- Hi, I'm Eric Singer.
I'm a dialect coach.
Have you ever noticed that people tend to have some really
strong feelings around language use around the words
we use and even the way we say them?
Today, I want to talk about some of the most common language
peeves, where they come from,
and maybe even debunk a few of the most persistent myths.
[happy orchestral music]
[keyboard clacking]
Search the internet for language or grammar pet peeves,
and you're bound to find people venting,
about other people using expressions like,
for all intensive purposes or a new leash on life.
These are called eggcorns.
[happy orchestral music]
No, no, no, not acorns, eggcorns.
The original expressions of course are for all intents
and purposes and a new lease on life.
But you can kind of see where those misheard ones come from.
They sort of make sense, and they certainly
sound like the originals.
I'm gonna bring in my colleague, fellow dialect coach,
Eliza Simpson, to help me here.
Hi Eliza!
- Hi.
- Here are some other examples you may have heard,
or maybe you use them yourself.
It's a doggy dog world.
- Dog eat dog world.
- You need to nip that in the butt.
- Nip that in the bud.
- He's a social leopard.
- He's a social leper.
- Curl up in the feeble position.
- Fetal position.
- Do you have any favorites?
- Curve your hunger.
- Right, that's to curb your hunger.
- Cold slaw.
- Otherwise known as cole slaw.
- Card shark.
- Which is a card sharp, originally.
There's a great "Rick and Morty" clip with an eggcorn
in it, let's have a look.
- Really makes you think, huh, Morty?
We should never take things for granite.
- What?
- I'm just saying, life's short.
We shouldn't take things for granite.
- Are you saying granite?
- Well, yeah.
- What I love about this clip
is that I think it demonstrates
the kind of really strong feelings about language
that we're talking about.
- It's granted with the D, take things for granted.
Did you actually think it was, [laughs] Jesus Christ, Rick.
- Even super educated, super genius, Rick.
- Oh, you like that, huh?
I bet that really blows your mind.
- I mean, yeah, it's kind of great.
- He's misheard to take something for granted
as to take it for granite, all his life.
So I love eggcorns.
I think they're really fun and creative.
They're also an example of the way
that language changes over time.
Eggcorns are a kind of transitional stage.
There are lots of words and expressions in the language,
completely official, correct words and expressions
that began as the same kind of creative mishearings
as these eggcorns.
These are called folk etymologies.
A folk etymology is basically an eggcorn
that has crossed over the line from being wrong
or incorrect or misheard to being in fact, the only right,
correct accepted version of a word or a phrase.
A burger actually comes from Hamburg,
the city of Hamburg with the -er at the end,
meaning someone who comes from there,
but it gets reanalyzed as ham plus burger.
So we can take that part out and go, oh, it's a burger.
Shamefaced was originally shamefast with fast
meaning to be frozen or stuck in place.
So to be stuck in place by shame, shamefast,
but that's kind of archaic.
And so shamefaced seems like it makes more sense,
but that's not correct.
The word female is not etymologically related to the word
male at all.
It comes from old French, femelle,
and when it came into English, it was like, oh,
that's like male, so it became female.
Cockroach comes from Spanish cucaracha and has nothing
to do with cock or roach, both existing English words
at the time that it was brought into the language
and woodchucks have absolutely nothing
to do with either wood or chucking it.
The name comes from an Algonquin language in Narragansett.
It's ockqutchaun, which sounded like woodchuck.
So by all means, enjoy the eggcorns that you find
in the wild and maybe don't use them in formal writing,
but let's have a little perspective here.
Today's creative mishearing is in fact
tomorrow's unquestioned, correct usage.
Next, I wanna talk about vocal fry and uptalk.
You might associate vocal fry with speakers
like Kim Kardashian.
- And I realized it was just the lighting.
- Or Lena Dunham.
- My team's just been amazing and I've gotta
give all my love to my team.
- So what is vocal fry?
Your vocal folds, which are right here vibrate
very, very rapidly when you're producing normal voice,
what we call modal voice.
