Self-styled language experts — and let’s face it, that includes all of us — have lamented the decline of English for centuries. From shifting pronunciations to newfangled words to evolving grammar, everyone from Jonathan Swift to John McWhorter has a pet peeve or two. What’s yours?Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.* TRANSCRIPT *JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and yeah, Christmas. A Christmas show, a show about Christmas words, but do you really want that? Think about it: “Here's where the word Christmas comes from, and there it went.” “What's the etymology of tinsel?” Do you really? I don't really, but I know that, well, Christmas did happen and podcasters are supposed to do this and so what I will do is: There are these albums, real albums. Well, not exactly real, but this is the era of the LP. And the Firestone Tire Company used to put out these Christmas Carol LPs to make you buy Firestone tires. This was back in the mid 60s, and my parents had some of the Firestone Tire LPs. They had beautiful covers. They look like, you know, classic Rudolph Christmas presents. And for people of a certain age — and I'll admit that I am at that point — the Firestone Christmas albums somehow often come off as what Christmas, as in tacky American Madison Avenue Christmas, is all about, at least sonically. And my favorite cut from the ones of those that I have had forever — this is what I remember my parents playing in the late 60s, early 70s, Charlie Brown Christmas, The Energy Crisis, and Firestone Christmas LPs — was Gordon McRae — yes, Gordon MacRae from the film of Carousel, etc. He's always pulling up his pants to show that he's masculine. Gordon MacRae, who was all over the variety shows back then, he's singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” and he's trying to sound what they would have called in 1965, soulful. This cut is both bad for the reasons you'll completely understand, but also good. It's actually kind of a good arrangement, and Gordon is trying his best and I play this in my home every Christmas season. People who know me are familiar with it. This is Go Tell It with Gordon 1965. Here we go. [“Go Tell It On the Mountain” sung by Gordon MacRae]So a little Christmas, okay. But, you know, I don't feel like doing a Christmas show; I just want to do some stuff. And what I've been thinking about lately, just randomly, is how utterly — talk about random — how utterly random people's linguistic pet peeves always seem, about ten minutes, literally, maybe, you know, five generations after they put them forth. You see it throughout history. And I want to share that with you because you really have to see how brilliant people have these notions about what they just don't like and feel like there's some authority behind it, and I can't pretend that I'm not one of those people sometimes. And yet you read these people later and they sound so — well, you know — and so I just want to give you some examples. We're going to go through some history very quickly. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, a wise person. It's 1712, when he writes a piece called A Proposal for Correcting and Proving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. (I'm not sure what that “ascertaining” means, but you know, the meanings of words change, you know, as Justice Scalia liked to show us.) So A Proposal for Correcting and Proving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, and Swift had a problem with the way people were beginning to speak English, which seems so deliciously, deliciously quaint today. Here's what he said: “What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable” — in other words, drudged, disturbed, rebuked, fledged. He thought they should be drudg-ed, disturb-ed, rebuk-ed and fledg-ed, like we say bless-ed. So: “Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.” That's what he said. So he didn't like that people were leaving out the E sound in the past tense or past participle forms. So not disturbed, but disturb-ed. Not full fledged, but you're supposed to say full fledg-ed. You wonder why you say bless-ed now? It's because that's the way it was pronounced at a certain time. Here is Swift kind of straddling the errors, where you could say disturb-ed or disturbed; he thinks disturbed is slangy. “And a thousand others every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse,” he doesn't like what he's hearing. Can you imagine? Now, of course, very quickly, while he was living, the non-voweled pronunciations were becoming the standard, except in the occasional example of one of the verbs where the old pronunciation stayed when you're being kind of quaint. So: “he was blessed with an ability to do math very quickly.” You don't say “he was bless-ed” with the ability,” but “oh, well I am a bless-ed person, etc.” And you're thinking of [hums Amen chord] (that's supposed to be an Amen chord). OK? But generally it's no longer bless-ed and you certainly don't say rebuk-ed. And this is Jonathan Swift, who I think we can agree was quite the brilliant person. He wasn't an idiot. He was one of the smartest people who ever lived. But he didn't like hearing the past tense forms shortened because that was new to him then. And yes, I know some of you were thinking: that accent that I did badly, that plummy British accent — that didn't exist when he was writing in 1712. That British accent that we think of as so gorgeous, Stewie Griffin wonderful, that only really came in after 1800. Not to mention that Jonathan Swift was originally Irish, but still the way he wrote, it sounds like it was in that accent. That's my favorite example. So he's thinking that we're supposed to say, “Well, I was disturb-ed” and we're thinking, “No, sorry, Jonathan, it changed, and you must accept it.” But that made perfect sense to him at the time. He thought he was speaking from a mountaintop. That was 1712. 