Ann Hanley nearly choked on her cornflakes – all due to my wayward “who” in August. Shocked, she had to email, “Whatever has happened to whom? Recently you wrote: ‘The man himself, who I met last week …’ The use of who instead of the objective case whom is rampant in contemporary literature and speech. What’s to be done?”
Before I could answer, another reader in Geoff Lyons swooped to bewail a lazy adverb: “You’ve used the American ‘meantime’ without the customary ‘in the’ preceding it. Please, I’d appreciate if champions of language like you didn’t encourage it. So why, David?”
David Astle: I’m not wriggling from my duties as a columnist, but rather suggesting words wriggle by nature.Credit:Jo Gay
Why? Who? Where do I start? Perhaps with John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University. Yes – he is American, but the argument he makes in Words on the Move (Picador, 2016) echoes the descriptivist view across the English-speaking world.
Descriptivist studies how language is used by its speakers and writers, versus the stricter prescriptivism, which logs how language ought be used. You may suspect the two are enemies, but one informs the other, and most linguists hobnob in both camps.
McWhorter’s book is a descriptivist field guide, declaring, “One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it’s actually something that’s becoming. People tell you a word is a thing, when it’s actually something going on.”
Imagine a cloudscape, where airstreams reshape vapours, seeing smaller clouds combine, or a larger cloud fray. That’s English in essence, or any language. Poetic, dynamic, but compare that flux to the earnest notion of words belonging in a periodic table of immutable elements, where the existing order is the only order.
In truth, English is a lava lamp. Words drift, catch new light. I’m not wriggling from my duties as a columnist, but rather suggesting words wriggle by nature. How else did gamble emerge from gambler, donate from donation? Each backformation dates back 170 years, when English was just as antsy as it is now, yet “we find it easy to suppose that this kind of change was tolerable in the past but somehow less appropriate in the present”.
Over time, we see a shift towards the individual, from Iliad to Holden Caulfield, from what words mean to how they reflect what we feel. Assessing the relics in more detail, we meet a word like leek, stemming from the German root of lik, or body. Marry that with slow, say, and you have slow-leek, evolving into slow-like, paving the way for slowly. Just as did – the past tense of do – is the vestigial suffix seen in loved (or love-did) and evolved. That’s how language works. It breathes. Grows. Each generation is a child bearing its own rich pedigree, yet refuses to dress like Nan or Pop.
Clarity will always count, of course. Speakers and writers will always strive to connect. Just don’t expect them to resort to what worked best a century ago, or imagine for a moment this column exemplifies your highest ideals of usage. Every week I riff, drumming into service what language does the job best.
Meantime, what of whom? To be fair to my critics, both of whom were simpatico in their laments, I know their anguish in spirit, as words matter deeply to me, too. Just not those particular words. Empty jargon on the other hand, or the passive voice that shrugs responsibility: watch out! I’ll hunt you down. Otherwise, I get 600 words each week to informally engage, amuse and inspire – split infinitives be damned.
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