In the early moments of a 1998 playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there was a brief stoppage in play as the referees untangled a special-teams skirmish. Somewhere off camera, reigning NFL MVP and future (alleged) welfare fraudster Brett Favre was idling near Bucs defensive lineman Warren Sapp. He turned to Sapp and asked offhandedly, “How much do you weigh?”

A disruptive force on defense, Sapp wasn’t used to quarterbacks engaging him in conversation, much less questioning his girth. And so, while he answered Favre—“Three-oh-seven Friday”—it wasn’t until the next whistle that he really responded.

“It dawned on me,” Sapp says. “I said, ‘What? You think you can outrun me?’”

Favre: “Oh, I’ll outrun your big ass.”

Sapp liked what he was hearing. He shouted back, “Don’t worry. I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”

Favre and Sapp continued barking at each other the rest of that day and pretty much every other time they played. After a Sapp sack on Favre—which he would do eleven times over the course of his career—the quarterback turned to see who had dragged him to the turf. “Who you think it is?” Sapp asked. The two jawed so much that Favre’s teammates would literally forbid him from talking to Sapp.

“As good as he was as a player, he was equally as good as a talker, and if you were not careful, you would get caught up in that,” per Favre.

Favre wasn’t the only one to hold that opinion. In a 2006 Sports Illustrated piece about trash talk in football, multiple players singled out Sapp as best in class, while the New York Times dubbed him “one of the great blabbermouths in the game.” But if you ask Sapp about this reputation—and I did—he’ll tell you it’s off the mark. “I really wasn’t that big of a trash-talker,” he says. “I just got into conversations with certain dudes.”

It’s not that he denies talking; he just doesn’t think of it as trash. Todd Boyd would agree with this sentiment. As the University of Southern California professor and chair for the study of race and popular culture explains, “I mean, talking trash—it sounds disposable. The metaphor is disposable.”

Says Sapp, “Call it the dozens. Or call it shit talking. That’s all it is.”

As a kid, Sapp learned to engage in verbal combat both at home, where he was the youngest of six siblings, and in the neighborhood, where he would pedal the bike he asked his mom for every December—as either a birthday or Christmas gift—to wherever his friends were hanging out, where he knew they’d be talking shit. “That was our entertainment. That was our fun,” he says. “When we got together, we talked about each other.”

According to the activist H. Rap Brown, who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the dozens served as linguistic training for many Black youth, too. As he writes in his 1969 memoir: “Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.”And: “We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.”

If you didn’t grow up with it, perhaps the easiest way to understand the dozens is to think about the game as the exchange of your-mama jokes—combatants trying to one-up (and even upset) each other, while vying for verbal and creative supremacy via any vulgar means necessary. Usually, this would transpire before an inciting crowd of observers who served to heighten the accolades of success and deepen the humiliation of defeat. But the dozens isn’t so easily defined—neither in format nor content.

According to some accounts, the dozens can be traced to the early days of the United States, when it was played by enslaved people, while Elijah Wald, in his deeply academic book on the subject, Talking ’Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, makes the case that the game has African roots.

As an informal pastime played in schoolyards, on front stoops, and in barrooms, the dozens can claim no unifying theory. It’s always evolving, defined by its participants, informed by context, and infused with local flavor. For many, the dozens is known by other names—like joning, slipping, capping, bagging, or snapping—and individual experiences with the game can be equally varied.

For some, like Sapp, the dozens is an activity undergirded by affection and bonhomie. It is a prosocial endeavor—a bonding ritual—even if there are a few sharp edges. As Steve Jones Jr., the basketball coach and son of ABA star Steve Jones, describes it to me, talking shit was his dad’s “love language.” Todd Boyd can relate.

“My parents talked shit, like regularly. Like every day. It doesn’t get any closer than that,” he says. “After a while, that’s the normal mode of discourse. That’s how Black people talk. Black people I grew up around, anyway.” This dynamic would speak to what are known as “joking relationships,” which were defined by the pioneering social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown as consisting of “a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism,” in which intimacy can masquerade as hostility. In which, in other words, insults aren’t to be taken personally.

But just as play fighting can become the real thing, the dozens can be a dangerous game: sometimes people get hurt. “It is a risky pleasure,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it. In 1939, the white American psychologist and sociologist John Dollard was the first person to give the dozens serious academic attention in his paper “The Dozens: Dialect of Insult.” He noted that “the themes about which joking is allowed seem to be those most condemned by our social order in other contexts.”

Dollard saw the game not just as idle entertainment, but also as serving a utilitarian function for Black folks living in an openly racist society, specifically as “a valve for aggression” that would have otherwise and rightly been directed at white people, which would also have likely led to violent consequence.

Various other ideas and theories about the functionality of the dozens have emerged over the years, though Wald asserts that “all are interesting as much for what they reveal about the explainers as what they tell us about the game.” But while there may be no authoritative account—and while the meaning of the game to one person can be in direct contradiction with what it means to another—the explanations are instructive.

Some, for example, have cast the game as a means of negotiating social status, a puberty or initiation ritual, an in-group signifier, or a mechanism of survival. These all speak to a kind of testing—a challenge being presented.

This last functionality, in particular, has gained traction with many. In 1970, the psychologist Joseph White writes in Ebony “that the brothers and sisters use the dozens as a game to teach them how to keep cool and think fast under pressure.”

The following year, in their book The Jesus Bag, psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs describe the dozens as “a highly evolved instrument of survival” that introduces Black youth “to the humiliations which will become so intimate a part of their life.” They write, “In the deepest sense, the essence of the dozens lies not in the insults but in the response of the victim.”

Nigerian poet, scholar, and journalist Onwuchekwa Jemie—who links the dozens to similar West African traditions—describes this learned stoicism as a kind of immunization process: “It is as if the system is inoculated with virtual (verbally imagined) strains of the virus.”

But to gain true inoculation, one’s immune response has to be put to the test. And in that sense, the goal of the game is to not just best an opponent, but to get them to lose their cool. It’s why H. Rap Brown described the dozens as “a mean game,” wherein “what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words.” He continued: “The real aim of the Dozens was to get a dude so mad that he’d cry or get mad enough to fight.”

As Dollard writes in 1939, “it is good technique to attack the other fellow at his weak point, if that be found” and that “the one who fights first tends to be viewed as the ‘weaker kidder.’” Warren Sapp can barely imagine his childhood duels devolving into fisticuffs: “No, you throw a punch and nobody is going to hang out with you. You soft-skinned bastard.”

And yet violence was always a possible outcome with the dozens. Any insult contains an implicit and necessary threat, a violation—it’s what gives the insult its power—and if you’re going to disparage someone, especially by “getting close to dangerous truths in comical ways,” as Wald puts it, that invites retaliation, verbal or otherwise.

But even more than that, the dozens could be deployed at times with the explicit intention to hurt or to escalate an encounter to physical conflict. That distinction may not always be clear. As Jemie writes, the dozens is “always ambiguous and double edged. Always, it could be used either to amuse or abuse.” Many who understood the dozens for its bloody potential felt it was best avoided altogether, per Wald. At least one Mississippi establishment even hung a sign to that effect in the late 1920s: If you want to play the dozens, go home.

Others opted out simply because they didn’t want to get their feelings hurt.

Soft-skinned bastards.

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Excerpted from Trash Talk by Rafi Kohan. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Featured image: Jonathan Rolande via Flickr

How are swear words born? The process begins with certain words being widely dispreferred within a given community. This sets the scene for the offense escalation process to occur on a community-wide level, resulting in words that offend the entire community. The process cannot, as in the Rebecca/Rachel and shed examples we looked at in the previous two chapters, be restricted to the response of a particular listener or the use of the word by a particular speaker.

We all have different preferences about the words we use, but words that are widely dispreferred within a community are linked to recognized taboo topics like sex, defecation, religion, and so on. As we’ve seen, it’s not impossible to use taboo-related words inoffensively in polite company: a new parent might manage inoffensively to refer to defecation by remarking that their baby has “soiled herself,” or someone might politely refer to sex by sharing that a mutual friend has ended their relationship after catching their partner “in bed with” someone else.”

Remarks like these can pass off without so much as raising an eyebrow even in cases where the listener is someone who would be horrified by other ways of introducing the same topics—but this takes some skill on the part of the speaker. Part of that skill involves knowing which euphemisms to use: soiled herself and in bed with instead of defecated and having sex with—or, worse, words like shit and fucking. Choosing one’s words carefully in this way helps to signal to our audience that we recognize that the topic is not a pleasant one and that we do not wish to cause offense by discussing it. But it’s not all about the words we use.

Even euphemistic references to defecation and sex can end up causing offense if the speaker keeps returning to the topic, discusses it too gleefully, introduces it at the wrong moment, or in other ways fails to convey that she finds the topic as uncomfortable as her audience does. One wrong move—an indelicate word here, a second too long spent on the topic there—and the speaker risks embarrassing, disturbing, or offending their audience.

An important lesson that arises from the fact that it’s possible (albeit risky) for a skilled speaker to introduce a taboo topic into a polite conversation without causing offense is this: when we cause offense by talking about taboo topics in polite company, it’s not the taboo topic itself that offends our listeners, it’s what we signal to our listeners about our attitudes to them. Specifically, by talking about taboo topics we risk signaling to our listeners that we don’t care about their feelings. After all, we’re choosing to talk about a topic that we know people in our community—including those we’re addressing—dislike.

The strategies speakers employ to avoid causing offense in these circumstances—strategies like using euphemisms and moving on from the taboo topic as soon as possible—work by conveying to their listeners that they (the speakers) are being solicitous of the feelings of their listeners. Dealing sensitively with a taboo topic in a polite conversation is possible when the speaker manages to strike the right balance between signaling I care about having a conversation with you and I care about ensuring that you are comfortable during this conversation.

