In the fourth episode of High Noon, Inez Stepman talks with Professor John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and host of a podcast on his subject of expertise called Lexicon Valley. He is also a co-host of the popular Glenn Show, along with Glenn Loury on Bloggingheads TV, as well as an important and valued commentator on matters of race and identity.
Stepman and McWhorter discuss the subjects of two different books he has out right now. The first, on the history of English profanities, is Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Then, Now and Forever. The second, The Elect, lays out how the ideology surrounding race and identity has moved from mere political commitment to unquestionable religion, and how damaging that is to our ability to think, respect one other, and have adult conversations.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. Inviting interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we discuss controversial subjects with interesting people. I’m your host, Inez Stepman, and I’m excited to introduce this week’s guest, Professor John McWhorter. John really needs no introduction, but I’ll go through the formalities anyway. He’s a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and hosts a podcast on his subject of expertise called Lexicon Valley. He’s also a co-host of the Glenn Show along with the great Glenn Loury on Bloggingheads TV. I absolutely loved having John on High Noon.
We talked about developments in the language that we all use, his original specialty, as well as the issues surrounding race that he has been commenting on in the more political sphere. I think one major thing I took away from this conversation on High Noon was how tempting it can be to think of yourself as a victim to really understand how dangerous it is for the society, as well as for the individual to be indulging yourself in that particular way. It’s a real temptation, I think, to stay childish to magnify that self-pitying instinct that we all have that is not unique, obviously, to any kind of background or ethnic or racial identity.
John and I talked a lot about how culture has created incentives for people of all races to really mire themselves in that emotional immaturity and to overdevelop the “traumas” that if we’re lucky, as most of us in America are, we all have to endure just a few times in our lives. Why so many people today seem to prefer being condescended to rather than just endure the normal unpleasantries that life has in store for virtually everyone. John McWhorter has two books in different formats out right now. The first on the history of English profanities, Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever was just released in early may and is available now in bookstores everywhere.
I read Nine Nasty Words to prepare for this conversation and it was such a nice intellectual break from politics. I really highly recommend it. Usually, when I need a check out from politics or from the political battles of our age I zone out with a TV show or something that is, let’s just say not of the highest intellectual caliber. By the way I asked John about what his favorite TV shows are in this episode as well. But this book is the holiest of grills. A book that turns on your brain, makes you think, but is also incredibly funny and engaging and allows you to banish both our national troubles and your own while you explore John’s wittily rendered world of profanity and what our swear words can tell us about the world that we live in.
John has a second book out as well. The Elect, on the subject of race and the development of what he thinks has jumped ship from political ideology to religion. That book has been published in chapters available to subscribers to his Substack and will be available soon in, I believe, in a more traditional format. Is that right, John?
John McWhorter:
I’m not allowed to say, but yes, I can’t give details.
Inez Stepman:
Well, welcome. It’s an honor to have you here on High Noon. I’d like to start out by tying your two books together. I know you’ve tried to do this in various formats and there’s no perfect nexus between them, but I was wondering if this idea of The Elect, and I know you don’t even like the word woke, but this ideology as a religion, it somehow came to you through your work with language, through your work with profanity. Seeing as we have moved from essentially the category of profanities being related to blasphemy, to now, the blasphemy in our society has to do with identity or slurs about identity. Is that maybe where, or at least part of how you came up with that idea?
John McWhorter:
That is a very interesting way of parsing it, but the truth is I’m not that organic and the two books are really very separate. Nine Nasty Words is primarily just a jolly ramble through various bad words and what their histories are and what their histories are with me, et cetera. Of course, one of the chapters is on the N word and how sacred it has become. That wasn’t what I was thinking about when I wrote the book though. It wasn’t really the most important thing. I would have written that chapter even if I weren’t black because I just basically feel that slurs have become a kind of profanity.
So, we think of them in that way. What happened later with the book that’s being serialized at Substack, and that will exist in relatively short order as a book, although I can’t talk about it at this point because Nine Nasty Words is supposed to be what’s in publicity. But that book just came because last summer it started to absolutely infuriate me the way various people were being defenestrated for no good reason based on other sacred concepts. So, the N word does happen to be one of them.
