Words on the Move Quotes

“People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still

“Hence, the notion of the “cheese burger” by the late 1930s, with “burger” now referring to a disk of meat. Today, of course, one speaks of the veggie burger, taco burger, fish burger, and so much else, such that no one would object that burger is “not a word.” Now it is, but only because of grafting. We talk about eating a nice burger, and Abraham Lincoln brought back to life would picture us trying to consume a staid, small-town German tradesman.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“People say “nucular” modeled on other words that end in -ular such as spectacular, tubular, and vernacular. Specifically, because there exist the words nuke and, long before that, nucleus, a temptation looms to think of nuclear as “nuc-” plus the -ular ending: spectacular, tubular, nuc-ular.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“In this chapter we will go beyond the one type of change we saw in chapter 1, and embrace the word in general as a fundamentally impermanent association of a sequence of sounds with a particular meaning.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess. To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body”! The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like. Gelic over time shortened to just lic, which became like.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Then, cybervision, cyberoptics, cybermarketing, cyberculture—all these words are flubs, technically. It started with cybernetics, from the Greek word kybernetes, for “steersman.” Cybernetics was composed, then, of cybern (not cyber) plus -etics. But most of us don’t know Greek, and cyber- seemed the more intuitive first element than cybern.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident. It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“The word about is not the scion of some ancient Old English word like “ægboþe,” but a melding of at, by, and out.*”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“More to the point: the Backshift doesn’t happen only to single words; it happens to pairs of them, and knits them together in the process. An example is the difference between black board and blackboard. A black board is some board that someone painted black. A blackboard is the particular thing made of slate that hangs on a schoolroom wall. Black board is pronounced “black BOARD,” while the thing on the wall is a “BLACK-board,” and that’s no accident. The way we mark blackboard as “a thing,” different from just any old board that happens to be black, is with the Backshift. A blackboard is something very specific—“a thing,” as it were.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“When a verb becomes a noun in English, if it has two syllables, something happens very quietly, so quietly that I have never known anyone who noticed it by themselves. The accent shifts backward. It’s why someone who re-BELS is a REB-el, whose crimes you can re-CORD and thereby leave them on REC-ord for all to see. It’s why your tooth may be im-PACT-ed and have a negative IM-pact on your sense of well-being.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Words involving sounds and movement seem to have been especially susceptible to yielding blends: flush is apparently what happened when flash met gush, and if given a second to think about it, one can almost guess that twirling is twisting plus whirling.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Namely, English spelling is hideous in large part because it represents what English was like before the Great Vowel Shift happened. That neatly demonstrates that vowels really are as liquid as I am presenting, and that what happens to them can neither be said to “ruin” the language nor be dismissed as bubblegum static, since no one wishes we could go back to talking the way Chaucer did. Here’s what I mean. Why would any sane person write mate and pronounce it “mayt”? We’re used to being taught that this is a “long” a and that the “silent” e is our clue to that. But clearly no one would design a system this way. If people in France and Spain and seemingly everywhere else on earth were writing the “ay” sound as e, what was the sense of instead bringing in an a and signaling that it, instead of e, is pronounced “ay,” and by putting a “silent” e at the end of the word? Why e? Or why use any sound at all as standing for absence instead of, duh, not writing anything there? While understanding that customs differ across the ages, we can be quite sure no writerly caste decided on such nonsense as a writing system. Sure, some eccentric medieval scribe could have arbitrarily decided on such a system, but why on earth would it have been accepted across England? When something makes that little sense, usually it was created amid conditions now past in which they did make sense. And indeed, time was that mate was actually pronounced the way one would expect: MAH-tay. The final -ay, unaccented, wore off over time just as the -ther in brother has worn off among men saluting each other such that guys of a certain demographic call each other “bruh” and one might call one’s sister “sis”—that’s easy. “Mahtay” became “maht.” But why don’t we just say “maht” today? Because likely the vowel moved, and this one did.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“In the word overwhelm, you might wonder why there is no word whelm. In fact, there once was. You might wonder what it meant, and it meant … “to overwhelm.” Overwhelm began as redundant as irregardless; people were simply being forceful.