Word-Sex

I checked out some of the blogroll at Throw Grammar From the Train today, and was most entertained and beguiled by The Subversive Copy Editor.  One of her posts linked to the video above, for which I'm grateful.  Like me, Stephen Fry is clearly a recovering punctuation/spelling/grammar neurotic, but in this talk he goes beyond my critique of grammar bigotry to point out and extol the playful element of language use.  I hope my own playfulness is apparent in what I write here, as well as elsewhere -- I think that a lot of my Facebook friends don't recognize its presence in many of my comments there -- but if it isn't, let me stress it here.  What I enjoy in good writing isn't the absence of technical errors, but a playfulness and musicality and rhythm that can't be summed up by Fowler's Usage or Strunk and White's Elements of Style.  (In fact, those authorities often get it wrong.)

Fry's talk came in handy because my Right-Wing Acquaintance Number 2 complained on Facebook today about people shortening words.  "It's medicine, not meds," he grumped.  It's both, actually.  I pointed out that standard modern English incorporates many shortenings: most obviously contractions ("haven't") and silent e in the past tense.  (It used to be standard to pronounce the e in, say, informed -- Jonathan Swift ranted against the tendency to lose the extra syllable, but in vain.)  As a recovering PSG neurotic, I admit that some shortenings sound affected and annoy me -- bro, for example -- but I don't see why med should have touched off RWA2's complaint.  Oh well, it is a neurosis or something of the kind; it certainly isn't rational, so it's not surprising that people gripe over things of no importance.  Fry's remarks are refreshing, and I'll be glad to have the above video handy when I have an attack of grammar grumpiness.

Orwell, Thou Shouldst Be Living at This Hour! (So I Could Give You a Dope Slap)

Two -- no, make that three -- of my Facebook friends passed along this meme today.  One commented, "I greatly prefer precision in the words I and others use. These terms are quite precise." Well, no, they aren't: the preferred ones are just as imprecise and ideologically loaded as the ones they're nominated to replace.  A couple are clearly meant as snark, but snark is okay for liberals, just not for the Right or especially -- Barack forbid! -- the Left.

Orwell himself was wrong about a lot of things: the innate superiority of "everyday" English, for example.  But mostly his is a holy name, invoked to discourage discussion, not initiate it.

Everyone has their favored euphemisms. There's nothing really wrong with "entitlements." "Taxpayers' investment" is every bit as Newspeak as "government spending." "Unelected legislators" is cute, but if taken seriously it's also Newspeak. I think we should stick with "corporate lobbyists," because everyone knows what it means. I'd expect it would be lobbyists who'd lobby for a new term that would be unfamiliar, and would allow them to pretend they're not lobbyists.

A commenter on the meme wrote, "I don't think people know that lobbyist actually write legislation. Which is why I like the term immensely." There's the rub: changing the label won't inform people about how Congress works. If only it were that simple.  I have the impression that many people think that the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare (itself a term which has reversed valence in the past four years), was written by President Obama himself, burning the midnight oil alone in the Oval Office, instead of by Big Pharma lobbyists.  There's no substitute for informing yourself, and no shortcut.

For parallel cases consider how "eugenics" was rechristened "sociobiology" and later as "evolutionary psychology" in order to cover up their shared assumptions and history.  Or how the American "Department of War" was renamed the Department of Defense, when "Department of Aggression" would have been more precise.  The School of the Americas, the US-run training institute for military torture and police terror, was "by 2000 ... renamed "under increasing criticism in the United States for training students who later participated in undemocratic governments," so it was renamed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.  Why, you can hardly hear the screams now.  The mercenary multinational Blackwater, having generated a lot of bad publicity for itself in the US and abroad, changed its name to Xe, but the bad smell still stuck to them, so they changed it again to Academi. This is known as rebranding: changing the name, redesigning the packaging, filing off the serial numbers, shoveling some quicklime over the bodies to try to kill the smell. 

