The Sound of a Car Backshifting

Introduction to Scotland

0:00Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at expedia.com slash visit Scotland.

Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:30From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language, and I'm John McWhorter. Hey, folks, I am dropping in to do an occasional show. And, you know, I imagine that we might think that I'm going to do something political, that it's going to be about some of the frankly terrible things that are happening as I record this. But, you know, I don't I don't want to do that because of all those terrible things. I'd like to just sit around with you all and have a little fun like I used to in the old days and share with you some things that happen to have been on my mind.

Origin of Words

1:05And especially the major theme is just what a wonderful thing it is to see where words come from. Talk about the media. There's a fashion nowadays. It gets more popular every year that you want to know where this year's expressions came from. And that's great. But I always find myself thinking it's just as interesting to imagine where some of the homeliest things have come from, what the histories of these words are. But really, let's just think in general about how words happen. And I want to start with something that will seem as mundane as the word wit.

1:39We think of wit as being, you know, Saturday Night Live, National, Lampoon, Portlandia, or whatever. Witty and so funny in a sophisticated way. It's a rather specific kind of word, wit. In Old English, and you have to do the Old English voice, if you wanted to say I know, it wasn't something like, not that. It was really, if you're going to say, oh, I know, you would say, Ick what? Ick what? I know, what? That was the form of the verb that you used in the first person singular.

2:11The verb in general was wit'en. Wit'en. And that was to know. That's your default, to know. Wit' was just the noun form. So, I know, Ick what? And then your knowledge, what you have in your head, is your wit. Not your funniness, but just your wit. This is a big problem in Shakespeare, actually. Because in Shakespeare's time, wit still just meant knowledge. And yet, we hear Shakespeare today, and understandably, we think we understand more than we do, because the words are familiar.

2:47But wit is one of those where the meaning has changed in such a way that anytime anybody uses it, we're hearing it wrong, unless we know that wit meant something different to the bard than it means to us.

Shakespeare's Use of Wit

2:58So, for example, love's labor's lost. At one point, the princess says to a guy, I'm less proud to hear you tell my worth than you, much willing to be counted wise in spending your wit in the praise of mine. Even the phraseology is a little weird, especially to the ear, so I'll read it again. I am less proud to hear you tell my worth than you, much willing to be counted wise in spending your wit in the praise of mine. Now, the key here is wise.

3:31So, wit, wise. They don't sound like the same thing, but wise is another form of this same verb. So, witton, wise means that you are knowledged, that you are learned. So, that meaning has stayed the same, as have so many other variations on wit, except the word itself. I'll get to it. But wise is witted, so to speak, and so you're learned. Now, Shakespeare is often in iambic pentameter, and Lord forbid anybody, you know, do a whole performance in it, but the pentameter here actually gives us a clue as to this relationship between wise and wit.

4:04So, hear this. I am less proud to hear you tell my worth than you, much willing to be counted wise in spending your wit in the praise of mine. The reason that the wit is down there on the low tone, as if it's already been talked about, is because it refers back to the wise. Then you, much willing to be counted wise in spending your wiseness, your wit in the praise of mine.

4:35And so, wit is just knowledge. And for you who know German, wise is the same thing as German's wissen. It's the same root, Proto-Germanic, you know, spread it around. And so, that line is basically, then you, much willing to be counted smart in spending your smarts in the praise of mine. That's what wit meant to somebody in roughly 1600. And Twelfth Night is a big problem with this because it's so easy to think that the characters are being kind of modern and witty when they use that word, for example, when they're really not.

5:11And so, that my favorite example of that is Olivia, you know, great character. And at one point she says, We hear that and we think, oh, so she's going to try to hide her passion by being witty, by using humor as a defense. And that feels kind of modern and so we think, oh, Shakespeare, we can always relate to him.

5:43But not, not exactly. Because really, she doesn't mean a sophisticated sense of humor. She just means knowledge. Neither knowledge nor reason can my passion hide. Specifically, Shakespeare is doing this doublet thing that he sometimes does. It's partly for the rhythm of the line, nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide. But partly because he would sometimes aim at both audiences. So, you would have the plebs, so to speak, down in the pit. And then you'd have the people higher up. I think they were higher up in the globe.

6:13And they had a larger vocabulary which would have included these new French and Latin words that were pouring into the language. So, when he would say, nor wit, nor reason, wit is for the people down eating potatoes and watching. And they're just using English words. Whereas reason, that's a French word. And that's for the high muckety-muck. So, nor wit, nor reason. But this is not a Catherine Hepburn line. It's not like a lockjaw where she's using wit, as we think of it, to hide that she's in love with Cary Grant.