The ease with which one can cause offense by discussing taboo topics makes taboo words ripe for offense escalation. When we talk about recognized taboo topics with a fellow member of our community—or with multiple members of our community, including ones we’ve never met or spoken to before—our listener knows that we know that the topic is dispreferred. Offense escalation of taboo words can, as a result, occur on a much larger scale than in the Rebecca/Rachel and shed examples described above.

Further, offense escalation of taboo words can skip the stage—required in the Rebecca/Rachel and shed cases—where the audience points out to the speaker that the expression used is disliked, since everyone will take the speaker to understand this already. This means that offense escalation can get started even when the speaker knows nothing about the personal likes, dislikes, and sensitivities of their listeners.

All this means that words referring to taboo topics are much better suited than neutral words like book to develop via offense escalation into swear words. We saw, when we discussed the Rebecca/Rachel and shed cases, that in some cases it may be possible to offend someone with a neutral expression when offense escalation occurs on a one-to-one basis and one comes to learn that one’s listener has an unusual dislike for a neutral expression. But offense escalation of a neutral expression cannot get started when addressing a larger audience, precisely because the expression is neutral (i.e. not widely dispreferred).

There is an additional reason why taboo-related expressions have a head start over neutral ones when it comes to developing into swear words: breaking widely recognized taboos can be thrilling. This idea is already familiar, since it is one of the reasons why swearing—itself a taboo behavior, of course—can be thrilling. The thrill of taboo-breaking helps explain why children delight in toilet jokes, why it can sometimes feel liberating to let rip and be rude, and why we are often entertained (even if also horrified) to witness somebody put their foot in it by unwittingly doing something inappropriate, like complaining about a colleague’s ineptitude to the colleague’s spouse.

That breaking taboos can be fun gives us a Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds motivation to do it; an observation made no less accurate by the fact that our motivation to break taboos is generally outweighed by our motivation not to break them. By contrast, there is no comparable, community-wide motivation to use neutral words like book for thrills, which makes those words less likely to be used in a way that would give rise to offense escalation.

But there’s more. Not only is breaking taboos fun, it is also widely recognized that breaking taboos is fun. This observation adds an extra layer to the offense escalation of taboo words. To see this, let’s begin by considering that sometimes, when we have a good enough reason, it’s acceptable to break taboos. Yelling at work colleagues is generally unacceptable, but if the purpose is to warn them that the building is on fire, then it is acceptable. Asking a stranger when they last defecated is usually frowned upon, but not if one is a doctor trying to diagnose a digestive disorder. Curtly telling another person to shut up is usually bad mannered, but not if spoken to someone who is verbally abusing another person. And so on.

In cases like these, no sensible person who recognizes that the speaker has a good reason for breaking the taboo is likely to disapprove of the taboo-breaking. Even so, breaking taboos is risky. Given that we all recognize that breaking taboos can be fun, when we break them we run the risk that those around us will suspect that we are doing it merely (or mainly) because it’s fun, and we do not generally regard having fun as a good enough reason to cause distress to others. Etiquette, as well as morality, demands that we take into account other people’s feelings when deciding how to act.

This is part of what’s involved in respecting others. If we anticipate that a certain course of action will be fun for us but unpleasant for others, we are expected to avoid it, unless we have a good reason not to avoid it. What might such a good reason look like? Well, it could involve having permission from the affected others, as when we go ahead and throw a noisy party after getting the go-ahead from our neighbors.

Alternatively, it could involve an action being very fun for us but only mildly unpleasant for others, as when we take a relaxing vacation that will make our colleagues feel even more downhearted about their dreary lifestyle. Or, the affected others might deserve the unpleasantness that our action will cause them, as when I humiliate you (and enjoy doing so) after suffering months of harassment from you. And so on.

In cases where we break a taboo without good reason, we not only give our own fun greater weight than other people’s distress, we also demonstrate that we have done so. There’s an element of performance to breaking taboos in this way; a flavor of Look at me being all naughty—I know you don’t like this but I’m having fun! Our audience can reasonably conclude from this that we do not respect them very much. When we break taboos, then, we had better hope that it is clear to our audience that we are doing so with good reason if we want to avoid causing offense.

Here’s the upshot of this for swearing. Taboo-breaking in general can be fun, but it’s more common—and satisfying—to break some taboos rather than others for fun. Few of us get our kicks by asking strangers about their defecation habits, which loses much of its sparkle once we’re over the age of eight. While bad manners are rather more common, being bad mannered is not something we think of as fun or thrilling.

By contrast, we all recognize that uttering taboo words can be fun, and even funny—even those who don’t enjoy this form of taboo-breaking themselves typically acknowledge (while shaking their head regretfully) that there are others who do. This enjoyment is reflected by the large role that swearing plays in comedy. It means that when we swear, there’s a risk that those around us will suspect that we’re doing so for fun, a risk that doesn’t really arise when we break other sorts of taboos.

Since taboo breaking for fun sends our audience a strong and clear message that we place little value on their feelings—their feelings are, after all, less important than our own fun—swearing can be more shocking than the breaking of many other sorts of taboo. And our recognition that swearing’s capacity to shock is greater than that of some other taboo breaches makes taboo breaking by swearing even more fun, which in turn emphasizes to the audience the disregard in which they are held by the inappropriate swearer—and so on.

I have explained swearing’s focus on taboo topics by arguing that taboo-referring words get a head start over other words in the community-wide offense escalation process that is required in order for a word to become a swear word. As such, I have provided a causal explanation for the role that taboo-referring words play in swearing; in other words, I’ve explained how swearing grew out of words relating to taboo.

But it also seems likely that, over time, the association between taboo topics and swearing has grown stronger, to the extent that now we might not recognize as a swear word a word that doesn’t have a taboo denotation. If that’s the case, then there’s another kind of explanation of why swear words tend to focus on taboo topics. According to this explanation, swear words by definition, or necessarily, have a taboo denotation.

This amounts to claiming that the link between taboo topics and swearing is not merely causal but also conceptual, which would make the idea of swear words that do not denote taboo topics incoherent, in much the same way that there is something incoherent about the idea of a square circle or an invisible color. This is a much stronger claim than I’m going to argue for here. I will, instead, content myself with the causal claim, along with the observation that the conceptual claim might be true.

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From For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun by Rebecca Roache. Copyright © 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

One summer morning in 1883, Alexander John Ellis sat at his desk in front of three large bay windows, opened wide to catch any breeze that London’s Kensington had to give. From his chair, he could hear the birds in the plane trees and see right down Argyll Road, its five-story white stucco Georgian houses resembling layers of an expensive wedding cake. By the time everyone else was rising, Ellis had generally already been up for several hours. Early morning was his favorite time of day. Ellis loved the notion of getting ahead while others were sleeping, and getting work done before his neighbor, a master singer, started his scales and taught his students by the open window. “The nuisance is awful at times,” he wrote to Murray. Ellis always ate the same light breakfast of a French roll with butter, and drank his signature beverage: a cup of warm water with a little milk.

This day, as every day, his first act on waking was to weigh himself naked, before dressing for the day. Always the same boots and coat, affectionately named Barges and Dreadnought, before heading straight to his desk on the second floor. He needed to weigh himself before putting on his clothes for one main reason: Dreadnought was heavy. Dreadnought had twenty-eight pockets, each one stuffed full with eccentric items. Ellis made a noise like a kitchen drawer as he walked. When he sat down, eyewitnesses said that his pockets “stood upright like sentinels.” They were variously full of letters, nail clippers, string, a knife sharpener, a book and philological papers in case of emergency, and two things that a teetotaller and someone who watched his weight rarely needed: a corkscrew and a scone, just in case friends were in want of either. These last two items sum up Ellis; he was kind-hearted and always thought of his friends before himself.

On his desk, there were signs of everything that he held dear: a draft of the fifth and final volume of his monumental book, On Early English Pronunciation, daguerreotypes of Venice and his three children, a tuning fork, and a favorite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism, “Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servant of the heart, and should never be its slave.”

This morning held a special excitement: also spread out in front of him were Murray’s proof sheets for the first section of the Dictionary (words A to Ant)—all 362 pages of them. Murray had sent them to Ellis for his comment. As Ellis’s eyes skimmed the proofs, he could not help looking for his own name in the Introduction. He felt a sense of profound satisfaction to see “A. J. Ellis, Esq, FRS (Phonology)” listed between Prof. Frederick Pollock (Legal terms) and Dr P. H. Pye-Smith (Medical and Biological words).

Ellis’s passions were pronunciation, music, and mathematics, and his expertise in all of these areas had been sought by Murray who had had difficulty finding British academics to help him (by contrast, American scholars were eager to be involved). He had helped Murray with the very first entry in the Dictionary—A: not only the sound A, “the low-back-wide vowel formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips,” but also the musical sense of A, “the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major,” and finally the algebraic sense of A, “as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used to express known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown.” Ellis was happy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, including the words air, alert, algebra.

Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”

Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.

Ellis had raised an important question about inclusion, but he was not quite right about the boundaries of the Dictionary. Murray had included slang but it was true that, so far, he had left out obscenities. We can only imagine the uproar in Victorian society had he not. Murray would agonize over his decision to leave them out, but also had to be mindful of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 which made it illegal to expose the public to any content judged to be grossly indecent.

Murray’s caution proved wise when, a few years later, a fellow lexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, had his own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with William Henley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing the letters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took his publisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jury that writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personally guilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs. Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Act by arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, not the public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henley was published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck and many other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and the public outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

By the time that section of the letter C was published for the Oxford English Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt– , a cross- reference to the prefixes cont– , count- with no mention whatsoever of the female body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had been in use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they would have to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however, include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” which he defined as “the privy parts, the external genital organs” with no reference to a woman or—God forbid—her vulva.

Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had to be sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within a larger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising him not to include the word condom. “I am writing on a very obscene subject. There is an article called Cundum…a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well- deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation,” he wrote to Murray. “Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair was named after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.” But he had found a quotation from 1705 referring to a “Quondam” which made him rethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. “I suppose Cundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary,” he concluded. Murray left it out.