I think about this personally because I've been through several changes of permissible labels in the gay community. (For that matter, any phrase compounded with "community" should be viewed with suspicion.) Many of my fellow Homo-Americans seem to believe that some words are inherently, innately better or more positive than others. But that's not true, because "gay" (which we chose for ourselves, against fierce opposition by many straights) became a pejorative in less than a decade.  Many younger gay people can't understand why their foreuncles chose such a nasty word for ourselves, though it's simple enough: "gay" wasn't always nasty.

Language changes, words change -- often radically. A true sign of intelligence is not using the "right" words, but thinking about how they're used and what that means. Putting too much emphasis on the words themselves is a way of not thinking.

Status Symbols

I had a dispiriting conversation yesterday with an old friend of mine, the law professor I mentioned a few posts back.  She'd posted a link on Facebook to a CNN op-ed piece, "Why 'illegal immigrant' is a slur," condemning use of the term "illegal immigrant", and seconded the writer's complaint: "And the CNN site admits it uses this inappropriate term, as does most of the media (following AP style)." If it fits the style book, it's not "inappropriate" in that context, though of course you can claim that the style book ought to be changed, as they periodically are. We got into a sort of debate in comments that I found disturbing because she was factually wrong on numerous points in her own field, as well as others that were dubious on larger grounds.

The CNN contributor, "Charles Garcia, who has served in the administrations of four presidents, of both parties, is the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a business focused on the Hispanic market. He was named in the book 'Hispanics in the USA: Making History' as one of 14 Hispanic role models for the nation."  He's not the sharpest pencil in the box, but that's why CNN would feature him. Try this tasty mouthful of word salad:

George Orwell's classic "Nineteen Eighty-Four" shows how even a free society is susceptible to manipulation by overdosing on worn-out prefabricated phrases that convert people into lifeless dummies, who become easy prey for the political class.

Maybe Garcia didn't mean to imply that Orwell's tightly-controlled and oppressive Oceania is a "free society," but that's what he wrote.  And of course anyone who gets to write for CNN, let alone serve as a White House Fellow under Ronald Reagan, is a member of the political class, a predator on the public.  That he's also a businessman adds another level of manipulation to the mix.  But on the other hand, it's precisely because of his qualifications that he's concerned with manipulating the discourse on immigration.  He knows how important framing and packaging are -- far more important than substance.

Given the level of discourse in our political media, then, I have to admit that terminology isn't a negligible tool.  The corporate media are very concerned with it, and will resist any attempts to change their stylistic preferences.  Gay activists spent years after Stonewall lobbying the New York Times to use "gay" instead of "homosexual," for example, and I'm of at least two minds about that.  It reminds me of the struggle I had in high school over my hair length.  "It's not such a big deal," my principal told me.  "Why won't you cut it?"  "If it's not such a big deal," I retorted, "why are you ready to throw me out of school if I don't?"  (In the end I did cut my hair, because it wasn't a life-and-death issue, but I always grew it as long as I could before cutting it after that, just to keep pushing the limits.  And it was the principal who ended up looking bad in most students' eyes, not me.)

I don't know why the AP elected "illegal immigrant" as a term of choice in their stylebook.  They claim it's "accurate and neutral," though "illegal" is a loaded term in any discourse, and the racist Right loves the word, though they don't care about legality in any other area.  Still, "illegal" is in many cases accurate, and I don't see that "undocumented" is an improvement: it still implies that the person is lacking something they should have.  If the Right adopted it, "undocumented" would be equally pejorative in a month at most.  What matters is not the word, but how it's used and by whom.  (I pointed out to my friend that "gay" went from a hard-won positive word to a schoolyard pejorative in less than a decade; she couldn't seem to grasp the signficance of that change, and indeed took a very strict linguistic-determinist line throughout our discussion.)

Garcia points to an increase in the use of "illegal immigrant" since the AP designated the term, which is hardly surprising: a term with institutional support will tend to be used in that institution.  And of course bigots love terms that are not negative in themselves, though they become so with practice; such terms are known as "dog whistles," because their overtones are audible only to those in the know, not to normal human ears.  But that's true of all language, and I contend that getting bogged down in squabbles over terminology can be a distraction from more substantive issues, a distraction that our opponents will welcome.

