Language A to Z - John McWhorter

The biggest lesson, and almost a regret, is that I didn’t know how to clip the audio during my key takeaways. For the print books, I have been able to flip back through and find the key ideas. Rather than torture myself, I am going to write what I remember and then add as needed.

He provides an explanation for the modern uses of like and lol. There is a term for their uses, and it explains how we actually text and speak today. I have been so far lost in foreign languages that I forget sometimes how rich it is to speak English as a mother tongue. I can always go back into the audio and find the references.

Now I have found the PDF. A few interesting tidbits:

- C for Compounds: a “black BIRD” is an adjective followed by a noun, while “BLACKbird” is a compound and a specific animal. Think a “white HOUSE” vs. the “WHITE house”.

- K for Ket: New Speakers of Languages. The chances the elaborate languages can be learned by busy adults is pretty slim. At least, they can’t be learned completely. Hebrew was the grand success story; it was brought from the page back to full life. However, that was a unique situation where, first of all, there was a religious imperative, and besides that, people speaking different languages were brought to one location where a new language had a highly practical purpose. Most importantly, the language was also transmitted to children on kibbutzes. 

- L for Like: Two versions, the quotation marker “She as like, ‘Don’t even talk about it,’ and I was like, ‘Why is he bald anyway?’” Second version, a softener, “You have to, like, push harder” to avoid commanding someone too explicitly. Like is a pragmatic particle, it’s a hedge word, think about the use of actually. In a different version, one could take the like as an example of a kind of politeness, rather than insecurity or lack of conviction. 

- M for Maltese: Maltese is a kind of Arabic, only I half of its vocabulary is Italian.  He also get into the sociopolitical implications of language vs. dialect, and that this is not determined by qualitative characteristics of the language. 

- U for Understand: this was the 3rd point that I wanted to remember. The evolution of “epic fail” as a move away from failure is natural and necessary, because failure picks up implications along the way, and then fail comes along as a means to remove the implications and to go back to the most basic meaning.