1762, Robert Lowth. He's a bishop. He's an intellectual. He's a leader. He's British. He's about to be appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's a very important man. He knows many, many things. He knows his Hebrew. He knows his English because he speaks it and of course, Latin and Greek. And in 1762, he writes what he calls A Short Introduction to English Grammar. This was the first classic grammar of English. There had been some before, but this one really got around and it set what people thought of as the proper English, to an extent, forever. There are things in this that we talk about now that really only started with him. But what's interesting about Robert Lowth and the short introduction to English grammar is that if you actually read it — and you should, because it's short, frankly — you know, this is when people have to write things in blood with a quill, so things don't usually get that long unless somebody really is obsessed with something, like Isaac Newton. And so you can read this in, you know, one third of an afternoon and every now and then you run across something that this person said — and it wasn't really that long ago. We're talking about 250 years ago, that is 10 seconds. I mean, people were already writing about this when it was less than 200 years ago. Here's this person, and he has these notions of how one should express oneself that now sound utterly ridiculous. An example: I spit if I must — never understood why some men feel the need to, you know, kind of go and spit on the ground. I've never felt the need to do that, but apparently — I get the feeling most men in the world need to kind of [makes phlegmy sound] spit. No, you take care of it more gracefully, but let's say that you're going to spit. So how did you do it yesterday? You spat. Now, if you're going to make it into a participle:  I have — and you probably pause a little — but it's spat. “I have spoken.” “I have spat.” No; Lowth thought it was spitten. “I have spitten.” Is that what it is? That's what he thought it was. I don't even need to check it out. There were people saying all sorts of things instead of spitten at the time. But he liked spitten. And so for him, it was, “Well, you know what? I have spitten.” And therefore, I have certain authority or vulgarity or something. This is even better; a chick, that's one hen or rooster or something. Chicken is two chicks. And so one chick, two, three or four chicken. And if that sounds stupid, remember: ox and oxen? So there are many oxen. Here's a chick [makes odd clucking sounds] whatever they do sound-wise. And then if there are two or three of them, then look at them chicken. That's what Robert Lowth thought. And remember, this is not some middle English from 4,000 years ago. This is like ten minutes ago. And he thinks that chicken is the plural of chick. That's not the way it is now. Now it's easy to get from, you know, chick to chicken being one thing. I once had a friend, a very literate friend who had this little problem. Like, I have problems like that. I do not know the difference between bought and brought. I know intellectually, but I cannot do it in fluent speech. I brought myself a Slim Jim at 7-Eleven yesterday. I bought the chair over. Both of those sound great to me. There's some kind of kink. There's some neuron. This person's version of that was that they were always saying that something was an oxen, an oxen instead of an ox. They didn't have that right. Well, same thing with with chicken, but with Robert Lowth, he still had the idea that there's one chick and then five chicken. And that's the way he thought that thing should go. Do we? I doubt it. And now here we are. And so: Christmas show, if we must. Let's do some Steely Dan. A lot of you like that. Let's do some obscure Dan. Let's do early Dan, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” back when they're this sort of post 60s rocky funky group. This is a very warm song. It has that family thing which, TMI, I never really had in the way that I wish, but I recall the approximation of it back in the 70s. And so you've got your family and you know how that goes on this album, which I think about when I talk about albums, an LP. I first had this on LP. I bought it from a Two Guys. That's how far back I go. It's “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again.” I've never known what that meant, either. This is that weird kind of Burrows-esque poetry of theirs, but it's a lovely, warm song. So let's hear about Christmas and family, although they're not talking about Christmas, but it gives me that feeling. [“Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” by Steely Dan]All right, so 1700s. Well, that maybe feels like it's so long ago because you know those are people from the 1700s. Let's get into the 1800s and let's go well into them. There's a person I could stop for around 1825, but let's leave him out. And so let's do 1872. Richard Grant White. You know who that was. You don't need to know anything about that person, but from those three names, you know what Richard Grant White was in 1872, if he was a person with a certain authority. He was a Shakespeare scholar. Big surprise. What else would Richard Grant White be interested in in 1872? And he was a critic. He was a literary critic. I'm not always sure