My friend insisted that "It's important to point out that we don't criminalize people or status, 'just' behavior. It mattered during the Red Scare, when some argued that being a Communist was criminal." In reality the distinction between "status" and behavior is as permeable as any other border.  People who behave in a certain way will be assumed to do so because of their nature, and acts can function as markers of "status."  In everyday speech and thought, a person who steals is a thief, a person who lies is a liar, depending on your view of the person in question: you may distinguish between her conduct and her being if you want to excuse her, or not if if you don't.  And this vagueness extends to elite legal discourse: in Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law, Justice White equated "consensual sodomy with 'homosexuality' per se, criminal activity, and all 'homosexual conduct'" (Marta T. Zingo, Sex/Gender Outsiders (Praeger, 1998).

In the case of membership in the Communist Party, there isn't even a status of "being a Communist" to distinguish: one "is" a Communist because one joined the Party and participates in its programs and activities.  My friend declared "Communism was criminalized, and that was struck down as unconstitutional precisely because status could not be criminalized."  And here, interestingly, my friend was completely wrong, though as a law professor she is in a position to know better.  The Communist Control Act against membership in the Party was never "struck down," and so is still on the books, mostly unenforced.  (This means it can be used again someday as expedient.)  I found two relevant court cases online: in Communist Party v. Catherwood (1961), the Supreme Court held that the Communist Control Act didn't bar the party from participating in New York's unemployment insurance system.  "In 1973 a federal district court in Arizona decided that the act was unconstitutional and Arizona could not keep the party off the ballot in the 1972 general election (Blawis v. Bolin)."  I took a look at the opinion in Blawis v. Bolin, and it was argued and decided on the basis of the First and Fourteenth Amendments; "status" seems not to have been involved.

It also occurs to me that in court, the argument doesn't involve the best, most rational arguments about the merits of a case, but the legislation and precedents that counsel thinks most likely to persuade the individual judge, based on his or her known biases; and decisions are often based on technicalities peripheral to real human interests.  Therefore, even if the Supreme Court had overturned the Communist Control Act on grounds of "status," it wasn't necessarily the most important issue involved.  I get the impression that my friend was trying to throw dust in the eyes of a layman; it might have worked if I were even twenty years younger.

My friend wanted to blame the Right for the blurring and distortion of the status/act difference, but I pointed out that the advocates for same-sex marriage do it all the time, by claiming homosexuality as a biologically determined, inborn status.  The Supreme Court of Canada based its ruling in favor of same-sex marriage partly on that claim, so it's not limited to thoughtless laypeople.  The best that can be said about the claim is that so far it's unsettled: we have no idea what shapes sexual orientation, and the research to date is fatally flawed.  To base a claim for equality on inconclusive science is to run the risk that the science may yet be concluded in a way that invalidates your claim -- and what will you do then?

But more important, the status claim is irrelevant.  When the Supreme Court overturned state laws against "interracial marriage" in 1967, it did not declare that Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving should be allowed to marry because they had a biologically determined 'racial orientation' that impelled them to marry only persons of the opposite race.  Insofar as "status" was relevant, it was the race of the bride and the groom, as in the case of same-sex marriage it would be their biological sex, not their "gender" or their sexual orientation.

Going back to immigration, then, to say that someone entered the US illegally is not to criminalize that person, though of course people do tend to essentialize people who've broken the law, if they find it convenient to do so.  Few Republican loyalists thought of Richard Nixon as a criminal, even though he indubitably was one, would have been removed from office for his crimes if he hadn't resigned preemptively, and should have faced criminal charges as well.  That's another problem.  Nixon was a criminal, but so was Martin Luther King, Jr., along with many other people who engaged in civil disobedience during the Civil Rights struggle.  (That's not insignificant: it was difficult for many respectable black people to face arrest and imprisonment, not only because it put them into the hands of abusive police, but because Nice People Didn't Break the Law and Go to Jail, only Trash.)  Jesus of Nazareth was a criminal, executed for insurrection by the Romans.  Many early Christians were criminals under Roman law, for refusing to offer due honor to the gods, including Caesar.  The leaders of the American Revolution would certainly have been hanged if their rebellion had failed.  Sometimes breaking the law is a positive good, when the law is in the wrong.  This is disturbing to contemplate for people whose attitude to the law is still that of a child.  An adult takes the law seriously, but doesn't see it as sacred.

