The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English - Hardcover

Mark Abley, an award-winning journalist, writes for the Montreal Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. He speaks English, French, and a little Welsh. His previous book, Spoken Here, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Discover magazine. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 for work on language change and the future.

Roarific
The Power of Language Change

Was I in Arcadia or Alhambra? Was I speeding past Temple City or City of Industry?

Somewhere amid the grind and spurt of traffic on a southern California freeway, I slipped a Coldplay disc, X&Y, into my car’s CD player. The morning sun lit up the distant, snow-clotted San Gabriel Mountains, a prospect as exhilarating as the opening song, “Square One.” As the lead singer, Chris Martin, evoked discovery, travel and the future, his tenor voice seemed to soar high above the choking swarm of vehicles; half consciously I swerved into the fast lane. But Martin’s tone soon darkens. Several of the cuts demonstrate loss, regret, uncertainty, and apprehension about what the days after tomorrow hold in store for us. An SUV was maintaining an aggressive stance inches behind my license plate, and I pulled back into one of the middle lanes.

The CD reached its fifth track: a haunting, nine-note melody, repeated softly, then with a surge of percussive volume. Martin sings about his fear of the future, his need to speak out. When an early attempt at reassurance fails, he probes deeper, asking if “you,” his brother, feel incomplete or lost. The song is called “Talk.” To the underlying rhythm of a drummed heartbeat, its lyrics summon up an anxiety specific to words and meaning: the feeling that other people are addressing him in a language beyond his grasp. It’s as though language has lost its ability to connect us— as though we’ve misplaced a key that would allow us, somehow, to understand what words have come to mean. Birds kept flying somewhere above Walnut or Diamond Bar, but all utterance now seemed strange, unfathomable. The guitar riffs swooped and rose to match the breathtaking, lethal grandeur of the California freeways, yet the song’s lyrics were bleak.

Back home in Montreal, I found myself continually listening to X&Y. So were millions of other people in dozens of countries—this had been the world’s top-selling album in 2005. One day I came across a futuristic, B-movie-like video of “Talk”; it showed the perplexed band trying to communicate with a giant robot. A version of the video on the YouTube website had been watched more than 442,000 times in the previous ten
months. Many hundreds of viewers had posted comments. Some of them were brief, uninhibited love letters. ace this song iz wick id lol ace vid, wrote a viewer from Britain. coldplay is the BEST!! added a thirteen-year-old Finn, using a Japanese screen name. vid. is kind of err. but the song is roarific, noted an American. A comment in English from China followed one in Basque from Spain and one in Spanish from Botswana.

If I were more of a joiner, I might have signed up for the official Coldplay.com online forum, which boasts tens of thousands of members. The forum makes national borders immaterial—Latvians and Macedonians, Indonesians and Peruvians, Israelis and Egyptians all belong. To them it doesn’t matter that the band consists of three Englishmen and a Scot singing in a tongue that was once confined to part of an island off Europe’s coast. Now, wherever on the planet these fans happen to live, music connects them. So does language. As long as they’re willing to grope for words in the accelerating global language that Coldplay speaks, the forum gives all its members a chance to speak. Which is how the fifth song on X&Y ends. Martin admits that things don’t make sense any longer. But as the melodies collapse around him, he invites us to talk.

All sorts of borders are collapsing now: social, economic, artistic, linguistic. They can’t keep up with the speed of our listening, of our speaking, of our singing, of our traveling. Borders could hardly be less relevant on teen-happy websites like Facebook and MySpace. That morning, a Canadian in the exurbs of Los Angeles, I was listening to a British band while driving to meet a Mexican-American professor who began a memoir in Argentina full of sentences like this: “repente veo que ALL OF A SUDDEN, como right out of nowhere, estoy headed for the freeway on-ramp.” Routes are merging. Languages are merging.

That professor celebrates a promiscuous, unruly mix of words. But many people contemplate such a mix with annoyance and fear, emotions they also feel about other kinds of language change, like the chatroom abbreviations in those YouTube comments. When you first peer at the weirdly spelled, lowercase fragments of speech, or listen to the staccato interplay of tongues in major cities like LA, you may be fearful that everyone else is talking in a language you don’t speak. Is it mere unfamiliarity that inspires such unease, or is it something deeper?