6:44She just means knowledge. And so, that's what wit originally meant. And then it changes over time to something more specific. Not just knowledge, but knowing humor. Humor that is undergirded by knowledge. And the funny thing is, the word alone changes. And so, that now it's unrecognizable as what Shakespeare would have meant. But then the original meaning is all over the place, right under our noses. So, for example, mother wit. Now, we know that that doesn't mean that mother likes Noel Coward.

7:15It's mother's knowledge. She's passing on her knowledge. We would never just say the wit. But mother wit means knowledge. Or, you're witless. Witless doesn't mean that you didn't get arrested development. It means that you're a dummy. You have no knowledge. Think about witness. What's a witness? It's somebody knowledgeness. It's somebody who was giving special knowledge. If somebody is a dimwit, it means that they don't have a good brain.

7:46Not that they don't understand parks and recreation. Or, for example, nitwit, which is the same thing. This is my excuse for playing. Now, it's not a show tune. But a clip from my favorite ancient movie, which is Dinner at Eight in 1933. And the Gene Harlow character, Kitty Packard, is abusive verbally to her maid, Teenie, played by the wonderful Hilda Vaughn. And she's always calling her, Natwit. So, let's listen to Gene Harlow calling Hilda Vaughn. Natwit.

8:16Who's that on the telephone? Mrs. Oliver Jordan wants to speak to you on the phone. Who? Mrs. Jordan. Mrs. Oliver Jordan? Yeah. Holy cat! Hand me that telephone, you nitwit. Such a funny movie. And you know what? Actually, here's some trivia. This just has to be said. And this is the only place anybody would ever let me say it. Dinner at Eight. If you're an old movie fan, you know that Marie Dressler walked away with it. She was on the old side. Well, frankly, old then. And she plays the grand dame ex-actress.

8:49And she was very sick during the filming. And she died about a year after the movie came out. She made one more movie that's never seen. And she passed away. But what nobody talks about, and you're only going to hear this from me and then we can all forget it, is that the woman who plays the tertiary role of Hattie, who is the dinner hostess Billy Burke's sister-in-law, who's invited along just to fill out the table. The woman of a certain age who says, because her husband is always at the movies instead of spending time with her,

9:19well, I guess I'm just a gabo widow. That woman, that was Louise Klosser-Hale. She was in like every second MGM movie at that time. Contract player. She died as soon as the film came out. She just kind of, she got hot and died of a stroke one day. I shouldn't laugh at it. But she died long before Marie Dressler. So the first person who passed away after dinner at eight was Louise Klosser-Hale. Okay, we can now forget that.

Evolution of Language

9:45But think about the fact that you say you have your wits about you. Once again, the expression to wit does not mean to SNL. It means to knowledge. Edna Ferber, who wrote the book Showboat and various others, was once as famous an author as today Sally Rooney. She was part of the Algonquin Roundtable Circle, you've probably heard of. And Alexander Wolcott was perhaps the leader of that. When he moved down to the end of 42nd Street here in New York,

10:18Edna Ferber said that his apartment should be called Wit's End because he's down at the end and he's witty. But the thing is, when you talk about wit's end, when you're at your wit's end, you don't mean that you've run out of jokes. You mean it's the end of your knowledge. And so one theme of this for me is Shakespeare is tough. And I have argued and had fruit thrown at me about it that Shakespeare needs to be gently adjusted in that roughly every few sentences,

10:50there's a word being used in a way that's irrecoverable for us unless we go to the footnotes or we're told. And it's why Shakespeare always feels like a radio station that's not quite tuned in unless you've read it before. Or you might want to just enjoy the language for the poetry, but I don't know about you, that wears me out after about 20 minutes. And so you have these weird moments. Richard II is one of them where I always have felt, I say always as if I've seen it four million times, I've seen it twice, but where I figure if you don't know what wit meant, you don't know what they're saying.

11:21Now, maybe I am being a little unimaginative when Willoughby says, and daily new exactions are devised as blanks, benevolences, and I wot not what. Now, you can either just let it go by or you can think, I guess he means no. I wot not what. Okay. You can figure, maybe you can guess what that meant. But at one sad moment, the queen is standing there and she's talking about her marriage to this person. In both versions, I've seen the implication is that he's actually gay.