I pointed out that the problem with "illegal immigrant" is less the "illegal" part than "immigrant."  Americans have always been ambivalent at best about the waves of immigrants that entered the country after them or their parents.  The more I watch the debate, the more obvious it is to me that, as I've suspected before, the most vehement opponents of "illegal immigration" consider all immigrants illegal.  Substituting "undocumented" for "illegal" won't change their attitude; they'll recognize it -- correctly, for what that's worth -- as a euphemism, a distraction from the issues; not that they are interested in the issues either.  Oddly, my friend conceded the point but then backtracked, because "language does matter."

Garcia makes a revealing comment himself:

Another misconception is that the vast majority of migrant workers currently out of status sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night. Actually, almost half enter the U.S. with a valid tourist or work visa and overstay their allotted time. Many go to school, find a job, get married and start a family. And some even join the Marine Corps, like Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, who was the first combat veteran to die in the Iraq War. While he was granted American citizenship posthumously, there are another 38,000 non-citizens in uniform, including undocumented immigrants, defending our country.

Suppose that the situation were otherwise, and that the vast majority of "migrant workers out of status" did "sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night."  Does Garcia agree that such sneaky invaders should be sent back pronto?  At least some of the poster kids for the DREAM Act were brought across the border by their parents in just that way.  Garcia's using "status" tactics here -- some immigrants are Sneaky Dirty Trash, but these are Clean, Upstanding Americans! -- and his resort to flag-waving and hiding behind the uniforms of Our Troops is beneath contempt.

Garcia concludes with a last appeal to St. George:

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell warned that one must be constantly on guard against a ready-made phrase that "anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain." But Orwell also wrote that "from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs" -- just like the U.S. Supreme Court did.

"Undocumented immigrant" or "migrant worker out of status" are also ready-made phrases intended to anaesthetize a portion of one's brain, however, and Garcia is a hard-working functionary in the Ministry of Truth, an Outer Party member using worn-out prefabricated phrases to prey on the public; he's just in a different faction.  Oddly, my friend declared to me that both "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant" are "slurs", though "the former has more serious implications."  She went on to declare that the Right is "ignorant," and she wasn't going to bother with them.  If "undocumented immigrant" is a slur, why are Robert Garcia and other immigrant advocates pressing for its use as the acceptable term?  "Left wing doesn't want to piss off 'documented' immigrants, who want to distinguish themselves."  That doesn't make a lot of sense -- and I have to recall that she was writing her end of the exchange on her smartphone, which kept cutting her postings short -- because if it's a slur, it would "piss off" the "documented."

Even if I concede -- which I don't -- that the rabble are too uneducated for rational discourse, and so must be manipulated by Newspeak generated by their educated superiors, where is the rational discourse going on, and for whom?  My friend (who's very upset about the dearth of "critical thinking" among Americans) is a highly educated person, presumably the kind of person who is competent to grapple with issues. Yet she had nothing to offer but slogans and overt misstatements of fact.  In this she appears to be all too typical of the educated American classes, and that -- not the ignorance of the rabble -- looks to me to be the real threat to the future of humanity: self-styled elitists who aren't as superior as they like to think.

And yet I have to admit that somewhere in me lurks a naive child who believe that people with college degrees, people with jobs that don't get their hands dirty, are not just smarter but nicer than people who haven't.  That's why I get even angrier at nice educated liberals who distort facts, blur important differences, and ignore logic than I do at blue-collar folk who do the same.  The nice educated liberals should know better, and they think they do, but they don't.  Not automatically, not by virtue of having a degree.

