- 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.
