The secret life of words english words and their origins course guidebook

Winning Words, Banished Words Lecture 1 O ne of the many wonderful things about studying English words is that we make new ones all the time. For example, do you know any flexitarians? This is a relatively new word, formed from flexible + vegetarian and meaning a vegetarian who eats meat when it’s convenient. Flexitarian introduces a key theme of the course that we’ll discuss in this lecture: the mixed/borrowed bag of English words. Other themes we’ll touch on include the power of words, the ever-changing nature of words and language, and the challenges that the study of words presents to our assumptions about how language works. The Human Element in Language • As speakers of any language, we must take words for granted, but the “secret lives” of words can be fascinating when we pause and consider where they came from, how they work, and what they tell us about our language and ourselves. • Those who study the English language are struck by its vibrancy and by our creativity with it, as we exploit the riches of English vocabulary, create new additions to vocabulary, or change or abandon words that are present in the vocabulary. • Language makes us human (no other species has this capacity), and it is a human impulse to play with language. • There is also a human impulse to lament some of the changes that occur in a language or to worry that young people are ruining the language. Many people believe that there was some earlier moment when the language was in better shape than it is in today. • In this course, we’ll look in great detail at how words work and change in order to gain perspective on this concern about decay and 3 insight into the fascinating things happening in the human brain and in human culture that we see reflected in the history of words. A Reason to Celebrate • There is much to celebrate and to study in the unlimited human capacity to create new words and new utterances. • Each year, a vote is taken at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS), a gathering of linguists and lexicographers, to choose the Word of the Year. o This vote, which celebrates language change and lexical creativity, happens often just a week after Lake Superior State has put out its list of banished words for the year—words that have become tiresome often exactly because they have been so successful. For 2012, this list of banished words included ginormous, blowback, man cave, and occupy. Lecture 1: Winning Words, Banished Words o In the recent past, some of the winners for Word of the Year and other categories at the ADS meeting have included occupy, app, tweet, e-, Y2K, bailout, chad, 9-11, and metrosexual. This list captures some of the many topics we can learn about by looking at words: technology (app, tweet, e-), history (occupy, 9-11, bailout, chad), and culture (metrosexual, flexitarian). o These are all relatively new words that can tell us about our current cultural moment, but we’ll also spend time looking at where more established words come from and learning from the stories they have to tell. • 4 In the year 2000, the members of ADS voted on the Word of the Millennium. o There was much debate about the criteria to be used in choosing such a word. Should the selection be based on a word as a word or a word as a concept? Should it be a borrowed term from French, Latin, or Greek or a longstanding Germanic word that took on new meaning or prominence? o In the end, the word she was chosen because it was new to the millennium, may reflect language contact (with Old Norse), represented change at the very core of English, and captured gains made by women over the course of the millennium. Themes of the Course • As we explore English vocabulary in this course, we will return to a few themes. The first of these is the idea that English words are a mixed linguistic bag. They come from many languages in addition to the native Germanic words, giving our language a rich, multilayered vocabulary. o As long as there has been English, there have been borrowed words in English, and by looking at these words, we can learn about encounters with speakers of other languages. o English words reflect a history of extensive language contact— in Britain, in the Americas, and around the world through imperialism and colonization, and today, through globalization and World Englishes. o English stands out among languages in terms of just how many words it has borrowed. o In this borrowing, we can see how different kinds of words cluster in different areas of the lexicon, for example, Greek and Latin in medicine. • Our second theme is that words are powerful. o The childhood saying “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is simply not true, and we know this. Some words are so powerful that we won’t even say them. o We know the power in being able to manipulate words to express what we want to say and how we want to say it. Examples here include “I love you” and “mistakes were made.” 5 o Language is a significant part of our identity. The words we choose tell people much about us and the communities with which we identify. o We also know that words sometimes fail us, perhaps when we attempt to express sympathy after a death. • A third theme is that words change all the time. English, as a living language, is ever-changing. o The human mind is a creative entity, and through our creativity, we change the language. o It’s important to note that change is a natural part of language, not in any way a destructive force. There is no endpoint or destination in language. o Looking at change in the past, we can learn a lot about our history—and we need to recognize and become comfortable with the idea that the changes around us are more interesting than worrisome. Lecture 1: Winning Words, Banished Words o It may seem like common sense to think about change as error, but in this course, we will frame change more often as creativity. This is how linguists think about change, as opposed to how writers of usage guides view it. • This relates to a fourth theme, which is that studying English words asks you to rethink some very common notions about language. o As speakers of English, we all bring a good deal of knowledge to the table, and along with that can come some pretty strong beliefs about how language works and what is correct or incorrect, many of which have been learned or reinforced in school or popular usage guides. o Who is to say, however, whether a certain word is a “real word”? If we all know what ain’t means, why do many language authorities say that it is “incorrect”? 6 o These are important and challenging questions about our everyday experience with words and about the resources we rely on to tell us about words. o Our challenge will be to move away from such words as “right” and “wrong” and to think in more nuanced ways about the competing forces of language change and the benefits of a standard variety, as well as the ways we all negotiate these forces every day, choosing different words in different contexts. • As we explore these themes, we will learn many wonderful linguistic facts, such as why colonel is spelled the way it is, why dive has two past tenses, and what pattern applies to such words as governor/governess. The Scope of the English Vocabulary • How big is the English vocabulary? The answer depends on who you ask. o The most recent unabridged edition of Webster’s, the Third New International Dictionary, has 450,000 words. This edition omits all words considered obsolete by 1755, except those found in well-known works. o A recent study using Google Books estimated that the English lexicon in 2000 was a little more than 1 million words, compared with 544,000 words in 1900. © Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Thinkstock. o Most college dictionaries have 50,000 to 180,000 words. English vocabulary reflects extensive language contact—in Britain, in the Americas, and around the world through imperialism, colonization, and globalization. 7 o The lexicographer Allen Walker Read put the number at 4 million: 700,000 in Merriam-Webster files, 1 million scientific terms, plus regional expressions, foreign borrowings, trade names, and new slang words not yet recorded. • This raises another important question: How many words does the “average speaker” know? o A college-educated speaker’s receptive vocabulary is about 20,000 to 50,000 words, a much smaller number than that in the average dictionary. o Note that there is also a difference between active vocabulary (the words you use on a regular basis) and passive or receptive vocabulary (words you recognize but don’t use regularly). • What counts as “English”? o Scientific vocabulary is arguably the most rapidly growing part of the lexicon. Some say, for example, that there are 200,000 medical terms. Do these count as “English”? Lecture 1: Winning Words, Banished Words o Dictionaries are filled with highly specialized terms, some borrowed and some not. o English has a remarkable history of borrowing: More than 80 percent of the most common 1,000 words are native English, but more than 60 percent of the next most common 1,000 words are borrowed. When does a borrowed word, such as sushi, become English? o It’s also important to realize that as English spreads around the world, it is developing new varieties, many of which have words specific to that region in the same way that American English has words specific to North America, such as moose and squash. • 8 In this course, we’ll focus mostly on long-established varieties of English, especially American English, along with British, Canadian,