just what that is, but he was a critic, and that meant that he was authoritative and that meant that people listened to him about language. So here is an America in which there's an increasingly influential — in certain cities, and of course, what I mean by that is New York — but in certain cities, there is an increasingly influential bourgeoisie. Think about the — I should say play, but you know who does the play? Think about the movie, “Life With Father.” Think about, you know, William Powell and Irene Dunne, and they're living in a brownstone and it's the late 1800s. People like that were very self-conscious about the way they spoke. And so there were people like Richard Grant White who would tell them, this is very Edith Wharton. And if you actually read Richard Grant White, which you shouldn't, then you find all sorts of things that are delightfully non-sensible. Whereas he thought of himself with his walking stick and his —I'm just guessing that he took laudanum. He thought of himself as quite authoritative. For example, this is just how he felt about the word “standpoint.” I just love this. We use the word standpoint, we think nothing of it. We have problems with things like using “structure” as a verb, etc. But he didn't like standpoint, and you read him on it and it's just like, what the— now I'm not going to say it. Bt at one point, he says: “Granting for a moment that standpoint may be accepted as meaning standing point, and that when we say from our standpoint, we intend to say from the point at which we stand, what we really mean is from our point of view, and we should say so.” Oh, standpoint, which may be accepted as meaning standing point. Well, I don't know if that's what I thought it meant, but that's what he thought it meant. Maybe because it was newer and you're thinking, well, keep going, Richard Grant White, because you like Shakespeare, you must be smart. And so what else? So he goes on further: “stand-point,” — he has little dash between stand and point — “stand-point, whatever the channel of its coming to use” — in other words, he means people who are not classy. So “stand-point,” even if it's being used by people who aren't in like the House of Mirth, “is of the sort to which the vulgar words washtub, shoehorn, brewhouse, cookstove belong. The first four of which are merely slovenly and uncouth abbreviations of washing tub, shoeing horn, brewing house, and cooking stove.” So shoehorn, like if you must use one, is shoeing horn really the proper term? If you've got a washtub, none of us do now, but if we did have it would we feel like we were supposed to call it a washing tub? He thinks that you should call it that because maybe people called it that before. Or maybe he just, because he had three names and was Richard Grant White, thought that that's what it should be. And so you keep reading you — what the hell are you talking about? And so he gets down to cases. This is my favorite Richard Grant White: “Rainbow, bow of rain.” I never thought of it as that, but: “Rainbow, bow of rain. Breadknife, knife for bread. Housetop, top of house.” Now this is a little weird, but this is what he wrote: “Dancing girl, girl for dancing.” Kay. “And standing-point — point for or of standing and so forth — but by no contrivance can we explain stand-point as the point of or to or for stand.” Now to imagine how he talked, we have to do Richard Hayden the character actor, something like [does accent] “Dancing girl, girl for dancing. And standing-point — point for or of standing and so forth — but by no contrivance can we explain stand-point as the point of, or to, or for stand.” No, I don't know what that means. What's wrong with standpoint? And yet, this person was taken very seriously. He was not an idiot. He was just in and amidst his time and didn't like a newish word, just like somebody today saying, “Well, I don't like it when somebody says they're going to structure something because structure is a noun.” Well, OK, good for you. But people keep using it as a verb. Many, many people, and in a hundred years, anybody who sees old internet posts about not liking structure as a verb is going to think “Ooooh how quaint,” except they’re not going to express it that way. And so, more music! It's the Columbus Boy Choir. This is on these Firestone albums. Everybody had it; it’s not just me. In middle-class America, back in the 60s, 70s — I'm not even going to say into the 80s; you have to be a 70s person for this — quote unquote “everybody” had this, and I mean it race-neutrally because, you know, everybody had tires. I knew many Black people who had the Firestone albums, and because the covers were good, you would kind of have them in the living room. So it did shape what you thought of as a Christmas carol. And so you've got an-gels instead of angels. “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” That's always been one of my favorite Christmas carols, and it's partly because of the way they do it [sings in castrato] with the Columbus Boy Choir in this, where these boys very well trained, very musically directed boys, before things have happened to them down below or up there, and they are singing in their little boy sopranos. And it's, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” To me, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” is this — this is actually from early in the Firestone LP I think most people liked the most, which is the ‘65 one. So here is “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” where you actually get what this song means, because it sounds so clear because these boys' voices — just