Dixon was the man who unwisely advised Murray to delete the entry for appendicitis because it was, according to Dixon, just another itis-word. “Surely you will not attempt to enter all the crack-jaw medical and surgical words. What do you think of ‘Dacryocystosyringoketokleitis’? You know doctors think the way to indicate any inflammation is to tack on ‘itis’ to a word.” The word’s deletion turned out to be an embarrassment to Murray and Oxford University Press when, in 1902, the coronation of Edward VII was postponed because of the King’s attack of appendicitis. Suddenly everyone was using the word, but no one could find it in the Dictionary, and since the letter A was already published it could not be added until the Supplement volume in 1933.

But back to the summer of 1883. Murray received the corrected proofs from Ellis. He not only appreciated Ellis’s feedback but also trusted his judgement: he promptly deleted all claims to exhaustiveness and wrote, “The aim of this Dictionary is to furnish an adequate account of the meaning, origin, and history of English words now in general use, or known to be in use.”

*

I had been wondering how Ellis got to be such a word nerd? I was fascinated by what I discovered. To begin with, something very unusual happened when he was eleven years old. His mother’s cousin, a schoolmaster called William Ellis, offered to give the young boy a substantial inheritance if he would change his surname from Sharpe to Ellis. Mr and Mrs Sharpe agreed, and from then on “Alexander John Sharpe” became “Alexander John Ellis.” The young boy was enrolled at Shrewsbury School and Eton, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and never had to earn money for the rest of his life.

Ellis’s wealth enabled him to be the quintessential “gentleman scholar,” an expert in almost everything he did, be it music, mathematics, languages, phonetics, travel, or daguerreotype photography. He was a polymath for whom life was more a science than an art. He published over 300 articles and books, and his works are quoted in the OED 200 times.

His interest in accent and pronunciation was inspired by the fact that he was born to a middle-class family in Hoxton, east London, where he was exposed to working-class cockney speakers, followed by schooling at Shrewsbury with its Welsh and English accents, and then exposed to the Received Pronunciation of the upper and upper-middle classes at Eton and Cambridge.

Words were like children to Ellis. He loved them equally, regardless of whether they were common, technical, scientific, slang, or foreign. He read the Dictionary as though it were a novel. Some words gave him pure delight in both their sound and meaning such as absquatulate, to abscond or decamp, with a quotation from Haliburton’s Clockmaker. “Absquotilate [sic] it in style, you old skunk…and show the gentlemen what you can do.” But it was their sounds that captured his imagination most. The quality of a whisper or a creak; the stress of a syllable; high pitch or low pitch.

Most people hear sounds, but Ellis saw them. He saw the air move in the mouth, the way the tip of the tongue touched the ridge of the teeth for a t; the vibration of vocal cords to change it to a d; and how the base of the tongue moved back in the mouth to block the flow of air for a g. Every sound was a picture for Ellis. He devoted his life to painting these pictures, describing their systematic order so the world might better understand the fundamentals of language.

His book On Early English Pronunciation, published in five volumes between 1869 and 1889, traced the pronunciation of English from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century and established him as a world authority on English phonology, a pioneer in the field of speech-sound studies. For the nineteenth-century section of the book, Ellis enlisted the help of hundreds of informants across Britain and a small group of experts, including Murray and others within the OED network. The result was the first major study of British dialects.

No language yet existed for the patterns Ellis was identifying, so he often had to invent the words, which subsequently made it into the Dictionary: palatalized, to make a palatal sound (by moving the point of contact between tongue and palate further forward in the mouth); labialization, the action of making a speech sound labial (articulated with both lips); and labiopalatalized, a sound made into a labiopalatal (articulated with the front of the tongue against the hard palate and the lips). He also invented the words septendecimal, relating to a seventeenth (in music); and phonetician, which originally referred to an advocate of phonetic spelling, rather than its current meaning of “an expert of phonetics.” Quite a few of his inventions have since fallen out of use and appear in the Dictionary with a dagger sign (which indicates obsolescence) beside them, such as vocalistic, of or relating to vowels, and phonotyper, an advocate of phonotypy (another term which Ellis invented, meaning “a system of phonetic printing”).

Ellis was one of the phoneticians on whom George Bernard Shaw modeled the character of Henry Higgins, that master of pronunciation, in his play Pygmalion, later turned into the musical My Fair Lady. Higgins (as a bet with his gentlemen friends) teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak “proper” English; but Ellis had none of Henry Higgins’s snobbery or arrogance. He was a generous, down-to-earth man, a frequent correspondent with friends, happy to offer advice when asked, and always working to bring people together and support them.

Ellis spent every Sunday carrying out experiments in musical pitch at the house of musicologist Alfred Hipkins. He arrived at the Hipkinses’ by horse cab, the pockets of Dreadnought full of tuning forks, measuring rods, notes, and resonators. So as not to cause any trouble to the Hipkinses’ servants, the thoughtful Ellis even filled his experiment jars with water for refreshment before leaving home. Ellis’s work with Hipkins is preserved in the Dictionary in certain words which they alone invented and used—but as no one else did they are now obsolete, for example mesotonic, relating to the mean tone.

After a full afternoon of experiments with Alfred, Ellis would join the Hipkins family for lively conversation around the tea table, although he refrained from eating lest it interfere with his supper of warm-water-and-milk. Hipkins’s daughter Edith remembered these Sundays and commented that for someone who became famous for sound, Ellis actually had a bad ear: “Dr. Ellis was tone deaf and could not distinguish between ‘God Save the Queen’ or ‘Rule Britannia!’ Happily my father had an unusually sensitive ear and as Dr. Ellis arrived at conclusions entirely by calculations he would call upon his ‘other self’ in time of trouble with ‘Lend me your ears!'”

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From The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie. Copyright © 2023. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Wander down a small alley off London’s Fleet Street and you’ll find a pub with a crooked, creaky charm. Its black and white sign says “Rebuilt 1667,” the year after the Great Fire gutted England’s largest city. Go inside for a pint in its wood-paneled dining room, where literary greats like Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain ate their fill. This may not be London’s oldest pub, but it sure looks the part, with atmospheric vaulted cellars that supposedly date back to medieval times. And if you harbor any doubts concerning the pub’s antiquity, its name sets you straight: “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.”

It’s nearly impossible to spend time in London without seeing a number of traditional ‘ye olde’ English pubs: “Ye Olde Mitre,” “Ye Olde Watling” and the curiously named “Ye Olde Cock Tavern” are just a few. It may seem that these places are real relics, or at least their names themselves are written in an ancient language—but they are not. “Ye olde” is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said “ye olde” except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.

But that’s not to say it has no roots in the past. Once there was a letter called thorn that made a “th” sound. It looked like this: þ. Over the centuries, þ was written increasingly like the letter y with some scribes using them interchangeably. Early printers even substituted y for þ, so the word “þe” (the) ended up looking like “ye.” Eventually þ fell out of use, but people continued using “ye” to abbreviate the word “the” in print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in handwriting until the nineteenth century. English speakers’ memory of the origin of “ye” faded over time, until people began reading the word anew, pronouncing it wrong, and eventually creating the habit in English of saying “ye” to sound old.

So if Old English is not “ye olde” English, what is it and how far back must we go to find it? More than sixty years before the rebuilding of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, William Shakespeare wrote this monologue for his tragic hero Hamlet:

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’ th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Hah, ’swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ’a’ fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal.

The phrasing and vocabulary are unfamiliar, but the English is not “Old.” Hamlet’s speech, written by Shakespeare around 1600, is in Early Modern English, the English used from the end of the Middle Ages in the late fifteenth century until the mid to late seventeenth century. The phrase “gives me the lie in the throat as deep as to the lungs” sounds strange, although forcibly shoving unpleasant words down someone’s throat is a familiar concept.

We still use the words “villain” and “slave,” but they are no longer common insults, and it’s more likely you’ll hear “chicken-shit” or even “lily-livered” rather than “pigeon-livered.” People no longer curse with “swounds,” short for “God’s wounds” (although you may spot “zounds” in a comic book), but in the sixteenth century using God’s name in vain like this was considered particularly foul-mouthed. Other Shakespearean oaths included “slid” (God’s lid, i.e. eyelid) and “God’s bodykins” (God’s dear body), the origin of the mild, antiquated oath “odd’s bodkins.”

Hamlet’s monologue is unlike anything you’d hear in modern English today, but a fluent English speaker can probably get the gist of it. Much of the vocabulary can be found in a modern dictionary, even if some words are now used infrequently. Shakespeare employs unfamiliar syntax, or word order (“who does me this” rather than “who does this to me”), but overall the passage makes sense grammatically, even to us today.

Compared to Shakespeare’s Early Modern English, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is significantly more difficult to read:

Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste.
Ye woot youre foreward, and I it yow recorde. If even-song and morwe-song accorde,
Lat se now who shal telle the firste tale.
As evere mote I drynke wyn or ale,
Whoso be rebel to my juggement
Shal paye for al that by the wey is spent.
Now draweth cut, er that we ferrer twynne;
He which that hath the shorteste shal bigynne.

Written in the late 1380s to 1390s, over 200 years before Hamlet, Chaucer’s writing has more strange spellings and unfamiliar words than Shakespeare’s. But the grammar is familiar enough that you may understand the passage better just from reading it aloud.

The publican Harry Bailly is speaking to his traveling companions, reminding them that the night before they had accepted his invitation to take part in a storytelling contest. Anyone who argues with him, warns Harry, must pay for all the wine and ale he consumes throughout their journey. He orders everyone to draw straws, and the person with the shortest will tell the first tale: “he which that hath the shorteste shal bigynne.”