The Limits of Language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984"

I missed Alan Turing's centenary, though I didn't have much to say about it anyway.  Turing was a brilliant man, brutally mistreated by his government for his queerness, and he deserves to be remembered for a number of accomplishments.  One of the most impressive things I've learned about him as a person was that he doesn't seem to have felt any guilt about being queer, which was unusual though not unique among British buggers of his generation.  (The circle of friends that included W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, for example, seems to have been just as comfortable with their sexuality as Turing.)

But the mentions of Turing that I encountered online often mentioned Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon and Schuster).  When I read in the gay press that Hodges was working on the biography, I began looking forward to it.  Hodges was well-qualified to write it, for he not only had the mathematics and technical background to understand Turing's professional work, he was a gay activist and writer, co-author with David Hutter of an important Gay Liberation pamphlet called With Downcast Gays, published in 1974 but available online.  This was important because even in the 1980s, most biographies of important gay or lesbian figures were marred by homophobic armchair psychoanalysis purporting to show why the Subject had turned out That Way.  Hodges was having none of that, and his groundbreaking biography not only did justice to Turing but helped set the tone for future biographies.

Aside from With Downcast Gays, I'd also read an article by Hodges published in the Canadian radical gay magazine The Body Politic at the end of 1979.  Its discussion of the way language affects our ability to think about homosexuality made a big impression on me -- it was the first critique of Orwell's dicta about language I'd read till then -- but it was never reprinted anywhere and wasn't available online as far as I could discover.  The flurry of attention to Turing's centenary and to the biography reminded me that I'd been meaning to write to Hodges and ask him about it.  I knew he had a website with some of his writings on it, but "Towards 1984" wasn't there, so I hoped to persuade him to add it; I could even send him the text if he didn't have it.  So I wrote to him, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here.

As its title implies, "Towards 1984" is dated now, but as Hodges wrote, the issues it (and Orwell's novel) deals with are still current.

TOWARDS 1984

by Andrew Hodges

(This article first appeared in Body Politic #59, December 1979 / January 1980.)

As the real 1984 approaches and becomes just another calendar year, one thing is certain: there will be no lack of voices claiming to draw political lessons from George Orwell's book. Indeed, the election posters for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party have already suggested that we should believe Labour policy to be leading Britain into an Orwellian nightmare. 1984 has sold millions of copies; it is a standard text for school examinations. But what does it hold for us?

A number of Orwell's suggestions have become reality; a number have not. That is not the point. The real value of the work is as a modern Gulliver's Travels, as serious political satire, and in particular as a thesis on the politics of language. It was Orwell's idea that language was not simply a means of communicating thought, in the way that an open road affords space for every kind of traffic. Rather, language could be more like a railway system, with a laid-down schedule which could convey only ideas of a defined shape and size, fitted into the compartments which the managers provided. Only these right ideas could ever be used.

But Orwell's target was narrow and distinct: not the language of everyday conversation, but the official languages of his own class and time, the British educated middle class of the 1930s and 1940s. Wartime censorship, Communist Party theory, military euphemism, Times leaders and newsreel journalism -- every case involved its own trahison des clercs in which state violence of revolting enormity could be justified or concealed by the manipulation of language. It was his thesis that language was not merely symptomatic of engineered thought; rather, that language determined what thoughts it was possible to have. "How could they believe it?", "How could they accept it?", Orwell asked of his contemporaries, and his answer was that once they had accepted a political language, then their thoughts could not be other than would fit inside its concepts.

It was a small step for him to suggest in 1984 that the State might consciously impose its official language upon its servants with that very objective in mind. This was a major theme of the book, summed up in its definition of "Newspeak", the officialese of the Anglo-American superstate. It was its purpose that:

...the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say "Big Brother is ungood." But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available....

The modern Newspeak of "extremist", "moderate", "security", has continued to keep Orwell's critique as alive as ever. But our reaction to Orwell's ideas must necessarily be more critical. In 1984, it was possible to escape from the official thought by means of ordinary language, the old English language, associated with good old ordinary decent things and feelings. Orwell seems to have thought the common language of his day to be a perfectly adequate vehicle for thought. But was it? Was it only the official, or state-imposed language that constrained what it was possible to think? Clearly we can see that it was not: in Orwell's own description of Newspeak, he wrote:

In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words "sexcrime" (sexual immorality) and "goodsex" (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake....