[smoothly ahhing] [gentle orchestral music]
That's probably about 180, 200 times per second.
It's so fast you can't even hear the individual pulses,
but if I slow that way, way, way, way down
by using a little bit less air,
maybe I'm putting a little extra tension in here.
You can start to hear the individual pulses
of my vocal folds coming together.
[creaky ahhing]
So you can try this at home.
Let's all start on modal voice going ahh,
and then lower your pitch down until your voice
starts to creak.
It may help if you start to sort of run out
of air a little bit.
[smoothly ahhing]
[creaky ahhing]
Now I'm Elmer Fudd.
So what is uptalk or upspeak?
It's going up at the end of the sentence,
going up with your pitch using a rising tone.
Hi, my name is Eric.
Linguists call this high rising terminal,
terminal at the end of a sentence.
So these two vocal behaviors,
fry and uptalk come in for a lot of criticism.
So what do people complain about?
Well, they complain that fry and uptalk
both can make you sound less intelligent,
less sure of yourself, less trustworthy,
less competent, less educated, even less attractive.
Vocal fry is sometimes claimed
to damage your voice, in fact.
One thing it's hard not to notice is that most of the time
when people are complaining about vocal fry and uptalk,
they're complaining about women's voices
and especially young women.
And it's not just women who do this.
Let's try our own experiment, shall we?
Let's take one sentence.
The first sentence from the Gettysburg address.
I'm gonna do it with some creak in my voice.
Four score and seven years ago,
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Eliza, would you do the same?
- Four score and seven years ago,
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- So what did you think?
Do you have different associations when you hear
it from a male voice, four score and seven years ago,
than when you hear it from a female voice?
- Four score and seven years ago.
- So creaky voice actually has a linguistic function
in some languages.
In Danish for example, the word, hun,
without any creak in your voice, means she,
but the word hund means dog.
So you have to actually put that creak in and you can change
the meaning of a word.
In Burmese, kha means shake and kha means attend on.
You have to add creaky voice and it means
something totally different.
Otherwise the syllable is exactly the same.
The Mexican language Jalapa Mazetec
actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice,
creaky voice, and breathy voice.
So we can take the same syllable, ja,
which with that tone means tree.
But if I do it with breathy voice, ja, it means he carries.
And if I do it with creaky voice, ja,
it means he wears.
Same syllable.
So if creak is a linguistic feature of some languages,
you're doing it all day long,
it can't be damaging for your voice.
I think we can put that one to bed.
[happy orchestral music]
Next up, grammar rules.
Eliza, sometimes people literally light their hair on fire
when other people mix up your and you're,
or use apostrophes for plurals.
- Or those signs in the grocery store
that say 10 items or less.
- Right, because we're supposed to use the word
fewer for that, right?
- Where did that come from?
- The idea that we should say 10 items or fewer instead?
Well, let's talk about that, but I can't help but notice
that you just ended a sentence with a preposition.
- Where did that come from?
- Yup.
- You got a problem with that?
- Can we table that for now?
- Did you just use the noun, table, as a verb?
- Yes, I did.
Let's start there, 'cause that's actually something
that really bugs people.
The verbing of nouns.
Shakespeare wrote, "But now to task the tasker"
and in another play "dost dialogue with thy shadow?"
Turning both task and dialogue into verbs.
It's been happening for hundreds of years.
Here are some examples of some really common verbs
that began life as nouns.
Divorce, model, male, host, diagnose,
salt, pepper, highlight, mastermind.
It turns out a lot of these grammar rules
that you learned in elementary school,
were just made up in the 17th or 18th century.
So ending sentences with prepositions.
The first person apparently to have a problem
with this was John Dryden in 1672,
who criticized Ben Johnson, a playwright colleague
of Shakespeare's for saying,
"The preposition in the end of the sentence,
a common fault with him."
That rule against splitting infinitives,
to boldly go, has a really similar backstory.
It shows up really in 1864 in a book,
"A Plea for the Queen's English" by Henry Alford.