Chaucer’s English may look ancient but it is not “Old.” Chaucer wrote in Middle English, the English used from the first half of the twelfth century until sometime during the fifteenth. Some linguists suggest an end date of 1400–1450 based on fundamental changes in the pronunciation of vowels (the Great Vowel Shift). Others give a later end date, closer to 1500, by which time the impact of the printing press had really taken hold in England. The advent of printing in England was in 1476, when William Caxton set up his own press in London. Printing, as opposed to writing by hand, meant that far more books were available, with a much wider circulation, which in turn led to greater standardization in spelling and pronunciation.

Some of the words that Chaucer uses, like “juggement” and “paye,” may sound completely “English,” but they, along with many other French loanwords, had only entered the language relatively recently. The Normans defeated the English in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and this Norman Conquest would add many new words to the English language.

Throughout the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, under the influence of the new French-speaking ruling class, English changed bit by bit until it became “Middle English.” French introduced words like “juggement” and “paye,” and shaped the way Chaucer and his contemporaries spoke and wrote; slowly, the words that they replaced were forgotten.

But these forgotten words, the language that the English would have spoken in the Battle of Hastings— this, finally, is Old English. “Juggement” and “paye” replaced words like dōm (judgement) and gieldan (pay, pronounced ye-ell-dahn). These older words still persist in our current language, like ghosts from the past, in “doom” and “yield.” They are just two words among many that survived the Norman invasion, the Great Vowel Shift, the revolutions of grammar, and Shakespearean reinvention, to crop up in the language we speak today.

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Excerpted from The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English © 2023 by Hana Videen. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Words are combined into phrases and sentences in a dazzling array of patterns, collectively referred to as syntax. The complexity of syntax has long confounded researchers. Consider, for example, the previous sentence. There are all sorts of patterns in the order of the words of that sentence, patterns that are familiar to you and me and other speakers of English. Those patterns are critical to the transmission of meaning and to how we think as we create sentences. It was no coincidence that I put “complexity” after “the,” or “syntax” after “of,” or “researchers” after “confounded,” to cite just three examples of many in that sentence alone. You and I know that “researchers” should follow the main verb of this particular sentence, in this case “confounded.” If I put that word somewhere else it would change the sentence’s meaning or make it confusing. And we know that articles like “the” should precede nouns, as should prepositions like “of.” These and other patterns, sometimes referred to as “rules” as though they represented inviolable edicts voted on by a committee, help to give English sentences a predictable ordering of words. It is this predictable ordering that is usually referred to when linguists talk about a language’s syntax.

Without syntax, it would seem, statements could not be understood, because they would be transferred from speaker to hearer in a jumbled mess of words. This is, it turns out, a bit of an oversimplification since a number of the world’s languages do not have rule-governed word order to the extent that English does. Still, let us stick with the oversimplification for now, because it hints at something meaningful about speech. Many languages, like English, tend to put the subject in front of the verb, and the verb in front of the object, as in “The syntax confounded the researchers” or “Sergio kicked Neymar.” In other languages another order may hold, for instance the object may precede the verb, as in “Sergio Neymar kicked.” In fact, the latter sort of ordering seems to be more common than the former across the world’s languages. Most languages have default word orders: Strong conventions determine how units of meaning are encoded sequentially, even iconic words and these conventions help make language intelligible. Still, the conventions can be exceedingly complex and take kids and adult language learners years to learn. Here is an illustration of a particular word order that helps convey meaning in English: (1) Sergio kicked Neymar and ran away.

This is a very straightforward sentence, but note that you must be familiar with a convention to understand who did the kicking (Sergio) and also who did the running away (again, Sergio). I do not need to say “Sergio kicked Neymar and Sergio ran away” for you to interpret the sentence. A word-order convention of English lets you know that, Because Sergio came first in the sentence, he is also the (omitted) person who did the running away. This convention does not exist in all languages. In some Amazonian languages, the equivalent sentence would mean that Neymar, the one being kicked, ran away. The point here is simply that there are countless “rules” about things like this in English syntax, and as English speakers we often fail to appreciate how many such conventions we must be aware of to convey our thoughts and comprehend those of others. Similarly, speakers of other languages must be familiar with an incredible array of distinct word-order conventions.

Syntactic conventions can be exceedingly complex, and any given language contains so many of them that linguists have long wondered how individuals can learn them. To many linguists in the twentieth century, learning language was largely about learning syntactic rules like those related to who did the second action in a sentence such as the one in example (1), rules that helped people produce and decipher sentences. Various theoretical models were put forth to offer frameworks for understanding how human syntax, with all its complexity, is even possible. Some of the models suggested that humans are genetically hardwired to decipher syntactic patterns, predisposed to make sense out of the stream of words they begin hearing at birth. These models focused on the complex syntactic rules of languages, especially a few well-studied languages like English. They suggested that learning a language was primarily a process of learning two components of the language: its dictionary or, more technically, its lexicon (which consists of all the units like words, prefixes, and suffixes, and the meaning of all the units), and its grammar. The grammar consists of the rules that allow people to put the lexicon’s units of meaning into predictable orders so as to construct even larger units of meaning. An increasing number of linguists now think this “dictionary and grammar” model of language was misguided. According to them there is no real distinction between words and sentences, as odd as that claim may seem, and no material distinction between a dictionary and grammar. We will return to this point toward the end of the chapter. The dictionary-and- grammar view of language benefited from the rise, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, of the theory spread by linguist Noam Chomsky. His theory became the dominant paradigm for the study of syntax during the latter part of the twentieth century and continues to influence scholars in some circles today.

One of the key distinguishing features of human languages, according to the Chomskyan paradigm, is a syntactic feature known as recursion. Recursion refers to the use of a structure within another structure of that kind, for instance when you place one clause inside another. If you are not sure about what a clause is, perhaps this helps: A clause consists of a subject and a predicate. All sentences have at least one clause, but some sentences have two or more clauses. In the following sentence a clause is inserted into another clause to form a coherent thought.

(2) Neymar knows [that he is a great dribbler].

In this example, the bracketed clause serves as the object of the whole sentence. It is a clause serving a function within a larger clause. We can also embed clauses recursively in the middle of each other, as in the following example.

(3) Neymar, [who likes to beat defenders [who think they can stop him]], placed the ball in the bottom corner of the goal.

Chomsky and others suggested that the ability to recursively combine clauses like these is at the core of human speech, implying that it was a key characteristic shared by all human languages. Countless studies have been published on recursive phenomena like embedded clauses, as boring as that might sound. Most of the relevant studies were on English and other European languages, though many were also on unrelated languages. In the last fifteen years or so, however, some linguists have made prominent suggestions that recursion is not so fundamental to syntax, and language more broadly, since embedded clauses like those evident in the previous two examples seem to be lacking in some languages. In 2009, linguists Stephen Levinson and Nick Evans pointed out that, judging from the data, syntactic recursion is not actually found in all languages. Part of the evidence they relied on comes from the famous case of the Pirahã, an Amazonian language I have already discussed. My father published a series of papers around fifteen years ago that described the absence of evidence for recursion in Pirahã (among other things), contradicting the claims of Chomsky and others regarding the proposed universality of recursion in the world’s languages. Instead, the language does not seem to allow for clauses to be placed inside each other but only placed next to each other. Recursive structures equivalent to “Sergio kicked the boy who ran” have yet to be documented in the language. Instead the Pirahã equivalent of this sentence would be something like “Sergio kicked the boy. The boy ran.”

To someone outside linguistics, this may not seem to be a particularly controversial claim—namely that a language in the Amazon places clauses next to each other instead of embedding one inside the other. To many linguists, however, it became a hot topic. Some expressed skepticism that such a language could exist. To others, like Levinson and Evans, it was not an implausible claim given the extreme diversity of the world’s languages and given that claims of “linguistic universals” always seem to fall apart as the number of languages considered grows and grows. As it stands, no outsider has been able to show that Pirahã speakers use recursion of the kind predicted by Chomsky and colleagues. Some might counter that this is simply because only a handful of people have actually learned Pirahã, as it is exceedingly difficult for outsiders to learn, by all accounts, and so our data on the topic are limited. From this perspective, maybe we just have not come across recursion in the language yet despite the hundreds of hours of recordings. To date, anyhow, no clear evidence for recursion in Pirahã has been offered.

The topic of recursion in Pirahã became popular both inside and outside academia, with articles published in venues as diverse as Language and the New Yorker on the topic. As linguist and syntactician Geoffrey Pullum has noted, part of what was lost in the discussion of Pirahã was the fact that it is not the only language that undermines the notion that recursion is a fundamental feature of syntax. In a 2020 article, Pullum surveyed a series of studies of non-WEIRD languages from the last few decades, all of which appear to lack recursion. Let us consider some of the examples discussed by Pullum.

Pullum notes that Ken Hale, a linguist who studied Australian languages, observed back in the mid-1970s that clauses in the Warlpiri language are not embedded inside each other but rather just loosely adjoined. This appears to be the case in other Australian languages as well. Around the time that Hale was making his observations, a linguist named Des Derbyshire published a series of findings on the Amazonian language Hixkaryana. Derbyshire noted the absence of recursion in the language. Instead, he said, the syntax of the language relies on similar strategies as the syntax of Pirahã. Derbyshire, who had spent decades as a missionary working with and living among the Hixkaryana, found that Hixkaryana clauses are simply placed next to each other rather than inside each other.5 A much more widely spoken language in which recursion does not seem to be relied upon is conversational Indonesian, one of the languages with the most native speakers. Linguist Robert Englebretson made this point in a comprehensive grammar of Indonesian. Indonesian is not the last example that could be offered, but it illustrates the point that some non-Amazonian and non-Australian languages may not rely on recursion during conversation. It is very difficult to prove the complete absence or impossibility of recursion in a given language. What we can observe, however, is that there are multiple languages that have been documented in the last few decades for which we have no clear evidence of recursion. This should likely give us pause prior to considering recursion a key feature of syntax and, more broadly, to considering recursion critical to how we think in order to speak. Another factor that might give us pause is that recursively embedded clauses are relatively infrequent in speech, even in the many languages like English that allow them.