11:54And she says, tis nameless woe, I wot. And I'm sure most of the audience is thinking, what, wot, she wot, when really she's saying, tis nameless woe, I know. But you can't know. And so I hope that other productions just have her say, tis nameless woe, I know. Because even there, you get a rhyme, but at least it isn't opaque. Anyway, that's my hobby horse. In any case, earlier English, there was the witton verb, and that was the equivalent of, say, the savoir in French, the saber in Spanish, and the wissen, of course, in German, as in

12:29to know a fact. But then there is also, in French, Spanish, and German, this other know, as in you know your friend. And so that is connaître in French and connaître in Spanish. And then in German, there is kennen for that. Well, in English, it used to be a normal language. And so witton was for knowing two plus two. Knawan was to know your friend. And now all we have is the Knawan, and wit has, you know, gone spread all over the place, but it isn't used in its original 1.0 sense.

13:02And so all we have is Knawan. Now that's no. And if you think about the spelling, Knawan, Knau, no. And so that's what that is. So as always, English is kind of crude. We learn most European languages, and we find that we have to master those two forms of to know. And we think, oh, how exotically they think. But really, it's that we don't. We take it kind of light. It's just a typical thing about English. And in terms of witty, as far as we know it, the earliest example I know is in 1744. And it is, satire is a witty and severe attack of mischievous habits or vices.

13:37That's the earliest one where I can tell that they certainly are thinking about champagne and whoever the Noel Coward equivalent at the time was. But that's pretty late. You know, that's George Washington is a kid. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach.

14:09LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. How about something else? One of my favorite things, and I am on a kind of an oldie jag today just for random reasons, but let's think about the automobile and let's think about how that word has evolved and how because of recording technology over the past hundred years or so, we can actually hear it in transformation.

14:40Some of you know where I'm probably going to go on this. If I'm back, if I'm back in the saddle, you know we're going to do some back shift because that's one of my favorite things. Here, listen to this. Talk about Showboat and Edna Ferber. That is a book that became a Broadway musical of seismic significance in 1927. Various films were made of it. I would not recommend any but the middle one, 1936, which basically is as close as you can get to the stage version and is also just a wonderful movie directed by James Whale,

15:14of all people, who was known for making horror films. And that actually tinges through this film musical. So it's not as corny as you might expect because there's a darkness. You know, there's a short step from this showboat to Frankenstein and Dracula. But 1936 and, you know, the soundtrack is a little because it's 1936. But listen to this exchange between two people who were supposed to be old at the time. These are two older actors. And specifically, listen to the way Helen Wesley, the woman playing Parthie, the grouchy

15:48mom character, says automobile. Public school is the best, but not for gay and nola. Nothing's any good for them unless it costs a lot. Did he buy her any new diamond bracelets or automobiles? She don't say. Well, what does she say? Automobile. And I doubt she was coached, to put it that way. That's Helen Wesley. She was born in 1875. That means she learned to talk in the 1880s and she would have seen automobiles coming in and she calls it an automobile.

16:19Here's some quick trivia. If you like old movies, you ever notice that Helen Wesley and Edna Mae Oliver and also Laura Hope Cruz, who played Aunt Pity Pat in the Gone with the Wind movie, all three of those actresses of a certain age, you never see them in color. Practically never. Edna Mae Oliver in Drums Along the Mohawk. But in general, they're gone after World War II. You don't see them on early TV. All three of them died around 1942. It was almost as if it was planned. So that's automobile.

16:49Now, if you're going to have a backshift, then you have to assume that the next step is automobile. Now, we don't know anybody who says that unless we're very old and most of us aren't. We never knew anybody who said that. But you can hear it. You can hear it on old radio. And one example that always comes to my mind is what many people regard as the best episode of Amos and Andy. And, you know, let's have it straight. This is a show where white men were imitating black men. And so extremely tacky these days. But the truth is, and I'm going to take advantage of a certain something and say, as old radio

17:24goes, Amos and Andy is probably one of the three funniest shows. If you can put your historical glasses on, despite what these white guys are doing, if I may, they did it well. They were very funny. If That's Not Your Cup of Tea, the TV show, they cast black actors who played the same characters and just as well. But this is an episode usually known as The French Car. It's kind of the gateway episode of Amos and Andy. And they've got a car. And listen to the way they say automobile. And it's exactly what we would expect in this episode of 1948.