So, I guess if we’re going to do a movie about my life or something like that, they might knit these things together and have it be that I was thinking mostly about the N word in two different ways, but really, I’m two people. There’s the jolly linguist and then there’s the cranky race commentator. The two books come from the two different means.
Inez Stepman:
Well, I guess the other parallel I would see between the two different use would be that so much of what you call the elect’s power comes from words, right?
John McWhorter:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Comes from the fear of being either a racist or white supremacist, or at least called one, especially online, especially on Twitter, where everybody can see it. There’s also though the corresponding worry. Of course, we do want these words to have some power. We don’t want people to be blasé about being called a racist or a white supremacist. How do we strike a balance around the power of those two words or related words, where they retain enough social opprobrium, where you don’t have people out and proud to be racist or to say racist things?
But not so much power that they really seem to have silenced by a lot of polls up to 65% of well-meaning Americans when they discuss politics or anything of cultural import.
John McWhorter:
Yeah. It’s like in an old cartoon where two characters are running and they run outside of the frame and you can see the edge of the film. We actually reached to the point that you’re talking about, of a civic agreement about racism terms. It was about 20 years ago. I miss, say, the year 2000, maybe the 1990s in general, where it was well-established that being a racist was a bad thing. That leveling words like the N word was a very bad thing, but you could use the N word in reference with taste without being kicked out of your job.
There was a sacralization that had not happened yet to the extent that it has now. So, yeah, we want there to be agreements that there are certain ways of using language that will not be allowed. The problem is when it gets to the point that you’re being accused of committing the sin without having done it. When you’re being accused of being a racist when you haven’t done anything that a normal society would consider racist. Or, when you’re accused of leveling of slur when what you were doing was referring to it often in criticism of it.
Nevertheless, everybody pretends that that’s the same thing as calling somebody the word. That’s an excess that we have slipped into today, I think.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. In your role as a linguist, you’ve stuck to describing, describing language, you’ve always maintained a certain non-judgmentalism, perhaps, about the direction of where words have gone. What you just described with the N word, it is in some sense an organic, or at least until very recently an organic transformation. A collective alchemic process, or I don’t know the word. That’s never a phrase you want to say in front of a linguist, but I can’t find the right words to describe it. But basically that being overly fussy or standing against the tide of where language is changing is a hopeless enterprise.
But I’m thinking now more about how language has been used in our politics of late and how, for example, the word equity has been artificially inserted on purpose, I think, to confuse people where they used to use the word equality. Of course, those two have very different meanings, or the way that names for identities continue what’s appropriate to call like [BIPAC 00:08:27]. I don’t even know how to pronounce that-
John McWhorter:
I think that’s the word.
Inez Stepman:
… because I’m not in academia, but the evolution of those terms seems not so much organic or collective in that normal process, but a very conscious top down academic exercise that is then enforced with social opprobrium, or enforced with that fear of being called a racist or called something else that you don’t want to be called in front of a lot of people.
John McWhorter:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
How does that organic versus inorganic change of language seem to you as a linguist?
John McWhorter:
Well, I think you’re touching on a lot of things and one of them is that I don’t know that these terms such as systemic racism, equity, et cetera, that have very particular meanings that have to be very carefully learned. I don’t know if the people using those words are on purpose leveling them upon us in order to make life hard. I think that subgroups of people have a way of developing jargons that end up being very transparent to them. Usually, we don’t really have to pay attention. Literature professors have words that they use that we never use in those ways, and well, let them have it.
But in this case we’re talking about something that began as a theory of the law among a small community of people who were legal scholars. Rather suddenly it’s being applied to all of society, such that we have these words that we never knew were used in this particular way. Of course, the people can be scolds in trying to get us to understand the difference between equality and equity. But I think what they’re upset about is that they wished that all of the world viewed how the world was supposed to go the way they do.
I think it’s just a matter of language than about their idea that battling power differentials has to be at the center of all intellectual, moral and artistic endeavor. BIPAC is something that responds to the fact that identity is crucial to this whole school of thought. The idea is that if you are not roughly a white man, then you’re in really serious trouble and the essence of your existence is oppression. So, the idea is to reconceive what I think normal senses of one’s humanity and one’s individuality are in favor of this idea of Mitt Romney is on top and everybody else is on the bottom.