Millions of readers must have swallowed unquestioningly Orwell's definition of homosexuality as a "perversion", together with the connotations of "immorality" and "normal" -- just as they would have gone along with the use of "he" in that paragraph to imply (as a "rule of grammar") a person of either sex. Why not? These were the available concepts, the "proper words" that English had to offer. Whether Orwell intended this classification consciously or not is beside the point; in either case this was simply the ordinary written English of 1949, in which sexual expression had to be packaged and valued by a tiny range of nasty words.

To be more precise, a writer who was sufficiently sensitive to value-judgment might, by a sufficiently laborious discussion, avoid the unconscious communication of received ideas. Thus in 1948, the authors of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been able to use the word "homosexual" in a very precise sense, carefully detached from the connotations of "abnormal." It was no easy task, as they themselves explained, and one which met with profound resistance from the "scientific" world as well as from popular opinion. But for those without access to the language of academic authority, words imposed the bounds of possible thought, in which "queer is good" was almost as self-evident an absurdity as "Big Brother is ungood."

Another observation to be made on reading 1984 is that all those features of the State which Orwell presented in imagination as the most deeply appalling were none other than those which in 1949, were being experienced in reality by homosexual people in Anglo-America. Not only the commonplaces of censorship, blacklisting, guilt by association; not only imprisonment on police say-so; but compulsory drug treatments, castrations, electric shocks, even brain surgery; the implication and betrayal of friends or lovers; the required confessions of thoughtcrime in the dock. Worst of all, according to Orwell's book, defiance was robbed of all meaning when history would never know or care, when the past would not even be known to exist.

But Orwell would never have perceived the connection. And we too are so well trained to think of homosexual oppression as not counting, not mattering, not being "real" politics or history, that it seems fanciful to make the comparison, a slur on "real" political martyrs. But this training is itself performed by the available language, which has defined homosexual oppression as a "non-political" form of dissidence, as a "social" or "psychological" or "medical" problem. Perhaps most poignant of all is the fact that Orwell chose as a symbol of escape from the official system the drama of a spontaneous heterosexual affair. For the millions of readers, the ultimate dreadfulness of 1984 has been brought home as the system where love to be a crime, where lovers could not even be seen to touch, even to know each other for fear of the State; where the smallest sign of affection was a political gesture. And how many of them have considered that all of this was so for homosexual lovers in the real world of 1949, of 1959, of 1969, of 1979? Indeed, our position is in a sense worse than that of Orwell's rebels, who at least had the cultural resources of "ordinary language" in which to express their spontaneity. But for us, the ordinary language of sexuality is something that must be fought for: childhood training and cultural values discarded and a second language learned in order that spontaneous feeling can be realized.

And yet, for that reason, one cannot but be cheered by reading 1984. The figure of Winston Smith was brought to say and believe that "Big Brother is good," just as so many of us have succumbed to "Queer is bad," yet so many of us have not given in. Not only have we continued to utter the "crude heresies" that the old available words allowed, but we have, since 1949, since 1969, found new words, new images, new language to express ourselves. So often we are immersed in conflicts over what seem mere words: our words (the straightforward use of "gay") are hated; the available "ordinary" words ("promiscuous", for example) constrict a million different experiences into one foolish epithet; the official words of psychology and of law degrade and imprison thought as well as people.

Yet we are gaining: with an ever-expanding vocabulary of word and picture, poetry and history, music, film and art. Orwell, against his own will, reminds us that the expansion of language is no ignoble cause, nor some unreal shadow of "real" politics, nor our own strange peripheral problem. 1984 has touched so many people because it touches the heart of things that matter. That is its lasting integrity and heroism -- and that is ours, too.