All the discoveries of languages that lack recursion date to the latter part of the twentieth century but have received much more intense scrutiny in the first part of the twenty-first Century in the wake of the findings from Pirahã and in the subsequent well-publicized debates on recursion. Note that none of the exceptional languages are Indo-European. This is not surprising in the sense that the languages of many regions are so distinct when compared to the languages of better-documented language families. Many of the languages indigenous to Amazonia are completely unrelated to each other, let alone those of other regions. The findings on languages with “unusual” syntax offer another case in which the extent of diversity of speech, like other facets of human behavior and thought, has been underestimated because of a research bias on people and languages in WEIRD populations. Even today, the vast majority of syntactic research is conducted on the languages of speakers of a handful of WEIRD languages. Like many claims about universals in human psychology that may be called into question by examining very distinct populations worldwide, claims about universals in syntax tend to face challenges once a truly representative sample of the world’s languages is considered. Evans and Levinson suggest that all linguistic universals that have been proposed, including recursion, do not hold up to closer inspection. Conversely, many very complex phenomena that do not surface in WEIRD languages and which have never been proposas universals are actually very common in many languages of regions like Amazonia. To scholars like Evans, Levinson, and many others like myself, the common perception of certain linguistic “universals” originated at least in part in the biased sample of languages that served as the basis for linguistic inquiry during much of the twentieth century. As that bias waned with the continued documentation of unrelated languages  worldwide, the evidence for universals uncoincidentally began to wane as well.

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This excerpt is adapted from Caleb Everett’s book: A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think, used with permission from the publisher,  Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2023 Caleb Everett.

“The gobshite, the gum-sucker,
the scare-the-man, the faith-breaker,
the snuff-the-ground, the baldy skull
(his chief name is scoundrel)”

–Seamus Heaney, “The Names of the Hare”
*

In 2016 The New York Times ran the headline “Cow Who Escaped New York Slaughterhouse Finds Sanctuary.” That “Who” caught the eye of Peter Singer, and he was pleasantly surprised. The perspicacity of a cow’s dash for freedom from the jaws of death appears to have thrown the reporter and said cow out of the newspaper’s stylebook. Could this at last reflect a change in policy?

Not according to the paper’s Editor for Standards, Philip Corbett, who held to the Associated Press’s guidelines: that “person” pronouns are only given to animals with a name or where the sex is specified. Otherwise, tough. Cows are its and thats and whiches, and that’s it. So the “who” was a blip then.

Nevertheless, the story was reported variously across the media as the cow “who,” and the cow “that.” Technically this cow was a steer, a castrated male—which demonstrates the way we talk about animals does not encourage paying attention—and now he’s got a name, Freddy, so it doesn’t count. Freddy went to the Skylands Sanctuary in New Jersey to live out his natural life. Which is so typically contrary of humans.

This sanctuary seems to do a roaring rescue service for escaped slaughterhouse cows and steers. Brianna, for instance, who fell off a cattle truck on her way to the slaughterhouse, was rescued and gave birth to a female calf who will now “never be without her mother,” said Mike Stura of Skylands. From meat line to the sanctuary in one imaginative leap, Brianna earned herself a lifespan.

March 2019, same thing: a calf escaped the slaughterhouse, ran loose down the street, became a TV star, earned his “person” pronoun, and was rehomed at Skylands. At writing, Skylands has 70 escapees. If livestock have the wherewithal to not become deadstock, we humans can relate to them, and with our divine whim we name them and grant their reprieve.

England, 1998. Two five-month-old ginger Tamworth pigs, brother and sister, escaped from a Wiltshire abattoir while being unloaded from the lorry. They were chased through the streets of Malmesbury, but they dived into the River Avon and swam to the other side. They were on the run for a week. Top slot on the news desk, the nation fell in love. A celebrity tried to buy them. Donors offered “silly money” for their safe retirement. sanctuaries across the country competed to give them a home.

By the time they were captured the boar had been named Sundance, and his sister butch. Their owner, Arnaldo Dijulio, said they were worth 40 quid each and he wasn’t prepared to discuss it. Whatever money passed hands, Butch and Sundance ended up at a rare breeds farm in Kent where for 13 years they were the main attraction.

*

What is “it” about? it: “pronoun, the neuter of he or she and him or her applied to a thing without life, a lower animal, a young child…” It’s a lot for such a tiny word to carry. Is it serviceable? perverse? Anachronistic? It’s unscientific, surely? It’s demeaning. Literally. Some animals, like parrot-fish, begin as females then change into males, and with wrasse it’s vice versa, and some animals are difficult to gender, but there are so many we can.

Cows, for instance. A handsome pair of bull’s castanets will put us on the right track. Antlers, a peacock’s tail, a lion’s mane, a blackbird’s song. Nevertheless we still use “it.” To call a person an “it” is the height of insult, Oh, look, it’s arrived. Pet owners will bridle if, after meeting Daisy the dog a few times, we persist in calling her a he, or an it, so we make an effort. We now graciously extend personhood to chimpanzees and gorillas, who can be he and she, but that’s it; the rest get to be “it” with the pronoun “that.” The gorilla who, but the dog that. What is the point of grammar if not precision?

Scientists with the strongest commitment to precision are prescribed a grammar unfit for purpose: “…a dead female guillemot with a fully formed, perfectly colored egg in its uterus…” Why, for Darwin’s sake, if he or she has a demonstrable gender, is he or she an it? It is so entrenched that if you question it, you are being sentimental at best, or insanely politically correct.

Of course, animals won’t know what we call them, but language directs how we think about them. Spiders are “it,” even when triple the size of the male of the species. We make exceptions for the femmes fatales to whom we give humanoid pronouns on the basis that they eat their husbands after copulation.

Hence the black widow spider gets her name (unpack that for a bit of not-so-covert racism and sexism). Follow the logic of this pronoun exclusion zone, and we can only ask “What” questions of animals and “Who” questions of ourselves, when surely today there is more occasion to wonder who the bear is, rather than what “it” is. The Oxford English Dictionary permits “who” to be used for an animal “with implication of personality”…. But who will decide this?

*

In 1935, in a garden on the Greek island of Corfu, the ten-year-old Gerald Durrell made a discovery. He was watching a lacewing on the roses, admiring the delicate insect’s glass-green wings and golden eyes. No third-person singular nonsense for him. She was a she from the instant she lowered her abdomen.

She remained like that for a moment and then raised her tail, and from it, to my astonishment, rose a slender thread, like a pale hair. Then, on the very tip of this stalk, appeared the egg. The lacewing had a rest, and then repeated the performance until the surface of the rose leaf looked as though it were covered with a forest of tiny club moss. The laying over, the female rippled her antennae briefly and flew off in a mist of green gauze wings.

*

As slaves were slavish, animals were brutish, and still are. With our metaphorical language we do things we hardly notice we are doing. Like all powerful tools, words can be used for good and ill. Names foul in the mouth. They can obscure as much as they can reveal. We can use them to pervert, poison and play with our minds. Language structures our consciousness. Changing language changes views, because language is loaded.

Bitch.

Pig.

Snake in the grass.

The Taliban entering Kabul in August 2021 were reported by news commentators as showing their “sheep faces,” although it was expected that they would soon show their “true nature as wolves.” Even the word wild has connotations: out of control, unkempt, mad even. The opposite of civilized, cultivated, sophisticated. What makes us human, or like an animal? Words project thought. And insult.

Vermin. Scavenger. Pest. Let’s blame the animals.

Ape /eip/ noun
1. a large primate that lacks a tail, including the gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan and gibbon.
2. an unintelligent or clumsy person. verb (apes, aping, aped)  imitate (someone or something), especially in an absurd or unthinking way…

Phrases:

Go ape (go crazy), God’s ape (a born fool), go ape-shit…

If someone called you Lizard Lips, would you like it? Perhaps not. Nor do we like being accused of weaseling out of something, of worming our way in, or of toadying up to someone. We hang adjectives on creatures which they cannot shake off. Sly. There is nothing deceitful about a fox, for he must eat and he must feed his cubs.

In the same way that we dehumanize our human enemies before we ask our young men to kill them, we en-mean animals. Vermin implies vicious, wicked, detestable; say “vermin” and you are absolved. From vermin to varmint to the near extermination of the wolf. That is how far words can stretch.

Euphemisms are the cloaks we employ to protect our sensitive souls. Control. Manage. Harvest. We know we do it, but we do it anyway. other words can write things off. Wasteland. Quagmire. Swamp. Wilderness. It is empty. There’s nothing there. Language is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we succumb to it even though we understand the mechanics of metaphor. Even our efforts to be politically correct produce “non-human animal”—a negative term for what is not us. Non-rhinoceros? Non-pigeon?

Other words shoot blanks. Like by-catch. A tiny word for a very big thing. A shrimp trawler throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals in its nets, dead or dying, overboard. For every pound of shrimps, 26 pounds of sealife must also die. That’s dolphins, turtles, sharks, whales. By-catch. I’ve mentioned “biodiversity” (unless you skipped the introduction).

Such a flatliner for everything that has life; the incalculable species of insects and fungi and slime, let alone a wren’s beating heart. “Biodiversity” squashes the luminous zing, the sleek glory. Wild living community? Planet inhabitants? It’s not easy. But we need more to care about, more magpie garble, more moose who loom.

In 2007 the Oxford Junior Dictionary contentiously removed the English words for adder, beaver, boar, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther. As if they were no longer necessary in a modern world.*

The writer Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how, in the language of her people, the Potawatomi Nation of North America, a “bay” is a noun only if the water is dead and stilled between its shores. Whereas the verb wiikwe-gamaa, to be a bay, releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.