That means more words. It means that you have to fashion different labels and BIPAC very nicely gets across the idea that if you’re not Mitt Romney, you are a single something else. So, there needed to be an acronym for this. If you’re standing on the outside of all of this, it can look rather confusing and it can also seem deliberate. I think though, that the deliberateness is in the social program, less in the language.
Inez Stepman:
So, when you talk about power, which by the way I think is one of the more impoverished ways of looking at relationships between people except in very limited circumstances. But when we talk about power, how is it that we can talk so much about power in the discourse and yet we are silent on the power of exactly what we were talking about? Obviously, there’s enormous power in being able to accuse somebody of being a racist here. I’m thinking, especially there’s some class dimension of this.
Like what happened in Smith College, where you have somebody who’s just working for the university and can be accused without, it turns out, without merit of being a racist. Then, you could lose your job. You could lose your social circle. How is it that an all of this talk about power we never talk about that power?
John McWhorter:
Well, it’s because we’re talking about a religion. What I have called the elect is not just a group of people. It’s not a political program. These people are a religion. If we just shook everything else, if we shook everything up and assigned labels again, and it wasn’t about tradition, we would very readily label the elect as the same kind of body of humans as Mormonism. It’s the exact same thing. So, because it’s a religion there are certain aspects of it that do not make strict sense. You have to sequester your sense of sequential logic to an extent.
Within the elect religion, there is a fundamental idea that you are always speaking truth to power. The fundamental idea is that your job is to show that you’re not a racist and that by definition most of the world is, and you are spreading the good news by showing that you are not a racist. The whole impetus needs there to be unconverted heathen, so to speak. As such, it’s very hard for the elect to understand that they actually are in power now because it’s their definition, their self-definition, that they’re speaking truth to it.
If there were no power to speak truth to, the elect religion would have no reason for being. So, the people who are a part of this religion are not inclined to admit their success. In their mind, no matter what happens, no matter what society is like, they will always be out of power and shaking their fist at the heavens. That’s why they don’t like to acknowledge that they have become the power.
Inez Stepman:
Is there a certain element of prosperity or success in all of this that they can’t admit that they’ve essentially won some of these battles? I grew up in the Bay Area, which by the way, I do use the term flip a bitch for U-turns.
John McWhorter:
So, you know that one? Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I know this one, but I grew up in the Bay Area and even by the time I was in high school, let’s say in the mid-2000s, I called it perhaps politically incorrectly, Selma envy. I had very privileged, mostly white kids around me. I literally had a friend of mine say, “I feel like protesting something this weekend, what’s going on that we could protest?”
John McWhorter:
Absolutely said that?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah.
John McWhorter:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Is there some element to this that is just a function of not having the kind of struggles that perhaps people did face even 50 years ago or 70 years ago that we have the time to … It seems awful lot like inventing, inventing things to struggle against at this point.
John McWhorter:
One hates to say that there is truth in that. One hates even more to say that there’s a lot of truth in that. There is a Selma envy and maybe a kinder way of looking at it is that, especially if you’re a black person who has not suffered unduly, it’s easy to think that it’s your job to continue the struggle as it’s put, and that’s fine. That things are not perfect and you want to still be of service, but it’s harder to find what to do these days, because the issues are not as implacable and stark and grievous as they were.
So, yeah, to an extent you look for something to protest because you have it set that you’re going to protest because the situation is still not perfect and your forebears protested, and they made your life possible. So, you have to protest. But yeah, unfortunately under our circumstances, because so much progress has been made, to an extent you have to look for something to protest. Then, there’s also simply the fact that to be a professional victim is a personality type. You can be white, you can be green, you can be black, it’s a personality type to stress victimization as your entire identity.
That is a kind of identity that is very tempting for a black person, because you can use our race conversation as the fuel for it. So, there is a personality type, and unfortunately it’s rather common where the idea is that you feel comfortable in attesting to your victimhood. It’s your comfort zone to depict yourself as frankly more victimized than you actually are. I stress, that’s human type. It’s not something unique to black people, but we are encouraged to OD on that, and that is what you’re seeing. That’s the Selma envy. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I’m hardly the first person to highlight this. But as a woman, it seems to me that a lot of what you just said about the temptation of this victimhood identity really does apply, even though the prism that we’ve seen this ideology, the elect, since last summer has primarily been about race. It definitely seems to me like there’s something parallel growing up around sexism or sex that really has a potential for a similar discourse. You’re right, it’s so tempting. I feel like if I had been fed this as a teenager, I would have grabbed onto it with both hands just to be lazy.
