly refreshing our vocabulary with new forms that capture emerging concepts. The most obvious examples are blends like brunch (breakfast + lunch) and smog (smoke + fog). While these deliberate coinages may seem modern and artificial, they follow patterns that have always been part of language. The word flush, for instance, emerged centuries ago as a blend of flash and gush. What initially appears clever or trendy may eventually become so standard that future generations won't recognize its hybrid origins. More subtle but equally important is the process by which words join through what linguists call the Backshift. When two words combine to create a specific concept, the stress typically moves to the first word. A black bird could be any bird that happens to be black, but a blackbird (with stress on black) is a specific species. Similarly, ice cream began as "ice CREAM" but shifted to "ICE cream" as it became conceptualized as a single item rather than cream that is iced. We can trace this process happening in real time. In the 1950s, people said "super-MARKET," but as supermarkets became the norm, the pronunciation shifted to "SUPER-market." The same pattern appears with "hot DOG" becoming "HOT dog" and "boy SCOUT" becoming "BOY scout." These shifts aren't random – they signal that a concept has moved from being a descriptive phrase to being "a thing" in its own right. Over time, these combinations can fuse even further. Words like breakfast (break + fast) and cupboard (cup + board) have merged so completely that their component parts are no longer recognizable in either pronunciation or meaning. A similar process gave us daisy (originally "day's eye") and world (from "wer-eld," meaning "man's age"). This creative mixing explains why English vocabulary is so rich and adaptable. New concepts don't always require new words – often, existing words combine and transform to meet our needs. Understanding this process helps us see that innovations like cyber- in cyberspace or -holic in workaholic aren't bizarre aberrations but natural extensions of how language has always grown and evolved through the fertile cross-pollination of words.

Chapter 6: Writing's Illusion: How Text Shapes Our Perception

Our understanding of language is profoundly shaped by the fact that we're literate. Writing creates an illusion of permanence that masks the constantly evolving nature of speech. We think of ourselves as speaking writing, rather than writing speech, even though writing has existed for only about 6,500 years while speech traces back to the dawn of our species. This "brain on writing" distorts our perception in several ways. When we see a word like "dog," we picture the written word as much as the animal itself. We mistake letters for sounds, even though English spelling is notoriously irregular – why does ea sound different in bread and meat? We expect language to remain stable because text stays put on the page, unlike the fluid, adaptable nature of spoken communication. Shakespeare provides an excellent example of this distortion. Many find his language difficult not because it's inherently complex, but because words that look familiar on the page meant different things in his time. When Edmund in King Lear describes his mind as "generous," he means "noble," not "giving." When Polonius tells Laertes to "character" his advice in memory, he means "write," not "personify." The printed text creates an illusion of continuity that disguises how much meanings have shifted. Even more recent texts reveal this gap. In Moby-Dick, Melville describes things as "wonderful" not to mean they're great, but that they inspire wonder or amazement. F. Scott Fitzgerald has characters say "proved" where we would say "proven." These aren't archaic oddities but evidence of the constant drift that continues despite our attempts to fix language in place. The modern obsession with "correct" usage stems largely from this text-based view of language. We treat dictionary definitions as eternal truths rather than snapshots of meanings that are always in flux. We criticize innovations like the new uses of like or literally without recognizing that they follow the same patterns of change that gave us the language we now consider standard. Writing is valuable and necessary, but we should recognize it as a representation of language, not language itself. A dictionary is like a tableau vivant – a frozen pose that captures a moment in time but cannot convey the living, breathing reality. When we understand this, we can appreciate language change not as decay or corruption, but as the natural process that has always kept our communication vibrant, adaptive, and alive.

Summary

Language is not something that is, but something that is always becoming. Throughout this exploration, we've seen that words are not static entities but dynamic processes – they shift in meaning through implications, transform into grammar through frequent use, migrate across the mouth in pronunciation, combine to create new expressions, and continuously evolve despite our attempts to fix them in writing. This constant change isn't deterioration but the very essence of language as a living system. The key insight is that resistance to language change often stems from a fundamental misconception: we think words should stay put because dictionaries and grammar books make language appear permanent. But just as we don't expect clouds to maintain yesterday's shapes, we shouldn't expect language to remain unchanged. The reason today's teenagers use like differently than their grandparents did follows the same principles that transformed Shakespeare's English from Chaucer's. Rather than lamenting these changes, we might instead marvel at the elegant patterns they follow – patterns that reveal the deeply human and social nature of language. Next time you notice a new usage or pronunciation emerging, consider approaching it with curiosity rather than judgment. Ask what function it serves, what pattern it follows, and what it reveals about our evolving communicative needs. In doing so, you might discover that the "errors" and "deteriorations" so often condemned are actually windows into the fascinating machinery of language evolution – a process as natural, inevitable, and beautiful as the changing of seasons or the growth of a living organism.

About Author

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John McWhorter

John Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas

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