On the evolution of language and the "W" word

[Igel]

113. It's more complicated than that.

Sorry, everything involving language is more complicated than that. There are 300+ speakers of English in this country and we're not a monolithic bloc.

To understand language change, you have to understand language. Few do.

Here's an old formulation, stripped down, from one perspective: You have a set of norms for a standard language. It's a social fact that there's a standard and a variety of language that meets that standard.

The norms aren't just yes/no: There is a range of acceptability and a lot of variation. These come out as registers: high, low, formal, informal. whatever you call them. On top of that, you have varieties that are part of the language but not standard: geographical dialects, variation by age, variation by class.

An educated speaker has to be able to use the standard language in various registers. An educated speaker usually has mastery over one non-standard dialectal variant (geographical, social class).

The variation, within the standard and without, affects pronunciation and changes for fast/slow speech; how you form words; how you form sentences; meanings of words. (Okay, we're up to 1930.)


Language change proceeds in various ways. A typical way is that somebody at the nexus of various sets of speakers, held in esteem by those speakers, adopts a word. To be "cool" like him (or her) people in those groups pick up the word from him or from others. At some point it hops to another group of speakers, if it's adopted by somebody in that group held in esteem.

Of course, words don't hop from network to network just because some low-ranked person picks it up, unless somebody important also adopts it. The word has to be useful in some way: Perhaps it refers to something new, or it's trendy and faddish and shows group membership or that you're cool and stylish. (Okay, we're up to perhaps 1975.)


Individual words change their meanings in a few different ways. One of them is "widening" or "extension," as a word picks up broader or additional meanings. Another is narrowing, as it loses a range of uses.

Here's a fun example.

"Wif" originally meant "woman." An adult female. "Housewife" was the woman of the house--not necessary married, but perhaps an older daughter or sister. It narrowed to meaning "married woman", but "housewife" kept wife = woman for centuries, and we still have midwife, who may not be a wife ('married woman') at all, but is a wife ('woman').

"Woman" was wif-man, and was formed from the words that meant "wife/woman + person&quot when "wife" was becoming the word for "married woman". Later--for many, only in the 20th century--did "man" necessarily mean "male." If you held to old-fashioned norms it didn't mean "male" consistently in the 1980s; for others, it had meant only "male" for decades before that. We had language wars in the US between those who insisted on the new standard and those who hadn't gone over yet.

"Housewife" was changed phonetically. You say it in a lot of English dialects and it's less clearly house + wife. It gave us the word "hussy." Originally "hussy" just meant "housewife." By 1600 it just mean "any woman or girl"--widening of meaning. Yet by 1700 it narrowed in some settings to "a woman or girl who acts inappropriately." By 1800 it was primarily derogatory.


The result when you mix how languages are socially structured with language change that proceeds by network hopping is that you get the same "register" with two different norms for a single word. In one register, the word has a new meaning, or a meaning has a new word. It means that some people will reject the meaning as foreign while others think it perfectly natural. A little good-will goes a long way. If you're not the audience, good will says to step out. If you're in the audience, it pays to focus on what's intended and not what is specific to your network that causes offense. This doesn't meant there aren't words that are intended to be offensive. But intent matters.

"Thug" is the same way. McWhorter, a Stanford linguist, argued that the word "thug" tended to mean "black use" as a term of abuse, and was okay and slightly endearing in the AfAm community but only racist outside of it. When the interviewer pointed out a lot of counterexamples, he just said that they used the word in obsolete ways. Now, on the face of it that's quite insane: They were using it in ways natural for their social dialect. But for the dialects he was used to, he was right. His view was narrowed down to just the networks that he inhabited, forgetting 200+ million other Americans and pretty much everybody who speaks English overseas.

Another example would be "skinny"--racist for some (I've been told), but not for others. I called my own kid "skinny" and had somebody call me racist. "How am I racist for calling my own son 'skinny'?" They stopped at the word, and didn't look at meaning or at intent. Idjit. If he'd been sitting down he'd have shattered his jaw and patella, the brainless knee-jerk reaction was so strong.


That's how languages change. It's messy to start with, but with changes it's horrendously messy. We argue that changes we have adopted are fine. They're ours, of course. Those that we haven't adopted are bad, low class, corrupting the language. They're the other guy's. It all works itself out in the end.

And it's the same argument, when you get down to the nitty gritty, that was used against "swell" and "phat".