John McWhorter:
It feels good.
Inez Stepman:
This is a human tendency. You know what I mean? It’s a great way to let yourself off the hook for anything that’s hard. Do you worry that this is migrating, not just from our conversation about race, but then to our conversation about sexism and sex? Then, who knows from there what the next level, I guess it’s already gender identity or sexual orientation. How many layers of identity can we make central to this conversation and therefore in some way taboo?
John McWhorter:
Yeah, it’s tough. There’s a central problem in American culture right now, which is that there is a such thing as crying wolf in terms of victimhood or exaggerating vastly. We don’t have a way of calling people on it in a way that we’re comfortable with because we’re also really committed to acknowledging people’s actual victimhood. We realize that the victimhood doesn’t have to be somebody punching you in the face or calling you a dirty name. We’re advanced. We realize that, say, sexual harassment cannot go in a way that people 30 years ago didn’t.
But what that means is that if there’s an extent to which people are claiming grievances because they have a victim complex, because it feels good to shake your fist at the sky, because it feels good to have a group of people that you can claim victimhood with. We all know that there’s an element of that in black people and people of other colors. I have to tread lightly, but certainly with women as opposed to men, et cetera. Yeah. We all know. Where do you draw the line? How do you draw the line? That’s something that thinking America needs to work on because too often our choice is either to just let people run over us with clearly false and self-indulgent claims.
Or, then on the other hand, you end up just pushing people out and denying genuine victimhood and being unsubtle. There has to be something in between. We have to work on that because that’s hard. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. The problem is I sometimes have a difficult time telling who’s sincere and who isn’t, and who’s using some of this concept of fragility or victimhood as a political weapon. So, relatedly to this entire phenomenon, it seems to me that another trend in our language as of late has been almost a therapeutic language. For example, we have politicians, people who have enormous amounts of power. They’re making very important decisions for the entire country claiming to be emotionally or psychologically traumatized as part of normal political discussion.
Of course, there’s the over analyzed phenomenon of the trigger warnings. But now, the language of harassment and abuse, I’m thinking Taylor Lorenz saying that it’s harassment or targeting to use her profile photo for her columns on TV. Increasingly, public life in America seems to be a one big therapy session, linguistically speaking. What does this all say about us? If our profanity says something about us as a society, what does it say about us that our dominant mode of discussion now is so heavily dependent on language? That until I think maybe, at least from my observation, five, 10 years ago would have been confined to a therapist couch.
John McWhorter:
Yeah. It’s a very weird moment that we’re in, where we’re taught that what a therapist would think of as sanity. What psychology tells us are normal human coping skills, given the basic difficulties that anybody is going to encounter in life. We’re being told that that is too much to expect, that that is expecting people to be too strong, and that we’re supposed to give vent to our slightest discomforts and talk about those discomforts as if we were practically being physically abused. I have never seen anybody actually try to make sense of that. The kind of person who says that they feel victimized by A, B, or C, that nobody would have batted an eyelash at, say, 10 minutes ago.
I’ve never heard one of those people challenged to express how they consider that to be genuine adult coping behavior. Of course, they might say, “Well, we need to change what we think of as tolerable.” But of course, there’s some people who clearly are just profiting from the fact that there’s such a market for showing one’s self to be that kind of victim. It’s an odd moment. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt very eloquently shows that we’re basically teaching people to be what a therapist would consider a broken person. That needs to be talked about more.
But it’s interesting, I was on, am I allowed to say this? No, given what happened I am just going to say it. The National Book Critics Circle, I was on the board and that particular book made it, it was one of the 10 finalists for non-fiction. But it couldn’t get any further because some of the people there didn’t like the fact that the right-wing might agree with a lot of the premises of the book. I found that interesting, because what that means is that the premises of that book are now regarded as dangerous thought by a certain kind of person, where it wouldn’t have been say just 10 years ago.