For the Potawatomi all beings are persons—the Beaver people, the Bear people—and trees are the standing people. Kimmerer calls it the grammar of animacy, that every sentence reminds us of our kinship with the animate world. humans are considered the beings who must look to the teachers all around them. had the human people learnt from the council of animals not to interfere with the sacred purpose of another being, the eagle would look down on a different world and salmon would be crowding up the rivers.

* The writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris responded with The Lost Words, an illustrated book of spell-poems to bring back the excised creatures.

II
Let the Animals Speak For Themselves

“But where a passion yet unborn perhaps
Lay hidden as the music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale”

–Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Aylmer’s Field”
*

The female Photuris firefly is as duplicitous with language as we are; she flashes the female semaphore of another firefly species, the Photinus, to lure in the smaller Photinus male. Then she eats him.

Many songbirds use alarm calls of pure tone, making their whereabouts difficult to locate, but for an elaborate song to impress they tune to a wavelength that will make themselves easy to locate by their own kind. The flourish of the nightingale’s virtuoso performances, his piping, fluting and limitless extravagance, with the added anticipation of every pause, might make us pause to wonder how he is composing as he goes along, and what he is singing.

Remember, too, that most of the song’s complexity is beyond the scope of our hearing. The thrush in our garden will sing far longer in autumn than necessary to assert himself as the territorial king, appearing totally absorbed, falling under his own spell. The writer Richard Mabey sees birdsong as not necessarily a language “but it is expressive—expressionist, if you like. It conveys a bird’s emotional tone, be it proprietorial, angry, sexy, contented, sociable, exuberant—states of mind we intuitively understand.”

Consider what the enigmatic giant cuttlefish is flashing with her surround-vision mantle, a living billboard of technicolor signaling. Rippling of stripes, blotches, flares, necklaces of glowing pearls, a cloud passing, dots, jags, washing rainbows. The displays are brain-activated through neural pathways to muscles that contract and relax to reveal or obscure the particular pigment held in each chromatophore—of which there are millions.

In the layer below, iridophores reflect and bounce light like a stack of mirrors, filtering into blues, greens, violets and silver-whites. To this electric color show add a skin with papillae that can sculpt itself into an array of shapes and textures; then add the gestures of eight independent arms (and two feeding tentacles). A show of horns, hooks, clubs, a flinging of arms aloft; the male will flatten his fourth arm into a flat blade in a show of aggression.

For goodness’ sake, what do we know? The cuttlefish has a potential banquet of signaling variations of which we can only dream.The combinations of shapes, gesture and color has the potential (if not the need or realization) of a language as complex as our own.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, writer/philosopher/diver, once observed a cuttlefish from above flash a passing cloud on her right side to another cuttlefish, while her left side remained unchanged and camouflaged. What was she saying?

Bewilderingly, these magicians of color are supposed to be color-blind.

With only one kind of photoreceptor cell (we have three), the cephalopod should be unable to respond to different wavelengths of light. But that conclusion is hard to accept from an animal who can trigger displays which appear highly intentional—for camouflage, defense, mating.

So what’s going on? We don’t know. The suspicion is the answer lies in the unusual off-axis shape of their pupil, and by exploiting something called chromatic blurring to decipher spectral information. Cephalopods have been observed going through tremendous choreographed repertoires on their own, for no apparent purpose.

Of course, it’s unscientific to suggest they might be practicing, or doing the visual equivalent of whistling, or occupying themselves for their own—dare I say—pleasure? We are having to change our minds about the cephalopods, the mollusc family that includes squid, octopus and cuttlefish.

Once thought of as unsocial creatures, we now observe gatherings of octopuses where behavior and radiant expression seem to exceed any biological function. It’s possible, yes, that these shimmering shows are just manifestations of electrical activity. More likely, there is more going on out at sea than we imagine.

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Excerpted from Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew. Copyright © 2023. Available from Abrams Books.

When I was in fifth grade, our class was joined by a boy who had the most exquisite handwriting. It was astonishing to watch, and worse, he had no idea how good he was at it. Penmanship in elementary school was about following rules, which I thought I did well, but my grades in that area were atrocious to the point that I was made to do extra practice exercises, an assignment that offended me for what it implied about my priorities. My handwriting mattered to me. I liked it when something came out looking nice. I wanted that to come through in the work I put out in the world. To that end, I envied my new classmate to the point of bitterness.

It was a comfort to see this precise sentiment presented in the opening pages of Fleur Jaeggy’s 1989 novella Sweet Days of Discipline, which was first published in English in 1993 (for New Directions, translated by Tim Parks). The nameless fourteen-year-old narrator boards at a school called Appenzell in Switzerland.

She is thrown for a loop when a new, slightly older girl named Frédérique arrives, with looks like “those of an idol, disdainful.” Our narrator is both enchanted and put off by Frédérique: “She had no humanity. She even seemed repulsed by us all. The first thing I thought was: she had been further than I had.”

The narrator finds many points of fascination with Frédérique, the first being her handwriting:

In our lives at school, each of us, if we had a little vanity, would establish a façade, a kind of double life, affect a way of speaking, walking, looking. When I saw her writing I couldn’t believe it. We almost all had the same kind of handwriting, uncertain, childish, with round, wide ‘o’s. Hers was completely affected. (Twenty years later I saw something similar in a dedication Pierre Jean Jouve had written on a copy of Kyrie). Of course I pretended not to be surprised, I barely glanced at it. But secretly I practised. And I still write like Frédérique today, and people tell me I have beautiful, interesting handwriting. They don’t know how hard I worked at it.

Like Frédérique, my classmate seemed to have a sense of style and grace that the rest of us lacked. You might have thought he had traveled to Europe, or that his parents allowed him a little wine with dinner. His pen was a high-end metal ball-point instrument that rested in the crook of his right hand. He confidently looped his lowercase o’s and didn’t fret about his ascenders reaching the line overhead. Curves where the rest of us made sharp angles. All rules tossed to the street, yet everything connected in a light line and looking like it belonged.

Elementary school granted opportunities to read the handwriting of your peers—grading each other’s spelling tests, secretly copying homework, exchanging valentines and later, notes. Many of us were clumsy, applying needless pressure with our fingertips, mistaking a bold line for integrity. The boys’ handwriting was jagged, angry, all over the place. The girls, meanwhile, had taken to that cultish bubbly writing that had become a thing—when had it become a thing?—where the o’s and a’s looked like they were about to explode and leave traces of soap on the paper.

I took note of those classmates who developed a consistent hand and looked for those who went rogue—an attempt at an a or a g that resembled the typeset design, the t crossed with a loop continuing from the end of a word, the z that retained its zigzag. I borrowed these affectations for my own penmanship, a way to entertain myself through the banality of composing vocabulary sentences.

*

There is a term used by both educators and forensic analysts, graphic maturity, that refers to the point when our handwriting stops looking childish. The criterion for when that point is reached seems to be subjective. While I wouldn’t have known the concept then, I had a vague notion that my handwriting might show that I had turned a corner.

I have never subscribed to the strained idea that the characteristics of one’s handwriting provides a subtle indicator of one’s personality—small letters mean you’re an introvert, long descenders mean you’re adventurous—but I do think there is something visible that communicates an attitude, a willingness to show through muscular coordination and flair that we know ourselves better than what we are taught.

I remember being excited to learn cursive, which to that point felt like the secret domain of adults, used for the business of writing checks or notes not intended for younger eyes. Cursive felt like a rite of passage, akin to learning how to drive a car or taking up smoking. Our third-grade teacher, Mrs. L, was big on rainbows, and she taught some modified version of the Palmer method using cards that showed the correct pen-strokes in rainbow order.

Devised by A.N. Palmer, the Palmer method was supposedly devised to encourage movements with the arm rather than the fingers. But the alphabet we were taught was designed by a committee of cranks, with needless rococo handles and pen-leaps that broke your rhythm. Ugly and unreadable, its only point seemed to be to gauge how well we could follow directions. I later realized that handwriting is taught with the same understanding as grammar or piano, that you must learn all the rules before you figure out how to break them. It is then that we find grace.

*

In Thomas Mann’s 1954 novella The Confessions of Felix Krull, the title character recalls observing his father’s penmanship:

At the time when I was still digging great pothooks in my slate I already dreamed of guiding a steel pen with my father’s swiftness and skill; and how many scraps of paper I covered later on with efforts to copy his hand from memory, my fingers arranged around the pen in the same delicate fashion as his. His writing was not in fact very hard to imitate, for my poor father wrote a childish hand, like a copybook, quite undeveloped, its only peculiarity being that the letters were very tiny and prolonged immoderately by hairlines in a way I have never seen anywhere else. This mannerism I soon mastered to the life.

A budding conman, Felix’s ultimate interest is in forgery. But there is something authentic to his recognition of his father’s penmanship habits as a mannerism. There is a point, growing up, when we notice our parents’ obscure, household talents, the tricks they pull off with a humble zest that not everyone can manage: whistling in tune, cracking open an egg with one hand, forming a Windsor knot.

For my mother, it was shuffling cards. Staying home to watch me, she played a lot of solitaire, knew variations of solitaire. She could pull off that satisfying double-shuffle where the cards bend into an upward arc only to fall lightly into place on top of one another. All with a cigarette in her mouth, eyes squinting in the smoke.

My mother’s handwriting, familiar from calendar appointments and absent notes to my teachers, was secretarially neat and compact, though being left-handed she held the pen in that torturous hook-around style that lefties use to avoid smearing. My father, having trained as an aeronautical engineer, dispatched with cursive entirely and opted for the utilitarian, blocky all-caps they teach in mechanical drafting. Rarely called upon in any correspondence with his children, it would create a unique impression when used to compose, say, the thank-you note from Santa for the cookies we had left out the night before.

