The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Read online

  The scheme for computing the meaning of a stem out of the meaning of its parts is similar to the one used in syntax: one special element is the “head,” and it determines what the conglomeration refers to. Just as the phrase the cat in the hat is a kind of cat, showing that cat is its head, a Yugoslavia report is a kind of report, and shmooshability is a kind of ability, so report and -ability must be the heads of those words. The head of an English word is simply its rightmost morpheme.

  Continuing the dissection we can tease stems into even smaller parts. The smallest part of a word, the part that cannot be cut up into any smaller parts, is called its root. Roots can combine with special suffixes to form stems. For example, the root Darwin can be found inside the stem Darwinian. The stem Darwinian in turn can be fed into the suffixing rule to yield the new stem Darwinianism. From there, the inflectional rule could even give us the word Darwinianisms, embodying all three levels of word structure:

  Interestingly, the pieces fit together in only certain ways. Thus Darwinism, a stem formed by the stem suffix -ism, cannot be a host for -ian, because -ian attaches only to roots; hence Darwinismian (which would mean “pertaining to Darwinism”) sounds ridiculous. Similarly, Darwinsian (“pertaining to the two famous Darwins, Charles and Erasmus”), Darwinsianism, and Darwinsism are quite impossible, because whole inflected words cannot have any root or stem suffixes joined to them.

  Down at the bottommost level of roots and root affixes, we have entered a strange world. Take electricity. It seems to contain two parts, electric and -ity:

  But are these words really assembled by a rule, gluing a dictionary entry for -ity onto the root electric, like this?

  Nstem Nroot Nrootsuffix

  “A noun stem can be composed of a noun root and a suffix.”

  -ity:

  noun root suffix

  means “the state of being X”

  attach me to a noun root

  Not this time. First, you can’t get electricity simply by gluing together the word electric and the suffix -ity—that would sound like “electrick itty.” The root that -ity is attached to has changed its pronunciation to “electríss.” That residue, left behind when the suffix has been removed, is a root that cannot be pronounced in isolation.

  Second, root-affix combinations have unpredictable meanings; the neat scheme for interpreting the meaning of the whole from the meaning of the parts breaks down. Complexity is the state of being complex, but electricity is not the state of being electric (you would never say that the electricity of this new can opener makes it convenient); it is the force powering something electric. Similarly, instrumental has nothing to do with instruments, intoxicate is not about toxic substances, one does not recite at a recital, and a five-speed transmission is not an act of transmitting.

  Third, the supposed rule and affix do not apply to words freely, unlike the other rules and affixes we have looked at. For example, something can be academic or acrobatic or aerodynamic or alcoholic, but academicity, acrobaticity, aerodynamicity, and alcoholicity sound horrible (to pick just the first four words ending in -ic in my electronic dictionary).

  So at the third and most microscopic level of word structure, roots and their affixes, we do not find bona fide rules that build words according to predictable formulas, wug-style. The stems seem to be stored in the mental dictionary with their own idiosyncratic meanings attached. Many of these complex stems originally were formed after the Renaissance, when scholars imported many words and suffixes into English from Latin and French, using some of the rules appropriate to those languages of learning. We have inherited the words, but not the rules. The reason to think that modern English speakers mentally analyze these words as trees at all, rather than as homogeneous strings of sound, is that we all sense that there is a natural break point between the electric and the -ity. We also recognize that there is an affinity between the word electric and the word electricity, and we recognize that any other word containing -ity must be a noun.

  Our ability to appreciate a pattern inside a word, while knowing that the pattern is not the product of some potent rule, is the inspiration for a whole genre of wordplay. Self-conscious writers and speakers often extend Latinate root suffixes to new forms by analogy, such as religiosity, criticality, systematicity, randomicity, insipidify, calumniate, conciliate, stereotypy, disaffiliate, gallonage, and Shavian. The words have an air of heaviosity and seriosity about them, making the style an easy target for parody. A 1982 editorial cartoon by Jeff Mac-Nelly put the following resignation speech into the mouth of Alexander Haig, the malaprop-prone Secretary of State:

  I decisioned the necessifaction of the resignatory action/ option due to the dangerosity of the trendflowing of foreign policy away from our originatious careful coursing towards consistensivity, purposity, steadfastnitude, and above all, clarity.