Inez Stepman:
I’m glad you brought up the right because it seems to me that there is this very eclectic or heterodox group of people who are starting to find a lot of commonalities in simply opposing this phenomenon, whatever we want to term it, the elect woke-ism. Cancel culture, that’s also a phrase that’s gone. It jumped the shark and is completely imprecise now, but there seems to be a certain amount of pushback that is formulating. It seems to be coming both from the liberal left and from the center, but also from the right. Do you think, one, that this kind of coalition is democratically viable, small D, or do you think there’s too much that we disagree on?
Then, second, do you think that Trump’s departure from the national stage has empowered the elect or has turbocharged them, or has actually lessened their power in some way?
John McWhorter:
No, I think that that second question is interesting because I think part of why they were able to take over in the way that they were, especially last summer was probably because there was a Trump in office and a Trump-ism that was convenient to rail at as something that was very dangerous. I agreed, that was my judgment of Trump as well. However, his departure hasn’t really changed it because the elect have acquired so much power that now they can just sit and wield it. It’s inherent to that religion that the present is always a complete nightmare. So, if they don’t have Trump, then they’ll have something else.
It’s very interesting to see a lot of them working really hard to find mean things to say about President Biden already, because the things can never be good according to this religion. But in terms of the coalition that’s moving against the elect, I don’t know if it would ever stay a coalition, but I think that because of the nature of things it would have to be the people who were left or left-ish, who had the most effect. Especially given that a lot of those people have a certain visceral contempt for anybody who is right of center. But what needs to be understood is that the elect are not just liberals.
They are hard, hard leftists who are telling the rest of us that if we are not as hard left as them, we’re immoral beings. It’s up to the rest of the left to plant their feet on the ground and say, “No, we will not be castigated like this and you are not going to take all of the oxygen out of the womb.” But it’s been so quick that I think a lot of people on just the left are still catching their breath and trying to figure out who these people are. I think that’ll start to happen in particular this summer.
Inez Stepman:
You’re preceding what I was going to ask, because it seems like they haven’t, present company aside and a handful of really great folks on the liberal left who have stood up against this in the Harper’s letter signatories and so on. It seems like the institutions are just very easy to topple for the elect. So, thinking about the New York Times, of course, academia has been captured for a long time. Do you have any insight on why it might have been so easy to push?
We’re talking about pushing out people who did have enormous amount of power within these various organizations for very minor transgressions against this religion. Why was it so easy?
John McWhorter:
I genuinely think, and I’m working on this and we need to see, I think a lot of it was something rather mundane. We tend to forget that most of this happened online. Most of these things happened at Zoom meetings. Everything going crazy starting last June, not an accident it was then. I think the pandemic had something to do with this. I think that the Zoom format, the fact that we’re not breathing in each other’s faces and being in the same room with each other after the meetings and things, I think that it has encouraged the extremism. You can have these chats alongside that can be very animated.
You can’t do that in a room. All of that, I think, creates a Lord of the Flies atmosphere that will be less when people start sitting in rooms again. I think we’ll start seeing more resistance to the things that organizations have so quickly done in the name of all their employees. Many of whom are sitting in the Hollywood squares thinking, “Oh, goodness.” That will be different if the meeting isn’t over once you turn off your computer. I think when people are actually in the same place again, maybe we’ll see some normality, it’s strange to imagine that 2019 was normal.
But I think that what happened, what you and I are talking about, was partly because the only way anybody has been interacting is the way you and I are now. I think it’s easier to get away with nonsense in this format than it would be if people were actually in reality.
Inez Stepman:
Well, there is certainly that phenomenon where people are way more polite in-person than they are when they can be anonymous or even not anonymous online, or the similar … I think there’s a similar phenomenon between people being rude drivers. But if you bump into somebody on the street like, “Oh, excuse me.”
John McWhorter:
Exactly. Yeah. We’ve been driving since last summer. Exactly.
Inez Stepman:
In a different forum, you noted the connection between, I think, an aspect of modernity. The fading away of traditional religion and perhaps in some forms, traditional identity. Some of those things are good in the sense that we don’t want an intense tribal identity where we’re just all fighting the other tribe and we completely give it up our individuality in order to survive. Certainly, my background is from Eastern Europe. So, I’m certainly no collectivist in thinking. But there is this big argument on the right as to whether, within the right mostly, whether we’ve jettisoned too much of a true collective.