So these prescriptions are both based in Latin grammar.
In Latin, an infinitive is one word.
You literally can't split it.
You can't put something between it the way you can
between to go, to boldly go, in English
and you can't put a preposition at the end of the sentence.
In English, you can, of course.
Latin was sort of held up by a very educated people
in the 17th and 18th centuries as the perfect language.
Grammatically, it's really a very, very different language
with different bones, different structure, different rules.
So to say English should be more like Latin
is really pretty ridiculous.
Less versus fewer.
It was a guy named Robert Baker in 1770.
And he was really just even expressing a preference
for the way he thought they should be used
or the way he liked to use them.
But that then got latched onto and hardened
into a prescription and beaten into us
by our third grade teachers.
It's kind of a weird thing.
It doesn't change the way most people speak,
most of the time.
So most people don't walk around saying,
from where did you come and with whom did you go?
And what did you step?
We just don't do that.
But nevertheless, we still have this idea
that somehow it's incorrect.
It's not.
[happy orchestral music] Okay, next up, word usage.
Almost everybody has pet peeves about words they feel
should absolutely not be used in certain ways.
Literally, anybody?
Literally of course, means exactly, precisely,
just like that.
As I said, right?
In a literal manner, I am literally talking to you
right now, I am literally sitting on a chair.
It has another meaning.
And that meaning is not the opposite of literally,
it's not figuratively, as people sometimes say.
It's used as an intensifier.
I'm literally dying right now.
But this is the thing about words.
They acquire new meanings all the time.
Meanings can drift, but meanings can also be added to.
It's part of the process of language change.
Here are some other examples.
Disinterested traditionally it doesn't mean uninterested,
it means dispassionate, uninvested not having a stake
in the outcome.
It is often now used as a synonym
for uninterested, actively not interested in something.
So it's acquired that meaning as well.
Ironic.
This is a big can of worms.
So irony is when something happens that is unexpected,
that is the opposite of what you expect.
An example might be rain on your wedding day.
If you got married in a desert specifically
to avoid having it rain on your wedding day,
that would unambiguously be ironic.
Verbal irony is just when you say the opposite,
so the literal opposite of what you actually mean.
Now, people sometimes use the word ironic
to describe situations that are maybe just unfortunate
or coincidental.
A free ride when you've already paid
or even the good advice that you just didn't take.
So I actually sympathize with the desire
to complain about at least some of these usages.
Sometimes there's a shade of nuance or meaning that feels
important and useful,
and like it's being watered down or like it's being lost.
The thing is, this is just something that happens.
And it is also part of the inexorable process
of language change.
The word nice, it originally meant silly or foolish.
The word silly did almost exactly the opposite.
It originally meant something like blessed or worthy,
before it came to mean what it does today.
So you just can't stand against the tide.
It's gonna change no matter what.
Here's something that might help though.
English is really flexible.
Language is really flexible and words can have more
than one meaning.
We go on like that just fine.
We even have a bunch of words that can mean
their own opposite.
Take a word like sanction.
Sanction can mean to approve of or to forbid and condemn.
Consult can mean to either seek advice or to give advice.
To dust can mean either to sprinkle with a fine powder
or to remove it from something.
So I think we're gonna be okay with literally.
You can use it to mean exactly what you want to use
it to mean and be understood,
and other people can use it in a very different sense
and also be understood.
That can all coexist together.
[happy orchestral music] [keyboard clacking]
The central fact of language is that it changes
and is changing all the time.
Some of the richness of English in particular,
comes from some of these borrowings and mistakes
and transformations and permutations,
and you're allowed to have your own personal opinions
and preferences.
We all do, but it's important to have a little humility
and some perspective,
and to realize that the forms and meanings of words
are ultimately determined by the speakers of a language,
not by any centralized authorities,
and that you simply can't freeze it in place.
And nor should we want to.
The diversity of expression of forms of meanings
is one of the richest and most fascinating
things about language.
It's something to be celebrated and to be enjoyed.