John McWhorter

McWhorter is funny and engaging. I thought I already knew a lot about the history and quirks of the English language, but I had no inkling about the two significant Welsh influences, which were especially eye-opening. Also thought-provoking was the idea that "unnecessary" components of language are periodically stripped away with use and/or external influences over time, which helps to explain why English no longer has complex verb forms and noun declensions. The realization that AAVE is a show more result of further streamlining out of historical necessity, was revelatory. 5 stars for the first 75%, 3 stars for the rest, only because that subject matter interested me less. show less

As usual for John McWhorter's pop linguistics books, Words on the Move is very accessible and friendly. Reading it felt like I had a chatty conversational partner at my side, explaining the concepts, almost. He relies heavily on pop culture of many different flavors to help explain topics or provide further examples of how a language feature might be observed elsewhere, and he avoids the International Phonetic Alphabet as a rule in his pop-ling books, to avoid any feelings of stuffiness or show more academese.

Frankly, when I read this book, or The Power of Babel, or his various articles around the web, I feel real smart. McWhorter is really good at that.

Unfortunately, this skill of his means this book is grounded in American English and less accessible for those who do not speak the language fluently or who do not know the references cited. Most of the time, if a pop culture reference is dated or even slightly obscure, there is an explanation and a short pointer to the source (old tv shows, for example), but this is not always the case.

Likewise, the lack of IPA means he relies on spelling conventions (and spacing, hyphens, capitalization) to express differences in pronunciation or stress. This is very useful if you have the right accent, but I found a lot of these to be fairly opaque. I tried to say the words out loud, but couldn't figure out why his "this is said this way" didn't sound right to my ears. Maybe IPA could have helped - or at least made a better distinction. He has recorded an audio book version, which I think would be excellent listening at those points. He does, afterall, take pains to point out that he has a Philadelphian accent himself, which is different from a lot of his audience.

The topic for this book is evolutionary linguistics in general, but specifically the changes in language that we can observe right now, rather than how it changed in the past (such as in The Power of Babel or Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue). There are five main categories, all of which eventually are used to explain that little word "like".

1. The Faces of English: Words get personal — on pragmatics, using a "FACE" acronym as the skeleton of the explanation (Feelings, Acknowledgement of others' state of mind, Counterexpectation, Easing)
2. It's the Implication That Matters: Words on the move — on the drift of word meanings due to implications (positive, negative, broad, narrow, etc.)
3. When Words Stop Being Words: Where does grammar come from? — on grammaticalization, for example "-ly" from "like"
4. A Vowel is a Process: Words start sounding different
5. Lexical Springtime: Words mate and reproduce — on how new coinages become standard, or old standards freshen up with some emphasis on Backshift

To everyone who hates words like "impactful" or "irregardless", this book will not apologize for them. It will explain why these words are so tenacious and not going away, but it doesn't say that they or any word are right or wrong - just that they are. The final chapter, in discussing "like" (or even "all" as a quote marker), does point out that describing language this way doesn't mean approval. It's an acceptance that language, as with all fashions, change, and trying to explain why it is changing in this particular way. But society has rules for fashion, and likewise for language, and one must use language appropriately.

As someone who does read "All Things Linguistics" and "Language Log" and pop linguistics books fairly regularly, I find that the most informative and new thing in Words on the Move is the first chapter on pragmatics. I had never seen the subject explained in quite this way, and the FACE descriptor is very useful. The "Factuality, Acknowledgement of others, etc." listing helped me articulate concepts that I instinctively understood but couldn't explain. show less

Good little takedown of all these horrible books that talk about how English, due to its special characteristics (imaginativeness? simplicity??), was destined to take over the world. Good to see a linguist with a sense of public-intellectual responsibility--nobody would ever make the same destiny argument about, like, 'the white race', but in language anything apparently still goes, and I'm grateful to McWhorter for his countersalvo. Written as a review of Robert McCrum's Globish, but god show more knows it could apply to others--Bill Bryson, I'm looking at you.

(New Republic.) show less

Does the structure of the language we speak affect the way we think and how we perceive the world? If you are intrigued by that idea and don’t mind re-examining any cherished Sapir-Whorf beliefs you may have this short but spirited and well argued book will be of interest. When we think of the fascinatingly structured Navajo language there is some appeal to the idea that its speakers have a special, maybe advanced way of understanding reality, but with his usual well informed wit McWhorter show more makes the case that if you accept that and take the idea that language patterns and limits our perceptions to all its logical conclusions you’ll end up with some very unpalatable and fortunately wrong judgements about various other peoples of the world--from the Chinese who speak a language which marks hypotheticals less explicitly than English (though surely Chinese speakers around the globe understand the difference between “She would have called him” and “She will have called him” anyway) to the people in New Guinea who speak languages with only one word for eat, drink, and smoke, (but who couldn’t possibly be thus doomed by this lack to be unable to distinguish between those three activities.)

Most people tend to take their own language’s idiosyncrasies (and idioms) in stride, accepting them as what’s normal, but language variations are the actual norm. McWhorter makes a convincing case that most of the often marvelous differences between languages are random, like spontaneous DNA mutations, and almost meaningless when we are looking at cognitive skills. Yes, Amazonian people with languages that have no way to indicate amounts higher than 2 or 3 will likely not be good at math, but McWhorter believes that is driven by circumstance and culture since hunter-gathers around the world and throughout time have not had much use for a number like 8,527.

McWhorter is always entertaining, and I especially love all the fascinating language facts he deploys, like that the Tuyuca people, who also live in the Amazon, have a language so rich and complex there are multiple suffixes for every verb to indicate where the speaker learned whatever he or she is saying--there’s one suffix affixed to the verb to let listeners know that speakers heard someone else say what they are now saying, another suffix for when the speakers instead saw what they are telling you, yet another for when the speakers think what they are saying is true but aren’t sure, etc. The Language Hoax is replete with wonderful, mind-expanding language anecdotes.

While it’s definitely both fun and worth reading, this isn’t my favorite of McWhorter’s books. Because it focuses somewhat narrowly on the debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its neo-Whorfian revival, The Language Hoax didn’t glue me to its pages with the same level of intensity that some of McWhorter’s other titles have, including Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which gives different insights into the history English than I have read elsewhere, The Power of Babel, which covers the worldwide history of language and its development, and What Language Is, which presents an almost fecund biological picture of how languages multiply, evolve, and disperse. show less