Why English Won’t – and Can’t – Sit Still (Like, Literally)
'Words on the Move' by John McWhorter is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which language changes over time. From slang to grammar, McWhorter shows how our usage reflects culture and history.
Sometimes it feels like every second person wants to be an artist these days. That’s partly because it’s one of the few jobs which really encourages emotional self-expression.
But art wasn’t always like that. In fact, emotions only took center stage fairly recently.
Medieval artists, like thirteenth-century Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone, weren’t all that interested in how individuals felt. What occupied them were the great questions of human life. Above all, that meant religion.
Things started changing around the time Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in 1505. The work is famous for its subject’s coy smile. The individual is front and center, making the painting pretty atypical, and for that reason, it’s often regarded as marking a new, more individualistic era in the arts.
After that, there was no going back. From the Renaissance to Tolstoy’s intimate 1877 work Anna Karenina, individuals and their feelings have had pride of place in our art.
While individuality and expressing emotions are relatively recent phenomena in art, they’ve been central to the way we speak for centuries.
Take the word “well.” Speakers of Old English were using it in the early medieval period, though they spelled it “wel.” So what does it mean?
Think of the sentence “Well, horses run fast.” Imagine trying to explain to a toddler what the word “well” is doing here. Pretty tricky, right? That’s because, unlike “horse,” it’s hard to pin it down to a single meaning.
It only really makes sense in the context of a previous remark or question, like “Why don’t horses get eaten by wolves?”
What it suggests is an attitude. By using “well,” the speaker is being gracious about another person’s ignorance of a given subject. That means this short four-letter word does a lot of heavy emotional lifting. It lets us correct someone without offending him.
That makes it a unique expression of the way our feelings and emotions are embedded in the language we use!
In the following blinks, we’ll delve a little deeper into the subjective world of feeling in language.
Words on the Move (2016) is a whistle-stop tour through the history of the English language, from its Anglo-Saxon roots to global lingua franca. Packed with illuminating insights into the evolution of words and meaning, John McWhorter’s entertaining look at language dispels plenty of myths along the way. He argues that emoticons and the new use of “like” aren’t a threat to our language, but quite the opposite – they’re the latest chapters in a story of endless evolution.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