Language enables us to feel at home in everyday life. But of late, language seems to have packed up its bags, slammed the door behind it, and taken to the open road. That’s where we find ourselves: on the move. Every few days, if not every few hours, we become aware of a new word or phrase speeding past us. There’s no going back, either—no retreat into the grammar and lexicon of the past. Our only home is this: the verbal space in which we’re already traveling. The expressions in that space are often amazing— a generation or two ago, before our use of language went digital, no one would have believed some of what we routinely see, hear and type.

Yet from time to time, I too feel lost. In the future, wherever we are, what in the world will we say?
The way other people use language sometimes troubles us. But the reasons vary wildly. It may be the particular version of English spoken in Singapore, Sydney or San Diego. It may be the way teenagers talk—Joan Didion, describing the “blank-faced” girls and “feral” boys of southern California, criticized their “refusal or inability to process the simplest statement without rephrasing it. There was the fuzzy relationship to language, the tendency to seize on a drifting fragment of something once heard and repeat it, not quite get it right, worry it like a bone.” It may be a pompously inflated polysyllabic phrase, a contortion of words in an ad, a noun that masquerades as a verb. It may be grammatical errors in a TV news bulletin, phrases abused on a radio talk show, spelling mistakes on a website. It may be the opaque language of bureaucracy—in March 2007, to take a random example, the Queensland Government Chief Information Office defined its task as “the development of methodologies and toolkits to strengthen the planning and project management capability of agencies.” Say what? “The QGCIO also plays an integral part in building relationships and identifying opportunities for collaboration between agencies, cross-jurisdictionally, with the ICT Industry and with the tertiary sector.” Even more than this kind of flaccid verbiage, my personal bugbear is the rhetoric of war, engineered to hide the truth: “collateral damage,” “friendly fire,” “transfer tubes,” or “the excesses of human nature that humanity suffers” (such was Donald Rumsfeld’s euphemism for the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib). There are innumerable reasons why people get irritated about language.

Irritation can lead to anxiety. If words no longer bear their proper meaning, or are no longer pronounced the right way, or are now being combined with other words in some incorrect manner, what verbal defacements might scar the future?

Experts keep trying to reassure the public. Even in 1929, the British linguist Ernest Weekley felt it necessary to observe that “stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis.” “People have been complaining about language change for centuries,” says Katherine Barber, editor in chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. “They’re fascinated to learn that ‘travel’ started off as an instrument of torture—but they want the changes to stop now. I think people invest a lot in correct spelling and grammar because they worked very hard to learn it well in school—that’s why there’s a resistance.

They say, ‘It’s terrible, they don’t use the subjunctive anymore.’ But the subjunctive has been disappearing for centuries.” As the American scholar John McWhorter has pointed out, “There is no such thing as a society lapsing into using unclear or illogical speech—anything that strikes you as incorrect in some humble speech variety is bound to pop up in full bloom in several of the languages considered the world’s noblest.” Nobility, the linguists reiterate, is in the ear of the beholder. Many native speakers beg to differ.

Amid the commotion, rest assured: I have no ideological ax to grind. I’m not interested in persuading you to refine your punctuation, double your vocabulary or perfect your grammar. I write simply as someone who loves and cares about language; I believe its manifold powers of expression help make us truly human. Today the evidence of linguistic change, like that of climate change, is all around us. But I suspect that with both words and weather, we don’t always ask the right questions. “Is language declining?” may not be the smartest inquiry to make. It might be more rewarding to ask: “Why does language change provoke such anxiety? What kinds of change can we expect to see in the future? And how should we try to cope?”

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace compared words to leaves in a forest: just as trees lose their withered leaves and welcome fresh ones, so too do words fall away to be replaced by the new. The process is continual, and older than any of our languages. Yet words seem unusually volatile now. “We are living at the beginning of a new linguistic era,” the eminent linguist David Crystal wrote in 2004. “I do not believe that ‘revolution’ is too strong a word for what has been taking place.” He based his assertion on three interrelated phenomena: the planetwide spread of English in the late twentieth century, the disappearance of hundreds of other languages, and the sudden dominance of the Internet as a means of communication. When these topics are looked at together, Crystal argued, “we encounter a vision of a linguistic future which is radically different from what has existed in the past.”