Racial Impurity and Gender Confusion

Here's a speculation. I'm reading John McWhorter's new book What Language Is (Gotham Books, 2011), which begins with a lengthy discussion of the difference in complexity among languages. Some have intricate systems of case, gender, or counting; others don't. This much I knew already. McWhorter argues, though, with numerous examples, that the "simpler" languages are usually the result of a sudden influx of speakers trying to learn them as adults. Infants acquiring their first language can, and do, master complex grammars effortlessly. After about the age of fifteen, this ability shrivels up, and few adults can learn new language with any fluency. Therefore they tend to simplify the new language, stripping away verb conjugations, noun cases, genders, and expressive particles. Their children learn the simplified version, and if there's a critical mass of such new speakers, they may affect the language as a whole: "over generations," as McWhorter says, "the very essence of what [a language] is starts to change. Namely, it gets simpler" (24). His first example is ancient Persian, but English went through a similar process.

English, like Persian, was stunted by too many adults learning it for an extended period of time. In this case it was the Scandinavian Vikings who invaded, starting in the eighth-century A.D., and stayed on to marry local women and knit themselves into English society. As new waves of Vikings kept blowing in over generations, children grew up hearing as much "funny" English as native: that is, without gender, using here instead of hither, chucking the difference between has seen and is departed, and so on. Scribes kept writing Old English more or less as if this wasn't happening, but then ... the Norman Conquest put written English on pause.

For two centuries, the written language of England was French, and when English started being used on paper [parchment and vellum, more likely] again, it was "middle" in the same way as Persian when it came back to light -- slimmed down and more user-friendly [27-28].

How do languages become complex in the first place? McWhorter argues that this a consequence of what he calls "ingrown" languages, where a population is relatively isolated, and so has the time and freedom to elaborate its language.

Even if we are aware that what is unusual is when a language is less complicated rather than when it is extremely complicated, a temptation always looms to attribute the complexity of language to some kind of utility. The idea that it is due to something as wan as drift or incremental habit formation sits awkwardly in the mind, especially for speakers of a moderately complex a language as English. Surely, we may think, all of that machinery in a language like Pashto must be for something. It couldn't just be buildup, like some ring in a bathtub [55].

McWhorter thinks that language complexity is just buildup, and gives plenty of reasons for believing that the complications "vastly overshoot anything that would be of any use to a child getting a grip on the system."

Languages are complicated because they can be. They complicate as a natural result of millennia of habits developed by people using them quickly and unconsciously. Because babies can pick languages up despite the massive accretion of complexity this yield, languages stay complex -- unless something intervenes, such as grown-ups learning them [59].

So, on to my speculation. McWhorter's discussion reminded me of gender, which after all relates to language. English is a relatively ungendered language compared to many others, such as French or German or Spanish. But in such languages, which randomly assign genders to inanimate objects, such as la mesa (how do you tell whether a table is masculine or feminine?), there are also contradictions.

German has a suffix, -chen, that makes things dear and small ... and it has neuter case. That means it takes the article das instead of the masculine der or feminine die. ... But once that suffix exists, you just know that somewhere along along the line, -chen will be applied, quite logically, to a woman to create a word meaning something like girly or maiden. It was: Mädchen. But that meant, automatically, an irregularity -- das Mädchen is a neuter word even though it refers to something clearly female [71].

In Spanish, -o is a masculine ending, but the word for hand is feminine: la mano. And so on.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about the way young children assign gender to objects in the world around them, as described by Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender (Norton, 2010).

At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male and female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong [211].

But even as they are forming themselves into little gender cops, they can be fooled, because so many of their gender categories are as arbitrary and fanciful as the notion that a hand is feminine or a girl is neuter:

Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls [224].

So this makes me wonder if the elaboration of such cues might be connected to the elaboration of linguistic categories, both of which seem to be congenial to children, but which can be and sometimes have to be abandoned. In the case of gender, the fanciful imposition of rigid categories, the insistence that everything has to be crammed into one or the other box, doesn't work for most adults. There's a popular tendency to blame bigotry on adult indoctrination of children, but I don't believe it's always so. I think a lot of it is invented by children trying to make sense of the world, who find it difficult and painful to break down the walls they set up at an early age, especially since our minds "harden" as we get older. Just a thought, though.