  Another cartoon, by Tom Toles, showed a bearded academician explaining the reason verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were at an all-time low:

  Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development.

  In the culture of computer programmers and managers, this analogy-making is used for playful precision, not pomposity. The New Hacker’s Dictionary, a compilation of hackish jargon, is a near-exhaustive catalogue of the not-quite-freely-extendible root affixes in English:

  ambimoustrous adj. Capable of operating a mouse with either hand.

  barfulous adj. Something that would make anyone barf.

  bogosity n. The degree to which something is bogus.

  bogotify v. To render something bogus.

  bozotic adj. Having the quality of Bozo the Clown.

  cuspy adj. Functionally elegant.

  depeditate v. To cut the feet off of (e.g., while printing the bottom of a page).

  dimwittery n. Example of a dim-witted statement.

  geekdom n. State of being a techno-nerd.

  marketroid n. Member of a company’s marketing department.

  mumblage n. The topic of one’s mumbling.

  pessimal adj. Opposite of “optimal.”

  wedgitude n. The state of being wedged (stuck; incapable of proceeding without help).

  wizardly adj. Pertaining to expert programmers.

  Down at the level of word roots, we also find messy patterns in irregular plurals like mouse-mice and man-men and in irregular past-tense forms like drink-drank and seek-sought. Irregular forms tend to come in families, like drink-drank, sink-sank, shrink-shrank, stink-stank, sing-sang, ring-rang, spring-sprang, swim-swam, and sit-sat, or blow-blew, know-knew, grow-grew, throw-threw, fly-flew, and slay-slew. This is because thousands of years ago Proto-Indo-European, the language ancestral to English and most other European languages, had rules that replaced one vowel with another to form the past tense, just as we now have a rule that adds -ed. The irregular or “strong” verbs in modern English are mere fossils of these rules; the rules themselves are dead and gone. Most verbs that would seem eligible to belong to the irregular families are arbitrarily excluded, as we see in the following doggerel:

  Sally Salter, she was a young teacher who taught,

  And her friend, Charley Church, was a preacher who praught;

  Though his enemies called him a screecher, who scraught.

  His heart, when he saw her, kept sinking, and sunk;

  And his eye, meeting hers, began winking, and wunk;

  While she in her turn, fell to thinking, and chunk.

  In secret he wanted to speak, and he spoke,

  To seek with his lips what his heart long had soke,

  So he managed to let the truth leak, and it loke.

  The kiss he was dying to steal, then he stole;

  At the feet where he wanted to kneel, then he knole;

  And he said, “I feel better than ever I fole.”

  People must simply be memorizing each past-t
ense form separately. But as this poem shows, they can be sensitive to the patterns among them and can even extend the patterns to new words for humorous effect, as in Haigspeak and hackspeak. Many of us have been tempted by the cuteness of sneeze-snoze, squeeze-squoze, take-took-tooken, and shit-shat, which are based on analogies with freeze-froze, break-broke-broken, and sit-sat. In Crazy English Richard Lederer wrote an essay called “Foxen in the Henhice,” featuring irregular plurals gone mad: booth-beeth, harmonica-harmonicae, mother-methren, drum-dra, Kleenex-Kleenices, and bathtub-bathtubim. Hackers speak of faxen, VAXen, boxen, meece, and Macinteesh. Newsweek magazine once referred to the white-caped, rhinestone-studded Las Vegas entertainers as Elvii. In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus’s teacher Miss Othmar once had the class glue eggshells into model igli. Maggie Sullivan wrote an article in the New York Times calling for “strengthening” the English language by conjugating more verbs as if they were strong:

  Subdue, subdid, subdone: Nothing could have subdone him the way her violet eyes subdid him.