The nature of that difference is the central theme of these pages. Having devoted a previous book, Spoken Here, to the last-ditch struggles of minority languages, I promise to say little about that subject here. The awareness of a terrible loss—on average, a language goes extinct somewhere in the world every two weeks—underlies some of what follows. But loss is not the only story to be told. This book sets out to explore and interpret a verbal revolution.
On a bright October afternoon, I was standing in front of a class of sixteen
and seventeen-year-olds in a small town west of Montreal. Their English teacher had invited me to give a writing workshop in the high school library. The hour was nearing its end when abruptly I switched course. Instead of talking about metaphors and similes, sweet conclusions and dynamite beginnings, I asked each student to jot down a few words or phrases that older people would not understand, and then provide a brief definition for each term. I gave the class no advance warning. The risk was that this impromptu assignment would induce a yawn-filled silence, a retreat into heavy-lidded boredom. But instead the students—especially the girls, I noticed—set about the task with enthusiasm.

“You mean any words?” said a preppy-looking girl in blue. “Even the ones that aren’t in the dictionary?”

“Especially the ones that aren’t in a dictionary,” I replied.

I waited a couple of minutes—time was short—and asked for the results. Arms filled the air. Hands waggled. I’m a reader, a parent, a viewer, a listener; I thought that all together, the students might come up with a dozen words I didn’t know. So much for the vanity of age.

Cheddar, said the first, meaning “money, lavish earnings.” (I’ll give this and all the other definitions in the students’ exact words.) He got owned, said another: “rejected, shut down, beat up.” On the go, added a third: “it’s like going out, but not official.” I recognized some of the expressions, of course; even a senior citizen of fifty can comprehend eye candy and loaded, poser and flame. Did these innocent, cool teenagers really believe their generation had invented high? But as I stood there in the sun-dappled library, I realized that the majority of the students’ words and phrases left me bemused. What on earth was burninate? Was d-low somehow related to “below,” “delay,” “J Lo”—or to none of those terms? (Not wanting to keep the meanings secret—to d-low them, that is—I’ll suggest that you’d burninate something only if you had the fire-breathing powers of a dragon.) More generally, by what learned or instinctive command had these young people enacted their self-assured takeover of the language?

Before the bell freed them from the joy of learning, the students handed in the slips of paper on which they’d scribbled their definitions. I have them still: scraps torn from notepads and workbooks, a page from a disintegrating paperback, a yellow Post-it note with a smiley at the top. Overlaps were surprisingly rare; just one word—noob, meaning somebody new, ignorant or inexperienced—was defined three times.

Looking at the sixty-six words now, I’m struck by the diversity of their origins. A few emerge from the online world of instant messaging: rofl, for instance, which gathers the initial letters of “rolling on the floor laughing.” Others are abbreviations: sup, for instance, originally “What’s up?” and now a synonym for “Hi, how are you?” Almost anywhere you go, the power of hip-hop seems unavoidable: surely that’s how homie (friend) and foshizzle (I agree) migrated from America’s inner cities to a small, waspish town in Quebec. Hip-hop and cyberspace together encouraged the spread of phat, which morphed from “sexy” in the 1960s to “cool, great, wonderful” by the ’90s, and which is now widely regarded as an acronym for “pretty hot and tempting”—its original meaning, in short. Drug culture is just as influential; blame or credit it for fatty (an oversized joint), gacked (on speed) and pinner (a small joint). It’s unfortunate That’s so gay has come to mean “That’s
stupid, not worth my time.” But what could be the origins and adolescent meanings of lag and One and die in a fire?

It was humbling to read an impromptu definition of scene, a word I thought I knew, that deployed a word I couldn’t quite pin down—“style (knock-off of emo).” Emo? It was even more humbling for me, a writer, someone whose livelihood depends on the rich and exact use of words, to realize how far the English language had slithered away from my grasp, not for reasons of ethnicity or culture but simply because of time. “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” wrote the poet Andrew Marvell in the seventeenth century. It’s not a chariot any longer; it’s a Dreamliner.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all these expressions are destined to enter the permanent storehouse of English vocabulary. Many of them will be as fleeting as youth itself. Young men and women have always used slang as a weapon to cut their lives free from the nets cast by their elders— didn’t I aspire, unsuccessfully, to be a groovy freak? Older people have no reason to try and ...