listen. [“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” sung by the Columbus Boys Choir]OK, so the 1800s, well, they didn't have electricity, you know, but what about the 20th century? Let's go in. This is risky here. It's 1946. It's in Columbia where I teach; Jacques Barzun. Jacques Barzun. This is one of my probably top four favorite scholars ever. Talking about critic, he could criticize anything. He knew everything. Historian literature, the book From Dawn to Decadence, where he just writes about basically everything with serene authority. He lived to 100 and either four or six. It might as well have been 138. He knew everything. He walked around on the campus that I walk around on. This man is the s**t. I mean, I am in awe of Jacques. I wish that I had, you know, been at Columbia such that I could have had lunch with him at the faculty club or something. He's amazing. Yet, Jacques Barzun had some feelings about language because anybody does. Anybody did. And there's one piece in the Atlantic where he lays out his views. And you know what? Even him, even him, I mean, this shows that it's not about brilliance. It's not about erudition. It's not about whether you're a good person. It's not about cultural sensitivity. This man knew all things. And yet, when he talks about the words that he likes and doesn't like, all of a sudden he's just one of us. He had a piece in the Atlantic, which I write for now. I didn't think about this. He taught at Columbia, and he wrote a piece in the Atlantic. So like, I'm walking around in his shadow and you read about what he likes and doesn't like. He's so smart about all of it, erudite, he's learned, he knows everything. Here are the words he didn't like. Get ready. Evaluate, absenteeism, finalize, directive, to implement, and he didn't like the word cheeseburger. It's not that he didn't like cheeseburgers, just he thought that was a vulgar term.This is Jacques. This is the person who wrote From Dawn to Decadence. This is the person who wrote 700 other books. And yet the way he felt about language, he was caught up in the same sort of thing that I am where I cannot stand it. It happened even today, where somebody says, “Can I get a coke?” No, you cannot get it. No. “May I have a Coke?” “I'll take a Coke.” Not “can I get it?” It just implies that you already were deserving of it, or it's just a weird use of get? Or frankly, I find it vulgar. I hate to admit it, if I were a Richard Grant White, if I billed myself as John Hamilton McWhorter V, I would say you should not — oh, should do the voice [does the voice] — “You should not say can I get a Slurpee? Can I get a Philadelphia pretzel?” Which is what I actually heard it used for today. “ ‘Can I get’ — it is vulgar.” But no, people say it all the time. It's going to become ever more popular. I have hated “can I get” since I first heard it 25 years ago? I will hate it until I hypothetically — I don't think I'm going to — but hypothetically die. I would never write about it. I would never talk about it on a podcast because I know that it's just me. And we can bring this into our time. 1999, Charles Harrington Elster. Yeah, that's the name. This person is actually alive. And he wrote a book delightful in itself called, “The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Ultimate Opinionated Guide for the Well-Spoken.” All right, you want to be well-spoken? All right, let's try this. I'm trying to be well-spoken. Here's my attempt. I have created a hypothetical little segment based on some words that he pays special attention to. Here it goes: “The alumni decided over a salad with balsamic vinegar that to eliminate medieval studies will be about as worthy of congratulations as a gymnast would be in need of a yarmulke.” That's how I would say it. And there are people who tell me, “Oh, well, you know, you're articulate, etc.” I don't know about that, but I am not told that I am not good with the words. And I would say, “The alumni decided over a salad with balsamic vinegar to eliminate medieval studies would be about as worthy of congratulations as a gymnast would be in need of a yarmulke.” What's wrong with that? Well, apparently, what I should have said was [phonetically] “The alumnee decided over a salad with balsaamic vinegar that to eliminate med-ee-eval studies would be about as worthy of congratchulations — not congratulations — but congratchulations as gymnaast would be in need of a yarrrmulke.” As a gymnaast, this reminds me of Shirley Jones in the movie Oklahoma, saying a month “mudwaasp” instead of a “mud wasp.” But apparently I'm supposed to say a gymnast would be in need of a yarrrmulke, a yarrrmulke. OK, now that's what Charles Harrington Elster, who I don't know, thinks that one should say for reasons that are very charismatic, but I'm sorry, there's a little bit of Richard Grant White about it. So, for example, I'm a highly Jewish-adjacent person, have been my entire life. It started with my Montessori and Quaker schools, where in Philadelphia, at least in the 60s and 70s, there were a lot of Jewish kids at them. And as far as what you put on your head, I've said yarmulke [“yah-makah”] all my life and nobody has ever corrected me. “Yarrrmulke”. No, I learned that's how it was written. But everybody said “yah-makah.” Oh, by the way, what I'm saying in this paragraph is “to eliminate medieval studies would be about as worthy of congratulations as a gymnast would be in need of a yarmulke.” And what I mean is that a gymnast would not need of all things, a yarmulke. But are there Orthodox Jewish gymnasts who keep their kippah on while they're performing? I don't know. But