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“The -ed that marks the past probably started as did: painted goes back, in other words, to paint-did. Considering how often you refer to things in the past, you could have known that did, when used that way, was eventually going to wear down to something like an -ed, inseparable from the verb itself.*”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“A heavily used little grammar word has a way of becoming a toolshed. After a while, it actually is a syllable of other words, and can never stand alone—the birth of a prefix or suffix. A good example is the -ly that forms adverbs like slowly and gently. It started as the word like (pronounced “leek” back then). That’s easy to imagine because even today we can still say slow-like to mean “in a slow fashion.” Used that way constantly, however, like lost the accent it once had. You hit the like in slow-like fairly hard, but the -ly in slowly not so much. Mumbled, it lost its final consonant—“leek” became “lee.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Grammaticalization is what linguists call it when a word becomes a piece of grammar.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Can you hear what I hear?”—now sing to the same tune “Can’s a piece of graaammar…” As grammar, it presumably started as something else, and it did: cunnan in Old English meant “know.” Ben Jonson in The Magnetic Lady has Mistress Polish praise a deceased woman for the fact that “She could the Bible in the holy tongue.” We can’t help at first suspecting a typo—she could what? But could meant, all by itself, “knew.” There was even an old expression “to can by heart” alongside our familiar “know by heart.” Modern English is littered with remnants of that stage: other offshoots of cunnan are cunning and canny, all about having your wits about you. Plus, the past tense of cunnan was a word pronounced “coothe,” from which the couth in uncouth comes: the uncouth person is lacking in know-how, as in the kind that lends one social graces.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Ought once was, of all things, the past tense of owe. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, you can see it used in both the present and the past. Mistress Quickly tells Prince Hal that Falstaff “said this other day you ought him a thousand pound.” The prince asks Falstaff, “Sirrah! Do I owe you a thousand pound?” But when you owe, you’re under an obligation. The obligation is most readily thought to be financial or transactional, but one way the word might change is for the sense of obligation to become more general.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Endings, as a rule, start as words; becoming an ending happens only later, amid a kind of extended obsolescence. Even grammar in the form of words, such as the, a, etc., starts as regular words: the started as that, a started as one.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“In the same way, we must expect that designations for various groups will turn over regularly: the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has perfectly titled this “the euphemism treadmill.” Long ago, crippled was thought a humane way to describe a person—it had the ring, roughly, that hindered would today. However, once it became associated with the kind of ridicule tragically common among members of our species, handicapped was thought to be a kinder term—less loaded, it sounded like a title rather than a slur. But while words change, people often don’t—naturally, after a while, handicapped seemed as smudged by realities as crippled had. Hence: disabled, which is now getting old, as in having taken on many of the same negative associations as crippled and handicapped. Of late, some prefer differently abled, which is fine in itself. Yet all should know that in roughly a generation’s time, even that term will carry the very associations it is designed to rise above, just as special needs now does. Note the effort now required to imagine how objective and inclusive even special needs was fashioned to be.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“The joyous meaning of merry was a beautiful demonstration of the element of chance in how words’ meanings move along. The earliest rendition we can get a sense of for merry is that on the Ukrainian steppes several thousand years ago, in Proto-Indo-European, it was mregh. In Greece, this word for “short” morphed not into merriment but into the word for upper arm, brakhion. The sounds in mregh and brakh match better than it looks on paper: for one thing, both m and b are produced by putting your lips together, and so it’s easy for one to change into the other. As to meaning, it was a matter of implications, this time in one of the things the word was applied to rather than the word itself. The upper arm is shorter than the lower, and hence one might start referring to the upper arm as the “shorter,” and the rest was history. Calling your upper arm your “shorter” is not appreciably odder than calling cutoff pants shorts, after all. The process never stops. It seems that in Latin this brakh ended up, among other places, in a pastry, namely, one resembling folded arms, called a brachitella. Old High German picked that up as brezitella; by Middle High German people were saying brezel. Today, brezel is pretzel—from that same word that meant short and now connotes joyousness in English. In France, that brach root drifted into a word referring to shoulder straps or, by extension, a child’s little chemise undershirt. Women can wear chemises, too, but garments, like words, have a way of changing over the centuries, and after a while the brassière had evolved into a more specific anatomical dedication than a chemise’s. The modern word bra, then, is what happens when a word for “short” drifts step by step into new realms. Merry, pretzel, and bra are, in a sense, all the same word—yet contests could be held challenging people to even use all three in a sentence (or at least one that made any sense).”