*

For a while, I worked on my handwriting by imitating my classmate’s, until it reached a balance of looking both dashed-off and executed with care. I exerted my independence and tossed those Palmer letters to the curb; I added an extra loop to my lowercase o and made my s look like an actual, sinuous s. I sawed the rococo handles off my Ms and Ns. From then on I can distinctly remember trying on different affectations in my penmanship—the way one might try different accessories or accents, thinking it would make some statement about the kind of person I wanted to be.

Time and a lack of sustained practice have deteriorated those skills. I have lapsed in sending Christmas cards, rarely need to write a check, and there are no teachers to show off for anymore. I compose pretty much everything in Word now, or else my phone’s Notes app, and only keep a notebook at all for those loose thoughts—unread by anyone but me—that I want to get down while the phone is out of reach.

Likewise, they say, handwriting is going the way of the dodo. I don’t think that’s precisely true—it sounds like one of those lazy assumptions about technology, that it exists to flatten, to eliminate anything that brings a tactile, objective permanence. It may be, rather, that the objective has changed. Now we handwrite because we want to, not because we have to.

The sensations that handwriting brings still matter—consider the cult of Blackwing pencils, or the satisfying heft of an upmarket pen with a nib that creates just the right friction on the paper. The most tactile form of writing might be performed by the beachgoer who draws a message in the sand with their finger.

Digital media has merely altered the way we leave our affectations, with emojis—like tattoos, drawn by some other person’s hand—providing the wink and the flair. But I would argue that it’s a way that humans have become more childish. Left to express our agonies in a prefabricated, toothless font, we feel our personalities being held back. In lieu of the flourish with the pen, we turn to artless eggplants and all-caps shouting—a cowardice that forgoes the risk of putting out something with a true, personal insignia, a way of letting history know that the mark left there is ours.

If you’ve never seen My Cousin Vinny, it should top your list of must‑see classic movies. Not only because it features actor Joe Pesci in one of his funniest roles, but because it is a great example of how sometimes it’s hard to look past the way people sound and dress, if black leather jackets and gold chains aren’t your thing.

There is a great scene where Pesci’s “Vinny Gambini,” a streetwise Italian American New York lawyer with no experience, appears before a rural Alabama judge and, impassionedly keeps referring, in his thick New York City accent, to “the yutes” (meaning “youths”).

The judge, of course, can’t understand half of what he says and spends most of the movie offended or aghast at what comes out of Pesci’s mouth. Much of the movie’s success comes from how it comically contrasts his working‑class speech and street sensibilities with the reserved and gentrified towns‑ people in the small‑town South. And for a linguist, it beautifully exemplifies how the impact of what we are trying to say can often get lost because of the way we say it, especially if our accent makes it sound like we don’t “belong.”

And this is not just the stuff of movies. A friend of mine is a very successful doctor and, not surprisingly, extremely articulate and well educated. She has never had any trouble growing a large specialty practice or building a big network of equally impressive friends. But much to her dismay, she has been less lucky in the romance department, often dating similarly career‑oriented men but finding that nothing clicked.

Then she met Tom, an incredibly kind and thoughtful man who works as a manager at a party store. The difficulty is, though, the way Tom sounds (and what he does) makes him stand out in her social circle, which is predominantly made up of upper‑middle‑class professionals. He uses past participles like “had went” instead of “gone” and lots of ‑in’ endings, and leans heavily on contractions like gonna or wanna.

As they got more serious, he became a bit sensitive to feeling like he didn’t fit in with her friends, and that he was just not as comfortable in her world as she was in his. While it may not be as stark as Tom’s experience, we can all relate, whether at work or in a social setting, to feeling judged by the way we talk.

This clash of class culture is neither unique nor unusual in the social world of language. We have always used the way people speak as a gauge to their social standing. In fact, the upper‑crust speech of eighteenth‑century Britain formed the basis of much of what came to be considered proper written and spoken English, valorized in culturally defining dictionaries and writings of the time, such as those by Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift.

In India, the traditional caste system that so sharply delineated class groups, prohibiting any mixing between them, was divided not only by social practices but also by language practices. Caste could be identified by simply hearing the dialect features some‑ one used—for instance, in Bangalore in South India, a Brahmin speaker would say ide for “it is,” while a non‑Brahmin would say ayti.

The existence of such caste dialects is the reason why speaking English has become so popular throughout India. Existing outside the linguistic shadow of caste, English has offered a way to move beyond the limitations imposed by this rigid status system.

Even without such sharp delineations, we still find language a window into the divide between the upper crust and the salt of the earth. In Boston, the highly recognizable Brahmin accent (actually a reference to the dialect of the highest Indian caste) typifies the speech of New England gentry (think Haah‑vahd or the Kennedyesque Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons), while a “wicked” Southie accent marks you a person of the people (think shawty or fawty, which translate, for others, into “shorty” or “forty”).

In London, we just as easily recognize the difference between a Cockney and a queen. After all, a Cockney accent can make three pints enticingly sound like “free” pints, which is surely the mark of a great accent. In other words, egalitarian as we may like to believe ourselves to be, our linguistic practices (and how they’re perceived) still reveal a sharp class divide. Though we might pay homage to increasing equity across groups in society, our employment, social networks, and educational opportunities conspire to stratify us in ways that recognizably rank us by the work we do, the places we live, the styles we emulate, and the language we speak.

The big reveal here is that without this stratification and its resultant linguistic distinctions, our language would look very different today than the English we have come to know and love. Language evolution, it turns out, loves a mouth that isn’t afraid to let it all hang out. And snooty talkers tend to be a bit too linguistically uptight.

In the same way that increasing written standardization since the rise of the printing press has created less variation in how we write things, rising social‑class affiliation seems to make us more guarded and regulatory about how we talk as well. If your bread and butter depends on making sure you sound like you belong at the top of the linguistic food chain, you will be more likely to suppress any tendencies toward change (especially the ones we talked about earlier that naturally arise in language) and be more inclined toward features that ooze social prestige rather than street smarts or camaraderie.

Working‑class or blue‑collar speakers have more mixed pressures to respond to—sometimes a need to shift toward more high falutin’ norms, or in other realms, the desire to use features that more intimately connect them within their social network, which tends to be more tight knit and locally drawn than upper‑class speakers’ social circles. Both of these forces, it turns out, are the secret sauce behind language change, as these tendencies propel speakers toward using features in less socially restrictive and more novel ways.

A striking and consistent finding in much language research is that lower‑status speakers have with great regularity led the linguistic charge in many of the innovations that have become well‑accepted parts of our language.

To take a few examples, consider the dropping of the y sound (known as yod) before oo vowels (and especially after consonants like n or d made with the tip of the tongue), explaining why some speakers in the South or in Britain sound a bit snobbish when they say nyooz for “news,” djew for “dew,” or tyoon for “tune.” This yod‑dropping is something we Americans share with Cockney and other working‑class dialects and, according to language historian Roger Lass, was decried as a corrupt and vulgar development in eighteenth‑century speech.

Now even upper‑class Brits are sometimes caught yod‑less, following in the footsteps of us lowly, crass, and vulgar sorts. In America, we even find a decent number of speakers who have expanded this deletion pattern beyond the places where it most often occurs—for example, the sort (like me) who use coo‑pons instead of cue‑pons. While this pattern might be interpreted as American English clearly going to the dogs, I put to you the important question of whether you have ever found yourself held back in life by the absence of yod?

But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of changes that have come full circle, led by those less bounded by the merely social rules we mistake for linguistic grammar. How about that dropping of r we just discussed? While this might be a mark of the Queen’s English today, it began in the speech of the lower classes, gradually moving up the social hierarchy to become the prestige norm in England in the late nineteenth century.

Though now simply just the way we speak, many of what we consider commonplace speech features like these were at one point associated with vernacularity and bemoaned as evidence of the decay of English. But, as with so many of the changes that have entered our language, they have ended up the linguistic legacies of our economically down‑on‑their‑luck ancestors.

Still, speakers in the lower classes didn’t reshape English alone. To understand fully what drives our verbal habits, we have to sleuth out our most important linguistic partners in crime.

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From Like, Literally, Dude. Used with the permission of the publisher, Viking. Copyright © 2023 by Valerie Fridland.

In a 1973 letter to the editor of The Horn Book Magazine, my mother, Ursula K. Le Guin, took Roald Dahl’s books to task. While acknowledging her own “feelings of unease” about Dahl’s work, she remarked that “…kids are very tough. What they find for themselves they should be able to read for themselves.” I had this in mind as I read about wording changes in new editions of Dahl.

As Ursula’s literary executor, I recently faced a similar decision. My mother, known for her young adult and adult novels, also wrote several children’s books. A multigenerational fan base has kept her Catwings books in print in the US since the 1980s. I was excited to move the books to a new publisher last year.

As we began work on the new editions, I received an unexpected note from the editor: “I’m writing to propose several minor changes to the language… to remove words that now have a different connotation than when the books were originally published.” The words in question were “lame,” “queer,” “dumb,” and “stupid,” a total of seven instances across three books.

Ursula revised herself throughout her career, notably The Left Hand of Darkness, which takes place on a planet where sex and gender are fluid. Years after publication, during a later wave of feminism, she received criticism for the novel’s use of “he” as default personal pronoun. After some defensiveness, Ursula demonstrated, through essays and revisions of the text, how she might have approached things differently.

My job is to bring my mother’s work to new generations of readers, not to revise it. People who adore a book are often eager to transform it, through screen adaptation, fan fiction or critical reinterpretation. Sometimes this works well; often it doesn’t. I tend to start from the position that Ursula’s words are sacred, so my initial reaction to the editor’s request was that of a strict constructivist.

After deep breaths, and with Ursula’s own revisionism in mind, I contacted a disability rights attorney, a youth literature consultant, a racial educator, and some kids. My advisory group leaned toward change but was not in consensus. I genuinely didn’t know what my mother would have decided. But she left me a clue: a note over her desk asking, “Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?”