you take my point. Most gymnasts would not say that I have to have a kippah on my head. I actually got to say that sentence once in my life. Orthodox Jewish gymnasts who keep their kippah—? Anyway, Charles Harrington Elster is a very interesting writer, but I'm sorry there's a little bit of Jonathan Swift there. There's a little bit of Jonathan McWhorter, although that's not my name, not liking “can I get.”So yes, the thing about Porsche, the car, he thinks it should be “Porsch.” OK, but why? Because I don't want to call it a “Porsch.” I call it a Porsche. There was somebody in my neighborhood when I was a kid who had a Porsche, and I remember that all the kids, including me, would run after it and say, Oh, cool car, cool car, cool car, I was six. So 1971, I had been calling it a Porsche for 50 years. Here's why I'm wrong. This is Harrington Elster, who's a very good writer: “In my experience, how you pronounce this word/name depends largely on whether you own the automobile in question. Porsche does not appear in any of my references, so I must rely solely on the evidence of my ears, which tells me that those who own a Porsche or wish they did tend to prefer the disyllabic Porsche, while those who don't and could not care less tend to prefer the monosyllabic Porsche. Because the great majority of us don't own or aspire to own a Porsche, I recommend the monosyllabic pronunciation as less ostentatious.” No, no! I want to call it Porsche, partly because that's what it looks like to me on the page, because I have a relatively comfy relationship with the German tongue, I don't know. And so look at your Porsch, and yet I want to call it a Porsche, but I will likely never have one. Partly because I've never liked the way they look. Porsche. Now this business of Porsch is what you call it if you don't have one, and therefore that should be the more widely used pronunciation? I get it, Charles Haddington Elster. I get what you mean, but that's — that’s not legal. That's not absolute. We're going to call that thing what we want to call it because his ideas, as beautifully put as they are, let's face it, they're a little arbitrary. Ah, you linguists are so permissive. You know where I get a lot of it? From Steven Pinker, who I have always learned so much from. I don't want to call him a mentor, but I should. And talk about his book The Language Instinct, which one should, 1994. He wrote about prescriptivism: the idea that we should trim language, that there are ways that we should speak and ways that we shouldn't that have nothing to do with clarity, but just picayune issues of logic, things that people with three names prefer. Pinker is the one who taught me to resist that kind of reasoning. And in The Language Instinct, at one point, he says: “One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.” So here we are back at the Atlantic. Back in the 90s, Mark Halperin wrote in a really neat article in the Atlantic that really got around. He wrote against Pinker's anti-prescriptivism. Halpern wrote, “Cat fancier clearly have no grounds for telling mammalian biologists” — I bet people say mammalian — “cat fanciers clearly have no grounds for telling mammalian biologists how to go about their business. Have the biologists any more grounds for telling the fanciers that this shorthair is too cobby, that Siameses’ points are too dark and the whole show should be canceled anyway?” Good line, Mark Halperin, but you know what? Frankly, if you compare what Pinker said, and Halpern's retort — I went to a cat show once, and I didn't like it. It was in Red Hook, New Jersey, and I could tell the kind of cat I like, like my cats over the years, would never win the show. There were all these little fluffy f*****s. I'm sorry to put it that way, but these fluffy cats that they look like, they know that they would win at a cat show. I like a sleekish, like no-nonsense looking cat, that looks like it could write books and maybe, maybe it even thinks that it does. Not these fluffy little f*****s. And so this issue of the cat show having any kind of authority? Let's say that the person who is the scientist has questionable authority. But no, the cat show analogy doesn't work for me because I don't like what kind of cats win at the cat show, and you can't tell me that I'm wrong, just because I like patting a cat that doesn't make me sneeze because a bunch of fur comes up in my nose. In any case, here's a little more of Gordon MacRae singing “Go Tell it on The Mountain.” We're going to see out this cut because I have listened to it complete for almost 25 years every Christmas. And, you know, my parents played this straight. This was Christmas music. This is, you know, people drinking their high balls in 1965. This was it. I play it in fond irony, but it's tradition. (Notice that I have made this kind of Christmas show without meaning to — as if I planned all this.)But this is how that cut ends:[“Go Tell it on the Mountain” sung by Gordon MacRae][Lexicon Valley theme music]So if you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts at this thing called Booksmart — which is different from Slate — so Banished and Bully Pulpit, or just to subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org, just type it in and you'll get to it. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo. Our theme music was created by Harvest Creative Services and wisely selected this year when we were starting this from, among other choices by my lady love. And notice, I just did kind of a Christmas show, and that's the best that I could do. But I hope you enjoyed what I took you through, which was what I was actually thinking about when it was time to plan this end-of-the-year show. I am, as you know, John McWhorter.   