Boris Johnson has accused the BBC of 'wetness' over not wanting to have singing at its biggest classical music festival:
Jay Doubleyou: rule britannia?
A linguist looks at the origin of the term:
‘Stop this wetness!’: the roots of Boris Johnson’s watery contempt | Language | The Guardian
And he's just written a book - reviewed in the Guardian:
Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language
A myth-busting account of how languages emerge, change, and influence the way we think
As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.
Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.
Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together.
Languages do shape how we think and act, but this usually happens not at the level of vocabulary but of linguistic structure. The psycholinguist John Lucy has given language as one explanation for the starkly different rates of workplace accidents in Sweden and Finland. In Swedish, prepositions allow for the nuanced account of actions over time; in Finnish, case endings stress static relationships. This may make Finns less alert to the temporal arrangement of a process, leading to more interruptions and accidents at work.
Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land – wrinkled in some places, straight in others. Every language is a different throw of the net. Language sieves and strains reality but never imprisons it. There are always holes for the real world to escape.
Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used. (Adam Gopnik once wrote that prescriptivism was “as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy”.) But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that “decimate” comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)
He also rescues nonstandard forms, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), from the routine condescension meted out to them. AAVE misses out the linking “to be” verb (“you late”) but then so do many other languages. The AAVE construction “he be singing” does not mean “he is singing” but “he sings [as a hobby, professionally]”. It is an efficient means of marking the habitual aspect. “Imma” for “I’m going to” is another standard linguistic move: cutting a word or phrase that is just a grammatical marker. “Imma” doesn’t work with the more literal sense of “going to”, which is why you can say “Imma let you finish” (I’m going to let you finish) but not “Imma the shops” (I’m going to the shops).
All languages move naturally towards abbreviation and compression, guided by what the linguist Rudi Keller calls “the invisible hand in language change”. Shariatmadari compares it to the desire path that forms on the lawn of a university campus after thousands of students have taken a short cut across it.
He is sceptical of Noam Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar, the idea that human beings have a sort of syntax-generating implant in the brain. Language for Shariatmadari is not a piece of brain software but something that emerges when we interact with others. It is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it”.
This is quite a scholarly and serious book. I admired its refusal to lighten its denser arguments with that jokey “here comes the science bit” flippancy that so often grates in non-fiction books on complex topics. Shariatmadari’s style is never less than clear, but there isn’t too much handholding. His account requires a little patience, but then so does linguistics.
Stick with it and it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. Shariatmadari begins by pointing to “an almost insatiable appetite for linguistic debate” in our culture. But as he then shows, most of the focus is trivial – “how to speak like a millennial” – or myth-ridden. Our wider culture seems profoundly uninterested in the dynamic, makeshift nature of language, the way that it gives birth to thought as much as articulates it.
Politicians, caught out saying something that they actually believe, instantly apologise for their “poor choice of words”. It is as if words were just a light dusting of salt on the meal of meaning, and not that important. But words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything.
This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.
• Don’t Believe a Word is published by W&N (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language | Books | The Guardian
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