  Seesaw, sawsaw, seensaw: While the children sawsaw, the old man thought of long ago when he had seensaw.

  Pay, pew, pain: He had pain for not choosing a wife more carefully.

  Ensnare, ensnare, ensnorn: In the 60’s and 70’s, Sominex ads ensnore many who had never been ensnorn by ads before.

  Commemoreat, commemorate, commemoreaten: At the banquet to commemoreat Herbert Hoover, spirits were high, and by the end of the evening many other Republicans had been commemoreaten.

  In Boston there is an old joke about a woman who landed at Logan Airport and asked the taxi driver, “Can you take me someplace where I can get scrod?” He replied, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

  Occasionally a playful or cool-sounding form will catch on and spread through the language community, as catch-caught did several hundred years ago on the analogy of teach-taught and as sneak-snuck is doing today on the analogy of stick-stuck. (I am told that has tooken is the preferred form among today’s mall rats.) This process can be seen clearly when we compare dialects, which retain the products of their own earlier fads. The curmudgeonly columist H. L. Mencken was also a respectable amateur linguist, and he documented many past-tense forms found in American regional dialects, like heat-het (similar to bleed-bled), drag-drug (dig-dug), and help-holp (tell-told). Dizzy Dean, the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher and CBS announcer, was notorious for saying “He slood into second base,” common in his native Arkansas. For four decades English teachers across the nation engaged in a letter-writing campaign to CBS demanding that he be removed, much to his delight. One of his replies, during the Great Depression, was “A lot of folks that ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t’ ain’t eatin’.” Once he baited them with the following play-by-play:

  The pitcher wound up and flang the ball at the batter. The batter swang and missed. The pitcher flang the ball again and this time the batter connected. He hit a high fly right to the center fielder. The center fielder was all set to catch the ball, but at the last minute his eyes were blound by the sun and he dropped it!

  But successful adoptions of such creative extensions are rare; irregulars remain mostly as isolated oddballs.

  Irregularity in grammar seems like the epitome of human eccentricity and quirkiness. Irregular forms are explicitly abolished in “rationally designed” languages like Esperanto, Orwell’s Newspeak, and Planetary League Auxiliary Speech in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Time for the Stars. Perhaps in defiance of such regimentation, a woman in search of a nonconformist soul mate recently wrote this personal ad in the New York Review of Books:

  Are you an irregular verb who believes nouns have more power than adjectives? Unpretentious, professional DWF, 5 yr. European resident, sometime violinist, slim, attractive, with married children…. Seeking sensitive, sanguine, youthful man, mid 50’s–60’s, health-conscious, intellectually adventurous, who values truth, loyalty, and openness.

  A general statement of irregularity and the human condition comes from the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar: “Grammar, with its mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foretaste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience.”

  For all its symbolism about the freewheeling human spirit, though, irregularlity is tightly encapsulated in the word-building system; the system as a whole is quite cuspy. Irregular forms are roots, which are found inside stems, which are found inside words, some of which can be formed by regular inflection. This layering not only predicts many of the possible and impossible words of English (for example, why Danvinicmism sounds better than Darwinismian); it provides a neat explanation for many trivia questions about seemingly illogical usage, such as: Why in baseball is a batter said to have flied out—why has no mere mortal ever flown out to center field? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs and not the Maple Leaves? Why do many people say Walkmans, rather than Walkmen, as the plural of Walkman? Why would it sound odd for someone to say that all of his daughter’s friends are low-lives?