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re making this week’s bonus segment free to all. But there’s more: Until the end of the year, you can get 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today.“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a slog. It's repetitive, replete with archaic imagery and long — and so one can be forgiven for getting a bit sloppy with the lyrics. That's what happened with the phrase “colly birds,” which eventually mutated to “calling birds.” Wait, what's a colly bird? John explains.JOHN McWHORTER: For our bonus segment, I want to share something that I think is just a joy. The Twelve Days of Christmas — you know that Christmas carol that kind of goes on and on? You know, you’re singing it wrong and the kids are singing it right. Think about it: You're standing there and somebody starts singing that song and you've got some eggnog, or hopefully something stronger. And you know that eight-year-old who's standing there next to you, and maybe they've got the lyric pretty much down? But there's something that you always hear them do. I'm almost sure I did this at a certain age. And so it's (singing): “fiiiiive golden rings!” Well, everybody does that. Then you hear the little girl next to you: “four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves,” because they don't know what a “calling bird” would be. 🎶 MUSIC (Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters) 🎶So “four colly birds, three French hens,” right. But you know what? Do you know what a “calling bird” is? And yet, if you were writing the lyric, would you put that? Like, OK, a bird that calls, but who ever says, “Ooohhhh, look, it's a calling bird.” That's not something anybody says. And you know what? “Colly birds” is right! Nobody wrote about calling birds! That's something that people thought it was, because nobody knows what a colly bird is anymore. A colly bird is a bird that's black. It's coal colored, it's coaly. And then the sound changes. And so in earlier British dialects, you talked about, “Oh, that coaly bird,” except you'd say, “Well, it's a colly bird.” And so it's a colly bird!So five golden rings and then four black birds — not that they're calling; if you think about it, when you give people birds, usually they're petrified. They're not calling unless it's a talking parrot, and you just know that this song is not about parrots. So it's not “five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens”; it's colly! From now on, you should listen to that girl next to you — you know, let's call her Delia — and she's going “five golden rings, four colly birds, three French hens” and you say, “Oh no, no, no, Delia, it's calling birds.” No, it isn't.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶You think about yourself. It's colly birds and then the French hens — why are they French? That's another story. Then turtle doves and then a partridge in, apparently, an entire tree. You can see that’s a show in this song itself. But they're colly birds. Isn’t that nice? So there's the bonus segment for this episode.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts— Banished and Bully Pulpit — or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

An alphabet, one of humanity’s greatest innovations, is far from intuitive. Our own English lettering was borrowed from the Romans, of course, but where did they get it from? And where did the concept originate? John has answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

To continue our celebration of the re-release of 10 original Lexicon Valley episodes with Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield, we’re making today’s bonus content free for everyone. Presenting the fan-favorite “Lexiconundrum” — a portmantastic puzzle for the ages. This week, an homage to Bob’s ancestors.* TRANSCRIPT *MATT SCHWARTZ: Hey, Matt Schwartz here, one of the executive producers at Booksmart Studios. This week's bonus Lexicon Valley is a remastered gem straight out of the archives: the short-lived but much-loved Lexiconundrum. I like to think of these not as mere word puzzles, but as a lexical challenge — a test of your linguistic wits. So without further ado, I present to you Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo.BOB GARFIELD: Each week, for our listeners, you are gonna come up with what I call the Lexiconundrum. Tell us what this week's Lexiconundrum is. MIKE VUOLO: This first Lexiconundrum is a kind of homage to you, Bob. Your name, Garfield was not your ancestors' original name. It used to be—GARFIELD: Garfinkle.VUOLO: So your ancestors, presumably upon arriving through Ellis Island, do you think somebody arrived at Ellis Island whose name was, like, Martin Garfield and he was like, “I wanna be called Hymie Garfinkle”?GARFIELD: To Judaicize their names? (Laughs.) Yeah, I don't think you don't see much of that. VUOLO: But maybe one reason that your ancestors settled on Garfield was that it preserved the vowel progression in their last name: A I E. So my challenge to the listeners is to find a name — a name of somebody relatively famous; not your cousin, not your nephew — whose first and last name has the vowels A I E in that order, and no other vowels. And just to make it simple for the purposes of this challenge, we will not consider the letter Y to be a vowel. So for example, Charlie Daniels of the Charlie Daniels Band, Charlie and Daniels both have A I E — and only those vowels — in that order. Daniel Radcliffe, he is the actor who played Harry Potter in the Harry Potter movies.GARFIELD: Well that’s good, Mike. So you've not only given us the puzzle, but also the solution. VUOLO: Well, those are two solutions which are now ineligible. You have to come up with another one. GARFIELD: I’m on it. Well, that wraps up the shakedown cruise of Lexicon Valley. All right, Mikey, later gator.