The Faces of English

Words Get Personal

There's a reason that it often requires an art history class to get a handle on medieval painting. It may be pretty in a general sense, but it's hard not to notice that the people tend to exhibit only the broadest of emotions, if any — in much of medieval painting, the faces seem almost frozen blank.

It would never have occurred to a painter like Giotto to depict the full range of human expressions. The individualist focus that seems so natural to us was not yet a part of how one was taught to create art. Art was less about you, him, or her than about that: grander things such as religion and commemoration. We cherish the Mona Lisa as one of the heralds of the new era, with that smile we can imagine someone curling into near the middle of a good first date. And even that doesn't compare with the japingly sarcastic glow on the face of the Cossack scribe penning an insulting letter to the Turkish sultan in Elias Repin's most famous painting, Zaporozhian Cossacks of Ukraine Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, of 1891. It's lifelike in a fashion we'd never find in a Byzantine image.

This increasing focus on the individual is a theme in much of Western history. We can practically hear and smell Anna Karenina, Holden Caulfield, and Oscar Wao in a way that we never can any of the characters in The Iliad. To Plato and Aristotle, steeped in unquestioningly hierarchical ideologies, a political system guaranteeing all individuals "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" would have sounded like science fiction. Even the notion of a popular song "cover" is a sign of the times. To Cole Porter, it would have seemed alien to write a song for only one artist to sing, with anyone else required to wait about ten years to take a crack at it, and even then, have their effort classified as a salutary "version" of the first one. Today, a pop song is about one person expressing their one self.

Language, however, has always been ahead of the curve on individualism. Long before Rembrandt, Thomas Jefferson, or Adele, human language has always and forever been getting personal. Not in the sense of people having arguments, although of course that has been happening, too. Rather, one of the things that has always happened to a great many words is that they start out showing what we mean, but end up being used to show how we feel. This trajectory is as common as words getting shorter (I'd-a done it from I would have done it), cuter (horsey, brewsky), or nastier (hussy started as housewife). Just as often, a word nestles into a place in English that grammar mavens and quite a few others consider unsuitably vague, random, redundant, or as having no "real" meaning — the use of so at the start of a sentence is an example — when to a linguist the word in question is fulfilling a function as normal as marking past tense or making something plural.

This chapter will introduce you to something very old about language that, through no fault of our own, always seems new.

Well, What?

It's a whole wing of language that one hears too little about, with our natural intuition that a word is something with a meaning corresponding to some easily specified thing, concept, action, or quality. Ah, there is so much more to what it is to communicate as a human being. There are certainly the vanilla sentences. Horses run fast: if a toddler asks us what that means, we could easily go word by word and nail the matter. But then, how about another perfectly plausible sentence: Well, horses run fast. Okay: horses, run, and fast are easy. But what about well? What does well mean, Mommy? Note, this is not the well that refers to excellence: you didn't mean Expertly, horses run fast. This is that other little well, that you don't even think about.

Why did you say well, Mommy? Tough, isn't it? If we must, you use well that way to politely acknowledge a previous statement, usually before expressing some view counter to it. That is, you would say Well, horses run fast if someone had asked, out of genuine curiosity, why horses don't seem to get eaten by wolves. The well would nod politely to the person's ignorance on the topic before affording them the knowledge that horses run too fast to be caught by canines. With well you convey, of all things, a gracious attitude. To speak English is to know that subconsciously.

And when it's that hard to specify or master what a particular word "means," it's a good sign that we're in a different realm of language, where the tidy idea of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions you learned in school doesn't do much for you, and a Schoolhouse Rock! jingle would be frustratingly diagonal. "Conjunction Junction" and "A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing!" were delightfully instructive tunes, but it's hard to imagine setting a melody to "Well implies discrepancy between a previous statement and what you wish to utter!" or at least one that would exactly catch on.

Why it would be hard to write a jingle about well is that it's about not labeling and describing, but something more abstract and subjective: attitude. Well allows us to indicate our take on what we're talking about; in this case, wanting to amend what someone has just said but without causing offense. Horse is objective; well is subjective. Horse is what you call something; well is about why you want to bring the horse up at all. Well is personal, and it is hardly alone: it is part of an aspect of language as central to being a person as naming things and saying what they do.

What is this realm of language called? I have held off because the term is one that seems almost designed to confuse. A more familiar concept is semantics: this refers to what words "mean" in the conventional sense. A horse is that magnificently peculiar animal; running is locomotion at a quick pace. However, when the issue is words used to indicate our attitude toward what we are saying, the topic is pragmatics. Ugh. We think of pragmatic as meaning "practical," but if anything, it's steak-and-potatoes semantics that seems practical compared to the subjectivity of a word like well in Well, horses run fast.

Linguists adopted the term pragmatism through its already abstractified usage by philosophers, referring to a school treating thought as not just mirroring reality in a passive way, but affording and mediating engagement with a surrounding environment in a more proactive, pragmatic way. Note the analogy between semantics, which is merely about naming and defining, and this other realm of language, which is...