  Consult any style manual or how-to book on grammar, and it will give one or two explanations as to why the irregular is tossed aside—both wrong. One is that the books are closed on irregular words in English; any new form added to the language must be regular. Not true: if I coin new words like to re-sing or to out-sing, their pasts are re-sang and out-sang, not re-singed and out-singed. Similarly, I recently read that there are peasants who run around with small tanks in China’s oil fields, scavenging oil from unguarded wells; the article calls them oil-mice, not oil-mouses. The second explanation is that when a word acquires a new, nonliteral sense, like baseball’s fly out, that sense requires a regular form. The oil-mice clearly falsify that explanation, as do the many other metaphors based on irregular nouns, which steadfastly keep their irregularity: sawteeth (not sawtooths), Freud’s intellectual children (not childs), snowmen (not snowmans), and so on. Likewise, when the verb to blow developed slang meanings like to blow him away (assassinate) and to blow it off (dismiss casually), the past-tense forms remained irregular: blew him away and blew off the exam, not blowed him away and blowed off the exam.

  The real rationale for flied out and Walkmans comes from the algorithm for interpreting the meanings of complex words from the meanings of the simple words they are built out of. Recall that when a big word is built out of smaller words, the big word gets all its properties from one special word sitting inside it at the extreme right: the head. The head of the verb to overshoot is the verb to shoot, so overshooting is a kind of shooting, and it is a verb, because shoot is a verb. Similarly, a workman is a singular noun, because man, its head, is a singular noun, and it refers to a kind of man, not a kind of work. Here is what the word structures look like:

  Crucially, the percolation conduit from the head to the top node applies to all the information stored with the head word: not just its nounhood or verbhood, and not just its meaning, but any irregular form that is stored with it, too. For example, part of the mental dictionary entry for shoot would say “I have my own irregular past-tense form, shot.” This bit of information percolates up and applies to the complex word, just like any other piece of information. The past tense of overshoot is thus overshot (not overshooted). Likewise, the word man bears the tag “My plural is men.” Since man is the head of workman, the tag percolates up to the N symbol standing for workman, and so the plural of workman is workmen. This is also why we get out-sang, oil-mice, sawteeth, and blew him away.

  Now we can answer the trivia questions. The source of quirkiness in words like fly out and Walkmans is their headlessness. A headless word is an exceptional item that, for one reason or another, differs in some property from its rightmost element, the one it would be based on if it were like ordinary words. A simple example of a headless word is a low-life—not a kind of life at all but a kind of person
, namely one who leads a low life. In the word low-life, then, the normal percolation pipeline must be blocked. Now, a pipeline inside a word cannot be blocked for just one kind of information; if it is blocked for one thing, nothing passes through. If low-life does not get its meaning from life, it cannot get its plural from life either. The irregular form associated with life, namely lives, is trapped in the dictionary, with no way to bubble up to the whole word low-life. The all-purpose regular rule, “Add the -s suffix,” steps in by default, and we get low-lifes. By similar unconscious reasoning, speakers arrive at saber-tooths (a kind of tiger, not a kind of tooth), tenderfoots (novice cub scouts, who are not a kind of foot but a kind of youngster that has tender feet), flatfoots (also not a kind of foot but a slang term for policemen), and still lifes (not a kind of life but a kind of painting).

  Since the Sony Walkman was introduced, no one has been sure whether two of them should be Walkmen or Walkmans. (The nonsexist alternative Walkperson would leave us on the hook, because we would be faced with a choice between Walkpersons and Walkpeople.) The temptation to say Walkmans comes from the word’s being headless: a Walkman is not a kind of man, so it must not be getting its meaning from the word man inside it, and by the logic of headlessness it shouldn’t receive a plural form from man, either. But it is hard to be comfortable with any kind of plural, because the relation between Walkman and man feels utterly obscure. It feels obscure because the word was not put together by any recognizable scheme. It is an example of the pseudo-English that is popular in Japan in signs and product names. (For example, one popular soft drink is called Sweat, and T-shirts have enigmatic inscriptions like CIRCUIT BEAVER, NURSE MENTALITY, and BONERACTIVE WEAR.) The Sony Corporation has an official answer to the question of how to refer to more than one Walkman. Fearing that their trademark, if converted to a noun, may become as generic as aspirin or kleenex, they sidestep the grammatical issues by insisting upon Walkman Personal Stereos.