I like to think that truth and compassion are immutable even as the language we use to express them changes. But cultural constructs of harm are mutable; we frequently revise our definition of what’s harmful to whom, how it is spoken of, and who gets to do the speaking. My mother’s note tipped me toward changing her words. I found substitutes that would retain the original meaning and cadence, and stipulated to the publisher that the new editions would note that the text had been revised.

Criticism of changes to Dahl’s books can just as well be leveled at my own decision. Closest to my anxiety is the reaction of Susanne Nossel, of PEN America, who counsels us to “consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.” Although this haunts me, people who don’t share my sensibilities about artistic freedom seem to prefer to ban or burn books, usually without having read them.

Most of the criticism regarding changes to Dahl’s words is of the “slippery slope” variety, which in itself tends to be reductive. The decision to revise a book need not create a prescription for all books or all writers at all times. It may pay heed to who is being revised, the reasons for the proposed revisions, the extent of change, and especially who is doing the revising—for example, a corporation that controls the rights vs. the author or an heir. These factors all determine when we shift from revision to wholesale rewriting.

Dahl and my mother could not be more different as writers and as humans, but they had in common a profound trust and affection for their child readers. Consistent with that posture, I would say that kids intuit and accept better than adults that language is constantly in flux, as are human sensibilities. Not condescending to young readers also means trusting that they can glean meaning from a textual whole, not just from specific words.

Nachträglichkeit (noun): “Afterwardness”

Every time I return to Berlin—and this is now 17 years’ worth of returning—I also return to speaking German. I’m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It’s good, it’s familiar, it’s awful, it’s tumultuous, it’s suddenly great again. But why?

German is the fourth foreign language I’ve studied, the others being French, Japanese and Spanish in that order. Since childhood I’ve wanted to become fluent in a foreign language—any language—and, before German, had only gotten maddeningly close.

At 30 my husband Seth—then a graduate student in musicology—got a language-learning grant and moved for a summer to Berlin where I visited him. We took a shine to the city, both applied for year-long grants, and got them.

Seth’s grant was plush and included a summer’s worth of intensive language training for both of us. My grant was scrappy and underfunded; you were supposed to show up fluent, ready to talk geopolitics with other journalists. This was back in 2005.

Why did I stick with German so long? Why German? All of my answers feel like alibis, and maybe they are. Childhood ambitions don’t often play out precisely as envisioned; you feel lucky if they can play out at all.

Nachträglichkeit is a deliciously untranslatable German word and a foundational idea in Freudian psychoanalysis. It means that decisions or experiences initially taken lightly can acquire different significance with later events. The meaning “clicks” or activates afterwards. When one visits a concentration camp in Dachau as I did at 16, it hits differently to see the yellow Stars of David preserved there, all emblazoned with the German word for Jew: Jude, my first name. When you marry an American Jew who loves classical music and experimental Neue Musik specifically, the epicenter of which is Berlin: that’s another click.

I was ready to clear a big space inside myself to learn another language well. My ambitions were vaulted only when measured against my previous efforts. That space I cleared grew and grew and grew. German gave me a second world that kept magically expanding even as I explored so much of it. Over time I saw and marveled at its internal logic, the precise top-to-toe unique construction of it. Click, click, click.

Why German? both is and isn’t the right question. It’s true this language’s demands have formed specific grooves in my brain that I’m now fond of. But German is less of an object on its own than a mirror, reflecting light on a less visible but truer object: my relationship as a writer to language. German is the mirror that I managed to polish to an unusually high shine. My imperfect fluency only makes that relationship more visible and conscious.

Fließend (adjective): fluent

How fluent am I really? It’s a mysterious question. The answer isn’t stable or absolute. It depends on a million points of context. It reflects one’s lived experiences inside the language. I suppose I’m fluent in German, and yet I feel provisional saying that.

I usually return to Berlin rusty; because I have a monolingual child in tow, it’s difficult to find flow. Yet my vocabulary has steadily grown—17 years of magpie word collection will do that. Since I first learned German I’ve become a parent, acquiring the superpowers of split attention and automatic speech—both factors that strangely help my German. But the situation leaves me stuck with go-to phrases that bore me to tears; grammatical mistakes so long-codified in memory that I don’t recognize them as such; the conundrum of which language to speak with old friends I only see briefly.

Anger improves my fluency, as does problem-solving, tiredness, and drinks. Distraction helps, as do actual communicative stakes. When my son Lev broke their foot by “speed-walking” over a raised threshold in our apartment, I described the injury to the hospital staff. The word die Schwelle (threshold) bobbed into consciousness suddenly like a cork. Did I actually know this word? Where did I learn it? Meanwhile the nurse just waited, mildly impatient, for me to un-pause my recital.

Speaking German has shown me how my brain is changing over time, too. On a momentary timescale, speaking German reveals my fluctuating sense of attention, how interested I feel in a conversational topic or person. On a timescale measured in years, speaking German reveals how a person changes as they move from adulthood into middle age: how one learns to embrace certain absurdities, tolerate nonsense less, practice greater patience, slow down into the present more.

Schweben (verb): to suspend

I learned this word from a teacher who hailed from Wüpperthal, a town built between two mountain peaks. Citizens traverse the city via Schwebebahn, a suspended tram across the crevasse.

Suspension while speaking a foreign language suggests many things: hanging out in thin air, grasping for a wire, forestalling doubt. Suspension is only terrifying if the forward motion stops and the tram rocks unsteadily side to side, awaiting a new signal. Flow, by contrast, feels unstoppable. It’s self-reinforcing, too: in a state of flow, good German easily becomes great German. You can suddenly say things that were never in reach before. It crests and crests. It’s similar to the flow writers always seek, only spoken flow is improvised and disappears instantly into the air.

My capacity for speaking German is not unlike imagination or good writing: Believe hard enough and the genie reappears. But belief also cannot be faked or summoned. It can falter, prove you wrong.

Die Darstellung (noun): performance

When I speak German I cannot stand the look of expectancy on my interlocutor’s face, the way their facial muscles twitch in sympathy or irritation. Thinking hard in front of someone can feel like the most terrifying circumstance I’d ever willingly enter.

I’m realizing now that composing sentences in front of another person is, for me, the exact-opposite condition of writing. Writing is private and messy while it’s happening, but the final results are not.

Stimmen (verb): to voice, to vote, to chime

German is indeed efficient: A handful of stem verbs can be modified with prefixes to produce shades of meanings. When you first learn these verbs, it’s like meeting Zelig: they seem to pop up everywhere, swapping out monocles, hats and wigs.

Stimmen is a lovely stem verb exemplifying this. Stimmen means to voice but also to sing, to give an opinion, to vote, to tune an instrument. Bestimmen means to determine, to earmark, to elect—fittingly, as the prefix be- often implies an action taken to its conclusion. The prefix ver- introduces a chaos element, an action gone haywire or transformative. Hence verstimmen, which means to sing out of tune or to become disgruntled. Other prefixes cast their own spells over stem verbs: like vor- (suggesting forward or generative motion), er- (darkly combining both chaos with extremity), zu- (suggesting closure or agreement) and many others.

Sometimes the prefixes just change the stem verb’s meaning. Other times prefixes are trennbar, or separable from the verb itself. You pull off a trennbar prefix and stick it to the end of your sentence or clause to complete the thought—assuming you remember, that is. Stimmen has many trennbar shades as well: abstimmen means to reconcile or fine-tune; to say “I reconcile X”, I’d have to say Ich stimme X ab. Without that ab at the end, the sentence feels unfinished and the meaning unclear. Again the prefix logic holds: ab- usually means to cast something off or trim it away.

Thinking about stimmen, a tuning fork of a verb, yields an overtone that grows louder into a question: Why has my relationship with German been so exclusively oral? It’s true all language acquisition starts with speech, and everyday language use prioritizes talking and listening, not reading the newspaper or Goethe. But I had never attempted to read anything substantive in German. Another click.

Seufzen (verb): to sigh 

In early 2021 when the vaccines had been heralded but not yet arrived, when my passport worked but not reliably, I took a Zoom conversational course in new German literature. It was laughing in the dark, cultivating foreign language skills that winter; it was something to do. But the space inside me reserved for German sprang back open, filled and stretched yet again.

From this class I learned all the alternatives to writing “he said” in literary reportage: er erwiderte (he replied), er zustimmte (he agreed), er hinfügte (he added), er seufzte (he sighed). I also started reading German for style, measuring word choices and sentence cadence. The language’s ceiling, its rhetorical possibilities, lifted so high that clouds drifted through. I had not realized how conversation—even quality conversation—constrains what you can experience of a language’s possible effects. New words, new cadences, new formulations: we don’t build or acquire complexities like these in speech.

The next summer we visited Berlin again after a two-year hiatus. There I plowed through four Agatha Christie novels in translation in as many weeks. From those books I learned many felicitous words still in currency (e.g. das Getue, hubbub) but also many that aren’t (die Klapsmühle, funny farm).

Last Thanksgiving I read all of Kafka’s parables. The effort was doubly exhilarating: first, to make sure I understood every word in the finely balanced sentences; second, to marvel at how even perfect grammatical understanding only plumbs the meanings of stories like “Der Geier” (“The Vulture”) and “Das Paradies” (“Paradise”) so far.

German changes the reading game in fundamental ways. Grammar gets foregrounded, providing crucial hints to the lost. In diagramming syntax as a reader, you palpate which words relate to which, re-tracing the author’s own decisions. Sometimes the going was giddily fast, sometimes not. I learned to let it ride, not looking up every word, recognizing the mike-drop words whose meaning I needed to confirm to get the effect. But enforced slowness is inherently vivid. Difficulty always paid off in spades. My space was dark but lit by flashes of irregular lightning.

Fluency in another language, I’m realizing, might be a lot like adulthood: We don’t know what it’ll feel like until we’re well into it. By the time you stop faking parenthood, your kid has almost exited the house. So much speed, and yet also slowness: the years are made up of days, the days of minutes, the paragraphs and sentences of words.