17:58Hello there, Kingfish. Excuse me a minute, Andy. I was just making a transatlantic telephone call. Why are you calling transatlantic? Oh, why? Because I was the agent for the new French foreign automobile. And I want to talk to the manufacturer. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hello, operator. So you start with automobile. Then you have to have automobile. And then, you know, it's going to keep going. It's almost inevitable. And so automobile. Now, I don't need to play anything with automobile because I'm playing myself. That is the word that I grew up hearing on TV.

18:28The occasional person would say it in real life. But automobile. That's something that I am now 60. That is what I would have heard. But then, you know, it's going to clip, too. So automobile is too long. You're going to start having auto. Here, of course, is a modern commercial. And they're talking about an auto show. The Philadelphia Auto Show. Find what moves you. Visit phillyautoshow.com. So you get it step by step by step. This woman who grew up during the Gilded Age is saying automobile.

18:58You've got an old radio show from circa World War II. And it's automobile. Then most of us are familiar with a formal word automobile. But if we're going to have that word at all instead of car, we're going to hear auto. And so what that means is Abraham Lincoln would have said like auto what? Although it would have been more like auto what? He actually had a high reedy voice. He did not sound like he did not sound like Edward Arnold. For those of you of a certain age, that's who does him in the exhibit at Disney World and Disneyland, the Hall of the Presidents, if that still exists.

19:30And he's got this Edward Arnold. No, no. It sounded like this. But he would have said, you know, what is what is an auto? He would have known that, you know, auto means self in Greek. But the idea that it would refer to something that you drive around, that would have been opaque to him. That's just for us. Just like broccoli. Broccoli is something that only Italians in America ate until about the 30s. And then it started becoming more popular. But nobody in a silent film eats broccoli. Franklin D. Roosevelt probably never ate broccoli, nor would he ever have had pizza.

20:03That happens after World War II for Americans in general. No broccoli for Franklin D. Roosevelt. No autos for Abraham Lincoln. Because, of course, everything is changed. And, you know, we just say car. But, of course, that started as motor car. But that, of course, is another story. Let's talk about something really recent.

Tacos and Language Change

20:25Let's talk about tacos. So, if you know how things like wit and auto happen, then you can make some predictions as to how other things are going to happen. And so, there's this taco thing. And it is something that means Trump always craps out. So, people in critique of certain policies of our current quote-unquote president will say that Trump always craps out. And that's the taco syndrome.

20:56Now, that means him backing out of a situation that he created. And generally, these days, we hear it in reference to him. I'm getting this observation from the linguist Thomas Beaver. And I think he is dead on. So, on 4chan, one of many quotes is, First time since Trump took office when he won't be able to taco out. Talking about the war in Iran. Now, I'm going to make a prediction. And I think it's probably going to happen this year. I might be wrong, but this is so typical that I'm just going to make a bet.

21:30Pretty soon, we're going to start using taco beyond Trump. And people are going to start saying something like, Oh, you can't taco out of this one. First to other politicians, probably Republicans. Then it'll start jumping the aisle. Then it'll just become people. Maybe that'll take until the end of next year. But I imagine this is going to happen quickly, partly because these things happen faster these days because of the nature of social media. And next thing is going to be, it becomes a noun because that's what happens in English. And so, it's going to be, Oh, the taco.

22:00He pulled a taco. The taco. You'll hear it on podcasts. It'll be on Joe Rogan or something like that. Oh, the taco. And just referring to somebody. You know, not necessarily Donald Trump. Not, you know, J.D. Vance. But just, you know, somebody who's pulling out of something that they created. It's a cute term. Everybody likes tacos. Makes you kind of hungry. But just think that when people start using it that way, and I will check in, he says, as to whether that actually happens. Then think that it would have been incomprehensible just a year before or two years before.

22:32Somebody says, The taco. Well, what about it? So, we'll see. These, you know, end of the year lists that people like these days. You get called upon to do that more every year as a public linguist to the point that this is the first year that I'm compiling these words as I catch them from the air this early in the year so that I don't have to do so much work in December when I get asked to write that piece. But the taco. It's going to be that sort of thing. That is my prediction. One other thing that we need to look at is how redundancy works, and it's partly because it is a much more natural part of language than we're often told, and partly because sometimes it's kind of funny.

23:12Irregardless. We're always told that's no good because you've got the less and the ear, and you really only need to say regardless. But people at some point started saying irregardless. Irregardless. Whenever I hear that, I think, well, if redundancy is such a terrible thing, then why is it okay in French to negate a verb using both the ne on one end and the pas on the other? So, if irregardless is bad, then why is je ne marche pas?