(Music)SCHWARTZ: In the original airing, listeners had about a week to think of their answer and email it in. You have 10 seconds. But you can always hit pause while you think about your answer and tweet it to @LexiconValley. All right, ready for the solution? Here we go. VUOLO: Last week, I revealed that your ancestors’, Bob, changed their name from Garfinkel to Garfield, and noted that both names have the vowels A I and E in that order. And I challenged our listeners to come up with a name of somebody famous whose first and last name has the vowels A I and E in that order, and no other vowels. GARFIELD: And you gave a couple examples, which I had assumed had covered the entire universe of correct answers for this Lexiconundrum.VUOLO: I gave the examples Charlie Daniels, of the Charlie Daniels Band, and Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the movies. And a lot of people submitted entries, many of which had the vowels A I and E in both names, but also other vowels. So they didn't count. The first correct submission was by John Delano with Xavier McDaniel, who is a former basketball player with the SuperSonics. Also a listener named Curtis Earhart was the first to submit Hattie McDaniel. Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an academy award for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. I didn't know this, but apparently half the population of this planet has the name Javier Martinez. So there were a lot of those entries. And, you know, half of those are, like, South American soccer players. A few other noteworthy entries: Clara Loganoff was the only person to submit Reiner Fasbender, the German filmmaker. Frankie Lane was actually the name that I had in mind when I issued the challenge. He's a singer with a bunch of hits in the 1940s and 50s. Stephanie from Alaska guessed that one. But perhaps my favorite submission is Charlie Laine. And I'll quote directly from the email: “Charlie Laine is an American porn actress with 177 credits on IMDB” — 177!* — “including Girls Kissing Girls 8, and curiously,” says the emailer, “Ashlynn Goes to College 3, this time for her PhD, I suppose.”GARFIELD: Yeah, by the way, Ashlynn Goes to College 3? Not half as good as Ashlynn Goes to College 2, which — my view — masterpiece. VUOLO: Really? I'm really looking forward to number four. I think that that's the one where they're gonna introduce 3D. GARFIELD: (Laughs.) Okay. I think, I think this has to stop.—Editor’s note: At the time of this re-airing, Charlie Laine now has 222 credits on IMDB. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

To celebrate the re-release of ten original Lexicon Valley episodes — remastered, ad-free and for paying subscribers only — Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield return as hosts for this special show about the word “happiness.” Please let us know if you’d like more episodes from the archives, or more Mike and Bob, or both! (As seemingly indefatigable as he is, John McWhorter does, in fact, require occasional time off.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

We’re giving John McWhorter a well-deserved day off. But the show must go on, so we’re bringing back a couple of Lexicon Valley legends for a special reunion episode. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

The late philosopher Paul Grice formulated four brief maxims by which conversations are generally governed. Most humans find it relatively easy to observe them. Machines, on the other hand, not as much.Normally, John’s Lexicon Valley bonus segments are behind the subscriber paywall, but we’re making this week’s bonus segment free for everyone. With more content now than ever before, we are deeply grateful for your attention and hope that you’ll become a Booksmart Studios supporter. Happy Thanksgiving week!* TRANSCRIPT *🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶JOHN McWHORTER: So what we learned about today with the irony was, in broader perspective, about maxims. It's the maxims created by the philosopher of language Paul Grice — we linguists call them the Gricean maxims — and what the maxims are about are certain underlying assumptions that we make about conversation, about how we use language. These things are unspoken — nobody would teach them — but they are yet another way that we can see that speaking is not just about describing things and giving orders and asking questions. It's more than that; social interaction is weirder and richer than that.So with irony, what goes on is that you are breaking one of the maxims, and it's called the Maxim of Quality. The Maxim of Quality is an unspoken agreement that we make as people to, when we are communicating, tell the truth. The idea is that the default assumption is that we are calling upon somebody's attention in order to tell them something that is true. If you flout, as we say, the Maxim of Quality, it means that you don't tell the truth. Irony is all about flirting with, flouting, the Maxim of Quality. So “very funny” when it wasn't very funny. You flout the Maxim of Quality in order to communicate something, but the idea is that you broke this maxim. Now there are other maxims. The nice thing is that there aren't like 34. It's one of those things where you would imagine