2
" People say “nucular” modeled on other words that end in -ular such as spectacular, tubular, and vernacular. Specifically, because there exist the words nuke and, long before that, nucleus, a temptation looms to think of nuclear as “nuc-” plus the -ular ending: spectacular, tubular, nuc-ular. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
3
" Hence, the notion of the “cheese burger” by the late 1930s, with “burger” now referring to a disk of meat. Today, of course, one speaks of the veggie burger, taco burger, fish burger, and so much else, such that no one would object that burger is “not a word.” Now it is, but only because of grafting. We talk about eating a nice burger, and Abraham Lincoln brought back to life would picture us trying to consume a staid, small-town German tradesman. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
8
" by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident. It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
9
" Then, cybervision, cyberoptics, cybermarketing, cyberculture—all these words are flubs, technically. It started with cybernetics, from the Greek word kybernetes, for “steersman.” Cybernetics was composed, then, of cybern (not cyber) plus -etics. But most of us don’t know Greek, and cyber- seemed the more intuitive first element than cybern. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
11
" In the same way, we must expect that designations for various groups will turn over regularly: the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has perfectly titled this “the euphemism treadmill.” Long ago, crippled was thought a humane way to describe a person—it had the ring, roughly, that hindered would today. However, once it became associated with the kind of ridicule tragically common among members of our species, handicapped was thought to be a kinder term—less loaded, it sounded like a title rather than a slur. But while words change, people often don’t—naturally, after a while, handicapped seemed as smudged by realities as crippled had. Hence: disabled, which is now getting old, as in having taken on many of the same negative associations as crippled and handicapped. Of late, some prefer differently abled, which is fine in itself. Yet all should know that in roughly a generation’s time, even that term will carry the very associations it is designed to rise above, just as special needs now does. Note the effort now required to imagine how objective and inclusive even special needs was fashioned to be. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
12
" Endings, as a rule, start as words; becoming an ending happens only later, amid a kind of extended obsolescence. Even grammar in the form of words, such as the, a, etc., starts as regular words: the started as that, a started as one. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
13
" The joyous meaning of merry was a beautiful demonstration of the element of chance in how words’ meanings move along. The earliest rendition we can get a sense of for merry is that on the Ukrainian steppes several thousand years ago, in Proto-Indo-European, it was mregh. In Greece, this word for “short” morphed not into merriment but into the word for upper arm, brakhion. The sounds in mregh and brakh match better than it looks on paper: for one thing, both m and b are produced by putting your lips together, and so it’s easy for one to change into the other. As to meaning, it was a matter of implications, this time in one of the things the word was applied to rather than the word itself. The upper arm is shorter than the lower, and hence one might start referring to the upper arm as the “shorter,” and the rest was history. Calling your upper arm your “shorter” is not appreciably odder than calling cutoff pants shorts, after all. The process never stops. It seems that in Latin this brakh ended up, among other places, in a pastry, namely, one resembling folded arms, called a brachitella. Old High German picked that up as brezitella; by Middle High German people were saying brezel. Today, brezel is pretzel—from that same word that meant short and now connotes joyousness in English. In France, that brach root drifted into a word referring to shoulder straps or, by extension, a child’s little chemise undershirt. Women can wear chemises, too, but garments, like words, have a way of changing over the centuries, and after a while the brassière had evolved into a more specific anatomical dedication than a chemise’s. The modern word bra, then, is what happens when a word for “short” drifts step by step into new realms. Merry, pretzel, and bra are, in a sense, all the same word—yet contests could be held challenging people to even use all three in a sentence (or at least one that made any sense). "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
14
" Namely, English spelling is hideous in large part because it represents what English was like before the Great Vowel Shift happened. That neatly demonstrates that vowels really are as liquid as I am presenting, and that what happens to them can neither be said to “ruin” the language nor be dismissed as bubblegum static, since no one wishes we could go back to talking the way Chaucer did. Here’s what I mean. Why would any sane person write mate and pronounce it “mayt”? We’re used to being taught that this is a “long” a and that the “silent” e is our clue to that. But clearly no one would design a system this way. If people in France and Spain and seemingly everywhere else on earth were writing the “ay” sound as e, what was the sense of instead bringing in an a and signaling that it, instead of e, is pronounced “ay,” and by putting a “silent” e at the end of the word? Why e? Or why use any sound at all as standing for absence instead of, duh, not writing anything there? While understanding that customs differ across the ages, we can be quite sure no writerly caste decided on such nonsense as a writing system. Sure, some eccentric medieval scribe could have arbitrarily decided on such a system, but why on earth would it have been accepted across England? When something makes that little sense, usually it was created amid conditions now past in which they did make sense. And indeed, time was that mate was actually pronounced the way one would expect: MAH-tay. The final -ay, unaccented, wore off over time just as the -ther in brother has worn off among men saluting each other such that guys of a certain demographic call each other “bruh” and one might call one’s sister “sis”—that’s easy. “Mahtay” became “maht.” But why don’t we just say “maht” today? Because likely the vowel moved, and this one did. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
16
" Can you hear what I hear?”—now sing to the same tune “Can’s a piece of graaammar…” As grammar, it presumably started as something else, and it did: cunnan in Old English meant “know.” Ben Jonson in The Magnetic Lady has Mistress Polish praise a deceased woman for the fact that “She could the Bible in the holy tongue.” We can’t help at first suspecting a typo—she could what? But could meant, all by itself, “knew.” There was even an old expression “to can by heart” alongside our familiar “know by heart.” Modern English is littered with remnants of that stage: other offshoots of cunnan are cunning and canny, all about having your wits about you. Plus, the past tense of cunnan was a word pronounced “coothe,” from which the couth in uncouth comes: the uncouth person is lacking in know-how, as in the kind that lends one social graces. "
― John McWhorter , Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