That we’ve lost, for example, our ability to identify as a collective of Americans or the fading away of traditional religion, and I speak as an atheist here, has really created a perfect storm for people to raise these what once were important, but not all consuming aspects of our identity to the level of a religion. I think the phrase you used that I’m probably slightly misquoting here, but it’s not natural for us to think of ourselves as individuals. Could you maybe elaborate on that a little bit more, and can we build a society of individuals or do we have to have some collective identity or else we’ll have worse forms of it?
John McWhorter:
Yeah. This is a serious problem. We’re dealing with what Rousseau warned us about, which is that probably in many ways the best state of society is when you’re dealing with a few hundred people living by the river. Nobody in a situation like that can have an identity crisis. You know what you are, you’re somebody’s brother, you’re somebody’s son, you’re somebody’s friend, and you die at 60. There you go. That is not anything any of us would be waiting for, but yeah, you don’t want to be an individual. If you’re in a nation that has a very strong national identity, usually a small one, then part of your identity is you are an Estonian.
That’s easy. I’m picking Estonia just randomly. That’s easy for an Estonian. If you’re in a society like ours, your religion used to provide you with that. But to the extent, that religion becomes something ever more distant for ever more people at least of a certain level of education and/or social class, then, you are going to have these substitute identities. An awful lot of what we’re seeing is people seeking to feel connected to other groups of people. That means that when you have the old-fashioned balkanization going away, then you start having weird replacements.
So, to be a black person, it used to be that because no matter what kind of black person you were, you were largely barred from the best that society had to offer. There were certain things you couldn’t do. There were certain places you couldn’t go. You were looked upon with open scorn by all other people. So, you didn’t wonder who you were because all black people were part of a certain community. Once that changes, as a black person, especially a rather affluent one, you might start looking for some other source of tribalism. For us in America, often that tribalism is that you seek the tribalism of victimhood.
You seek the tribalism of defeatism. That is something you could have almost predicted. Where do you go from there? That is a good question. If people need to feel like they belong to something, if it’s not going to be a bowling league, it’s going to be pretending that it hurts you to have your avatar not look right on a screen. Where you go from there is something we’re all going to have to talk about.
Inez Stepman:
So, do you think in that regard we’ve lost the ability to be weirdos? You probably have a better word for this, but it seems to me that because our identities have risen to this hugely important level, and as you said, the collectives are getting so large that it’s almost like everybody has to endorse every cork of a person except those, of course, which are forbidden. But everybody has to endorse every one of our weirdnesses, or strange aspects of our personality. They have to be raised to the level of celebration in society, or somehow were being oppressed, or we’re being victimized in some way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this question recently about the beauty of being a weirdo and developing these weird little subcultures or countercultures. It seems like that’s fading in a way, and it’s especially weird given the fact that it’s easier than ever on the internet to find other weirdos who share your particular weirdness. But do you think that aspect of societal endorsement in some way really squashes these fun little communities that pop up in opposition to the dominant culture?
John McWhorter:
Well, I think what’s important is that it would be a community. Most people don’t want to be weird alone. But yeah, I think that we do have a certain amount of that. It’s looking very attractive. This gets back to critical race theory. It’s made to seem very attractive to have yourself be part of some very large story of some group that has suffered at the hands of white people in some way. That can be many white people as well. It’s not hard to fashion yourself as part of an oppressed group of some kind. Yeah, that’s marketed literally and figuratively, and it does, I think, discourage people from being individuals, as in weird in that way.
In general, most people have never wanted to be individuals, but this is a time that definitely doesn’t encourage it, except for the fact that yeah, if you are weird, you can find more people who are weird like you online. That feeds right back into your being part of a community. Being the solitary weirdo, rarer these days, I would definitely say.
Inez Stepman:
So, to wrap this up I have a few short fire questions unrelated to each other. But just thoughts that I wanted to ask you.
John McWhorter:
Okay.
Inez Stepman:
Is English the language of the foreseeable future because it’s the language of the internet?
John McWhorter:
Yes, English will be like this, unless the world gets blown up and started again. It will not be Mandarin because Mandarin is frankly too hard and it’s utterly impossible to read or write. So, English took it. I frankly think English is a rather ugly language, but this is going to be the one. Other languages will survive, but English is the real Esperanto.
Inez Stepman:
What is your favorite language?
John McWhorter:
Russian. I think it’s just magnificently complicated and beautiful.