23:43I don't walk not. How come that's not bad? Or, in a lot of European languages, you'll use the negative word, the not word, in a way that kind of doubles the assumption that you already have that something didn't happen. And what I mean by that is, for example, in French, if you say avant qu'il ne vienne, and that means before he comes. So, formally, it should be avant qu'il vienne, before that he comes.

24:15But you say avant qu'il ne vienne, which means he hasn't come yet, which is why you're saying before he comes. He hasn't, and we know it. But then you actually say ne vienne. Why do you have to stick that in? We know that he's not here. Kind of an odd thing. My sweetie has reinforced for me that Russian does the same thing. Before he finds out. Пока он узнал. That's what kind of it should be. But you say пока он не узнал. Before he doesn't find out. Redundancy is just normal.

24:46Well, here's a bit of redundancy that I found recently. Apparently, there was a time earlier in our president's life when something was going on, and a female person, I'm not going to get into any details, but this person was much younger than him. And apparently, it says in the file, the girl bit him with her teeth. And I'm going to leave you to fill in what was going on. But the girl bit him with her teeth. Thing is, what else would she bite him with? It's a funny way of putting it.

25:17And it's as if you said something like, well, I sat down with my butt. Or, you know, I ate it with my mouth. Or I smelled it with my nose. Or I licked it with my tongue. We could think of maybe one other one that I'm not going to get into. Even in my randier guise on this show 10 years ago, I wouldn't have gone there. Because kids are listening. But you know what I'm probably thinking. The point is that the person did say, bit him with her teeth as perfectly natural language. That doesn't sound ridiculous.

25:47But it would be interesting if that kind of went further. And to tell you the truth, for this episode, I looked to see if I could find languages that actually do that. Where that kind of redundancy is normal. And you say I ate it with my mouth. I sat with my butt. I was assuming it was going to be certain Native American languages. But no, I would be distorting it to say that's what they're saying. But I'll bet there are some. And if any of you happen to know of languages where there's that kind of redundancy, please let me know. Because that's the sort of thing languages would do. I would not be surprised if there's some language, and it's probably one spoken on the North American continent, where you have to say, I ate it with my mouth and I kicked him with my foot.

26:26I'm going to keep trying to find it. This is one where actually there is a show tune reference that I've always found very funny. And thinking about it, I realize it's funny for the same reason. This is on the 20th century. It is a musical version of actually the old 30s movie. That's my thing today. 20th century with John Barrymore and Carol Lombard. And it is the John Barrymore vainglorious Oscar producer character who has had yet another failure.

26:57And he's stuck on the road in Chicago. But he's talking about how he rises again. He battles his enemies. And listen to this lyric. I'll face those grim goliaths with my slingshot. And I'll hit at them with my back up against the wall. Angry birds pecking with their beaks. So birds pecking with their beaks. What else would they peck him with? And it's just his way of being very graphic.

27:28I suppose there's a relationship between that and the biting example. And also another thing in that lyric is that he's not hitting the birds. He hits at them. He's kind of not quite getting them, but he's hitting at them. That's something that someone would say from the outside. It's as if he's seeing himself in a tableau. And that's partly his personality. I think that is so funny. It's kind of like a lot of modern humor would have something like someone is invested in having someone else think that they don't know another person in the scene.

28:01So they're with their friend. It's like George and Jerry or something like that on Seinfeld. But the idea is that the onlooker doesn't know that they know each other. You might imagine that George would say something like, oh, hello, complete stranger. I would like, well, that's only something that somebody from the outside would describe it as being that Jerry is a complete stranger to George. You don't say within your own life, oh, hello, complete stranger. Anyway, hit at them is kind of like that. You can see I'm in a kind of, we might call it discursive mood today.

28:34Basically, the lesson here is that all this stuff is always going on. We can talk and talk and talk about AI. And, you know, that's what I'm asked about a lot these days. And AI is very important. But to be honest, in my heart of hearts, whenever I'm asked about AI and what effect it will have on language, which, frankly, I think is going to be very little. I'm thinking, but what about the nitwits and autos and the tacos, the tacos that we cannot eat with our mouths?

29:05What about all of that? That is my version of language change. I'll see you all or you will hear me very soon. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Meet the new iSIMS, the single talent acquisition platform that's fully future ready.

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30:46You can hear it drop out.