John McWhorter’s profession may not put him on the fastest name-recognition track, but his pluck in taking on hip-hop made him an iconic target this summer among his peers and would-be (or wannabe) hip-hop politicos when he challenged this musical sacred cow. The publication of All About The Beat found some "haters" and yielded him an unusual moniker, “the most unpopular black man in America,” at a time when Barack Obama could become the most popular black man in America!
John McWhorter granted BlogTalkRadio an interesting interview about All About The Beat, and he has kindly consented to a written interview with BlogCritics about his latest book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
What do you think of the word “wordsmith?”
It makes me think about the word scarecrow. It should really be crowscare: just like wordsmith is about “smithing” words (as in blacksmith), scarecrow should refer to crowing scares. The order is wrong. Yet nobody calls it a “mistake”...
Anthropologists talk about how “plastic” a language is, we might call that user-friendly. How would you rate the English language, internally, for its plasticity?
I think people consider English special in having a large and mixed vocabulary. However, no one has ever really checked as to whether English is more expressive on some level than Russian or Arabic or the like. Nor can I imagine a French speaker nodding and saying “Oh, yes, English is a richer language than ours.”
Then how would English compare in terms of plasticity to other languages you have studied?
From what I know, the only major difference I see is that a language with a long, written history amasses a massive rootstock because it’s less likely that a word will go obsolete. Languages that are not written (i.e., the vast majority of the world’s 6000) don’t have vocabularies as large because there are no dictionaries to keep alive words that most speakers don’t actually know, like expatiate or ruth or condign. So is English a richer language in terms of vocabulary than an unwritten rainforest tongue? An argument can be made there. But is English more “plastic” than German? I’m not sure what that means.
What about the Latinate component of English? It is used for nearly all the medical, biological, and technical terms in English. How would you rank its importance next to the other bastardized parts of English?
The Latinate component of our language sometimes adds nuance: to "assist" sounds formal compared to the less fussy "aid" and the kitchen-sink "help." It also provides names for concepts and objects of an “encyclopedic” nature that most people are not aware of, such as particular terminology for internal anatomical parts. But then, the Scandinavian component is important too – it’s where we get the words THEY, THEM and THEIR from, for example. Even the –s of the third person singular is due to Scandis.
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