Inez Stepman:
I love that piece of your book where you talked about how, and I don’t know how many swear words I’m allowed to use on this podcast, but how English has transformed ass into so many different ways. Apparently, Russian does the same thing with dick. I was wondering what it says about us, Americans versus Russians, that we chose those various body parts to turn into.
John McWhorter:
Yeah. I wonder if it is anything. Also, I use dick because that’s better coming from a guy, but if you know Russian you know that the female word is also used quite colorfully in Russian, far beyond anything in English. So, yeah, I don’t know what that says about the cultures, but it is fun.
Inez Stepman:
This one is from my husband. What’s your favorite dinosaur?
John McWhorter:
Parasaurolophus is my favorite. It’s one of the duck-billed dinosaurs and it has the big, long horn that looks like a hairstyle. I think I’ve always liked the way Parasaurolophus looked. I have a balsa skeleton, little foot high skeleton of Parasaurolophus that I’m looking at right now. So, I would say that is one of my favorites. I also like the Abelisaurus. They’re like Tyrannosaurus, but they have really tiny arms and they have really flat faces. They’re rather recently discovered, but they’re dinosaurs like Carnotaurus. I like those. Your husband might know what Carnotaurus is. So, I would say those two off the top of my head.
Inez Stepman:
What is your favorite TV show?
John McWhorter:
Ever?
Inez Stepman:
Either way, either a recent one or of all time.
John McWhorter:
Best old one was Sgt. Bilko, go into the middle and I would say Seinfeld. Recently, The Office or Parks and Recreation or 30 Rock. I’m not sure which of those three I would consider the best. But all three of them I thought were absolutely brilliant. I really love TV though, and so it’s really hard to say, but those roughly.
Inez Stepman:
Have you seen Deadwood?
John McWhorter:
Never got around to it. I should, because of the language. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. That’s what I was going to ask was, I read somewhere that they had transformed the older language that would have been more accurate. They were trying to go for the same shock value in speech that would have, like a respectable member of society would have heard people in the old West as speaking like.
John McWhorter:
I kept hearing about it and my technology situation at the time was such that it was hard to sit down and watch. Now, it’s getting old and there’s so much else to watch. One of these days I have to take a look at it.
Inez Stepman:
Finally, how did you acquire your particular love for studying profanity within language?
John McWhorter:
I don’t have that love, actually. That’s not what I’m supposed to say here, but the truth is my agent came up with the idea of writing a book about profanity because he thought people would enjoy it. Then, I decided I would like to write it because I like cursing and also people always want word histories. I always say, “You don’t really want them as much as you think.” After about four etymologies, you’d start to get bored. But this was a way of giving people nine, it’s really 12 etymologies for words that are interesting.
Because of the way they’re used often, their etymologies are interesting. So, if you take a word like chair, well, it goes back to some words that meant chair that sounds a little different. That’s not interesting. With most of the curse words, the history is more interesting than that. So, it allowed me to give people their etymology in a way that they would actually enjoy.
Inez Stepman:
Finally, is there anything … I know, again, that you take this descriptive view towards language. So, I’m not going to say, are there errors that you hate, but rather, is there a common phrase you hear that you feel that could be more precise in some way or that people are not truly communicating what they think they are and you wish you could just give them a better phrase for it?
John McWhorter:
People are communicating it when they do this, that I hate, but it’s just it doesn’t make tidy sense to me. “You just can’t walk in there and say you’re leaving.” No, “you can’t just walk in there and say you’re leaving.” You shouldn’t put the just before the can’t because that means you simply can’t. “You simply can’t go in there.” That’s not what you mean. You mean you can’t up and tell them, they’re two different things. If you say, “you just can’t go in there and say you’re leaving,” that’s one thing.
If you say “you can’t just go in there and say you’re leaving,” that’s another thing. But people do the just wrong, or “just don’t stand there,” no, no, “don’t just stand there.” I hate that, but nobody listens to me.
Inez Stepman:
Well, we listen to you. So, John McWhorter, it’s been a pleasure to have you on High Noon. Thank you so much for joining us today. Nine Nasty Words is available now from anywhere that you get your books and The Elect is available from John’s Substack, which I highly recommend. John, thank you so much for being here.
John McWhorter:
My pleasure, Inez.