that Grice would have become one of these people to whom he has a hammer, and therefore everything is a nail. No, there aren't that many. There are only four. But another one — and one you end up thinking about after you think about the Maxim of Quality — is the Maxim of Quantity. What's the Maxim of Quantity? That is an underlying agreement that when somebody asks us for information, we tell them enough — not too much, and especially not too little. There's an agreement that we're actually going to give what the person was asking.And so let's say you have two children and somebody asks, “Do you have one child?” You're not supposed to answer “yes,” knowing that you actually have two because of course, it is true in the strict sense that you have one child. If you have two, you have two “one childs.” Yes. But if somebody says, “Do you have a child?” and you have two, you don’t just say “yes”; you say “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have two children.” That is, if you were going to fulfill the Maxim of Quantity. This reminds me of an anecdote somebody told me about being very far away and they were in a restaurant, and it had been a long day, and they asked, “Well,” [to] the waiter, “you have Kingfisher beer?” and the waiter says, “No, sir, we don't have Kingfisher beer.” So then he asked, “Well, do you have Sierra Nevada?” “No, sir. We don't have Sierra Nevada beer.” “Do you have an Amstel light?” “Sir, I'm sorry. We don't have Amstel Light.” “Wait a minute. Do you sell beer at all?” “No, sir. We don't sell beer.”That's not the way it's supposed to go. If somebody says, “Do you have Kingfisher beer,” you don't say, “No, we don't sell Kingfisher” knowing that you don't sell any beer at all. That's underselling it. You are flouting the Maxim of Quantity. It's not quite the thing that one does. And you know, there are two more of these maxims, and they're all about what it really is to talk. And this is the sort of thing that makes artificial intelligence hard, because how does the machine know that if it's asked, “Do you have one child?” — when its truth condition is that it has two children — that the answer is not “Yes, I have one child.” A machine is relatively easy to teach to answer a basic question, but how do you make the machine understand context? That is one of the massive challenges. And for reasons like this, actually, as the maxims go, quantity is the hardest one. There's an interesting study that was done recently by Mako Okanda, Kosuke Asada, Yusuke Moriguchi and Shoji Itakura — I am not going to pretend that those four names were not lots of fun for Anglophone me to say — but they did a study where they show that in terms of these maxims, quantity comes in the latest. Some forms of flouting quantity and understanding that that's what happened and that that's how language goes, people don't get until they are about six. This was done with Japanese kids. And so not until about six are you fully getting that.And if you think about it, that's about right. It's around six when your kids are understanding language completely in that contextual sense, where, within reason, you can use irony, etc. That is certainly the case with my two children. But that means that language is partly about maxims. We are in a Maxim House. Maxwell House Coffee! Remember the old commercials?Commercial Announcer: Mmm, smell good ground coffee!Where they used to somehow get across that Maxwell House is better than other coffee because it's good to the last drop? What did that mean? You know, what are the coffees where: Well, these are some of the last drops and it's not very good ‘cuz these are the last drops, and for whatever reason that would be — backwash or something like that — how is that different with Maxwell House? And of course, Maxwell House is not what most of us would consider good coffee. But here, just to close it out, this is an early 50s TV commercial. And it's about how Maxwell House is good to the last *whoop!* drop. That's the way they used to do it on the radio.Commercial Announcer: Pour a cup of this good smelling coffee. It will taste as good as it smells because it's good ground Maxwell House. Maxwell House Coffee is good to the last drop. Enjoy the rich, fresh taste of Maxwell House Coffee: The ground coffee that tastes as good as it smells every time. Maxwell House.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶This bonus segment has been about maxim house, but it got me thinking about coffee, although I, of course, drink better coffee than Maxwell House.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts, Banished and Bully Pulpit, or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Language is tricky. It doesn’t do what you think it should. It’s as messy as almost anything that’s created by natural selection. And that’s what makes it so fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Scrabble and other similar games have been the subject of an ongoing lexicographic debate in recent years, with some arguing that ethnic slurs have no place in the official dictionary or on the board. Many tournament players, however, decry the banning of words — the game, they say, is merely descriptivist. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Dividing up nouns as “masculine” and “feminine” — like, for example, in Spanish — has not been a part of English for many centuries. And yet our language remains peppered throughout with gender, often overtly in terms like Mrs. and Mr., which evolved from “mistress” and “master.” Sometimes, however, it’s more subtle. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com