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“the counterexpectational ass floated beyond anatomical plausibility as far back as 1919, when someone was documented as getting angry when a “silly ass barber shaved my neck.” All manner of -ass usages pop up well before 1950: an accent criticized as having “lousy broad-ass As,” and familiar-sounding locutions such as green-ass (corporals), poor-ass (southerners), and broke-ass (a waiter). In all these cases, the point is that the quality in question draws attention.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“true and tree developed from the same ancient word: Millennia ago, English speakers saw trustworthiness in the straight-up quality of trees.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“The nonliteral uses of literally are quite traditional, of all things. Literally had gone past meaning “by the letter” in any sense as early as the eighteenth century, when, for example, Francis Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague (1769), which contains this sentence: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” One cannot feed among anything “by the letter.” Or, in 1806, when the philosopher David Hume wrote, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger,” in his signature history of England, despite the fact that there are no letters via which to starve. Yet this was an authoritative and highly popular volume, more widely read at the time than Hume’s philosophical treatises, equivalent to modern histories by Simon Schama and Peter Ackroyd. The purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Literally, then, is easy. It was originally one more variation on indicating truth—specifically exactness, as in “by the letter”: He took the advice literally; He meant it literally. But that can have been only a snapshot along a time line; there was never any question that literally was going to morph into other meanings. The only question was what kind. For one, literally quite predictably went beyond its original meaning into one where “by the letter” no longer makes sense except as a metaphor: We were literally the only ones there; We were literally on the brink of a depression. There are no letters involved in these statements, but literally means that the statement is true in a specific way—as in what we sometimes even refer to as “by the letter.” A next step was for literally to go personal, on a mission less to specify than to vent.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Very, true, and sooth show that when a word means “true” and it’s used a lot, you can almost predict that, over time, it will glide from meaning “truth” into meaning “very.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“In the first installment, really was one of many English words meaning “truth” that came to mean very—such as very itself, which came from the French word for true, vrai (verrai in the late thirteenth century). Very is the well-worn version of verily just as “rilly” is what happens to really with heavy use. Truly was another example, of course, with true having undergone the same transformation as verrai a couple of centuries earlier.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words’ meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don’t mean “I demand that that be the Indian food,” but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it’s the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. “That” (in my mind) “must be the Indian food”: here is psychology. Must got personal. Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here’s some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot’s admirer Elaine is asleep “Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought.” Rathe? Angry, as in “wrathed,” maybe? No, actually: the word meant “quick” or, in this passage, “early.” Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant “early,” so rath-er, in Old and into Middle English, meant “earlier.” But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep—bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding. What happened with rather is that something you’ve got going earlier or sooner is often something you like better. As such, if rather means “earlier,” then there’s an air about rather not only of sunrise, but of preferability. That is, to earlier English speakers, rather was as much about what you like better (something personal) as about the more concrete issue of what you do before you do something else. Today the relationship between the two meanings is clearer in sooner. In saying, “I’d sooner die than marry him,” you mean not that you’d prefer your death to precede your nuptials, but that you don’t want to marry the man in question.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still

“When a note stays unchanged for an eternity, it's unexpected, suggesting either plainchant, willful modernist contrarianism, or bagpipes.”
― John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still