Check out new podcasts on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/HowtoDealwithHumans
and Spotify:
Rebel English
English is the rebel language of the world. We have some rules but, surprisingly, we make a lot of it up as we go along. Or, more formally stated, English has never had a central authority that dictates what should be considered “English” or how it should be communicated. You can think of English as the crowd sourcing of languages.
The closest we’ve ever come to a standard are various dictionaries, including Samuel Johnson’s seminal dictionary of 1755, which he compiled and wrote with a small team of workers in nine years. It was the standard for over a century until the Oxford English Dictionary. (For comparison, the Oxford dictionary took 70 years to write and was, actually, crowd sourced, including being written by people in prison. You can think of the Oxford dictionary as the first Wikipedia.) If you’re interested in the history of the Oxford Dictionary, you can look up Simon Winchester’s book from 1998 called The Professor and the Madman.
Just a little tangent here, the original name of the book in the UK was The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words. For the American audience, it was changed to The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It seems the only word that managed to make it across the Atlantic was “murder.”
So back to Johnson’s dictionary, which gives an interesting glimpse into how English grabs words from wherever it wants. For example, there’s an entry for an English word that will soon be eclipsed by the Italian word:
Came’lopard. n.s. [from camelus and pardus, Lat.] An Abyssinian animal, taller than an elephant, but not so thick. He is so named, because he has a neck and head like a camel; he is spotted like a pard, but his spots are white upon a red ground. The Italians call him giaraffa.
Here we can see in real time, the Italian word just waiting in the wings for its chance to take over as the word for the animal that we now call “giraffe.”
For a while, newspapers, like The New York Times, had a kind of unstated power to determine the way people saw and understood language. But no publisher ever gained dominance and this meant that even today, any company that deals in language has their own “style guide” that regulates their own particular style of English and grammar in whatever they print. And since everyone has their own little kingdom of language, you can have something like The New Yorker magazine, which is well-known for having odd choices in their style guide.
Rejecting Authority
This lack of a central authority is different than most other languages. In fact, Wikipedia has a page with a list of these academies, like the French Academy (Académie française) or the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum). Notably, although the title of the Wikipedia page is “List of Language Regulators” it has English in this list. The regulator, however, is listed as “none.” I guess they put that in there because people might have thought that it was a mistake if English wasn’t included. Nope, it’s not a mistake, it assures us. The English language regulator is “none.”
These committees and boards of people–the regulators–are set up to protect both language heritage (the past) and keep language from losing itself to another language (the future). Here in Canada, we are officially bilingual French and English. However, while some provinces have more French speakers than others, the province of Québec is the only province where French takes priority over English. It has its own unique accent and lexicon of French called Québécois. For the French speakers of Québec, it is a daily struggle to maintain their language in this majority English-speaking country of Canada.
There are a lot of examples of English sneaking into French, in individual words like
Le hamburger
Credit: Evan Amos
Or in English idioms that are just translated word-for-word into French, like “Il fait du bacon.”
Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Notably, although English and Canadian English don’t have regulators, the province of Québec has created their own: the Québec Office of the French Language (Office québécois de la langue française).
English Doesn’t Care
It is an interesting rabbit hole to jump into, but the point that I want to make here, is that all of this struggle doesn’t exist in English.
The fact that English has never set up a central language authority means that we can very, very easily and completely randomly take words from other languages. Like with Johnson’s “camelopard” that was on the cusp of being lost to the Italian “giaraffa.” The only requirement is that people start saying “giraffe” instead of “camelopard.” And we all know how that turned out.
English doesn’t even pause to translate words; just by using them they become English. Borrowing a word from a foreign language is not that unusual for any language, these are called “loan words,” but the sheer variety of sources and number of them make English unique.
Here are just a very few examples:
- bourgeoisie (French)
- cuisine (French)
- résumé (French)
- RSVP (French “Répondez s’il vous plait”)
- smorgasbord (Scandinavian)
- avatar (Sanskrit)
- shampoo (Hindi)
- bedouin (Arabic)
- litchee (Chinese)
- kimono (Japanese)
- tattoo (Pacific Islands)
- ketchup (Malay)
So go ahead and throw a foreign word into your next conversation. If enough people start using it, you may have just added something to the language because English is Darwinian: if people find it helpful to communicate, it is now English. Survival of the fittest. In other words, if the word fits a use, it can stay.
Does a Language Change or Is It Replaced?
This is not to say that English couldn’t crumble under the weight of foreign words being brought into the language. In fact, you could also make the case that English has already crumbled. Maybe even a few times.
In 1066, William the Conqueror took over England. He spoke French and so French became the official language of England. For three hundred years, it was the official language of court and king, and you needed to be fluent in it if you wanted to get ahead in polite society. At the same time, Latin was the official language of priests and clerics. It was only somewhere off in the distance that you came across the language of the illiterate common folk: English. And because these common folk rarely moved from where they were born and had no standardization of English or spelling (if they could spell), words became influenced by the dozens of regional dialects. This is why some farmers in England called that bushy tailed fellow a fyxe and later a fixen and later a fox and some farmers further south called it a vixen (spelled it with a “v” to reflect their pronunciation). With no standard of words or spelling, the accent created different words for the same thing.
French hung around in England long past the point it was the language of the monarchy. Henry V was the first king to write in English in the early 1400s thus shifting from 300 years of French as a daily language of the royal palace. French didn’t suddenly disappear and was still used in some law documents until 1778 (almost 25 years after Johnson’s dictionary). However, by the time Shakespeare was writing in the later 1500s, English had complete dominance and was clearly the language of the Kingdom of Great Britain and would become the functional language of all its future colonies.
So How Did English Win?
Well, like a voracious beast, it took in huge chunks of the languages that threatened it, but it didn’t devour the languages. A more appropriate comparison might be to a collector and a beast. English let other languages have their place, just not THE place. It’s a winning idea. Christianity used this approach by letting pagan festivals continue to exist and then sidling up to their popularity in order to gain power and more followers. This is a technique I see on social media where some YouTubers make a living not creating anything but finding popular videos and then making their own video that does nothing but show their response to the popular video. They use something that’s already popular and ride on its coattails to their own popularity, sometimes even dominating the original video.
English did the same. It was not out to make enemies. You want foxes? Okay. Vixens? Also okay, let’s make that the name for female foxes. While the English farmers had words for the animals they raised: pig, sheep or cow, they were more than willing to include all the fancy French names for the animals as they were eaten: pigs make pork dumplings, sheep make mutton pie, cows make beef stew.
Whether you want to put a positive spin on it and think that English is a malleable, expansive language, or see it as a kind of voracious, unthinking garbage can that takes all comers equally, the result is the same.
The Downside to Change
This willingness to add and change does have a downside. In Iceland, thanks in part to the Icelandic central authority, current citizens of the island have the ability to understand books written a thousand years ago because the language has remained quite stable. There is a precious history preserved that present-day speakers can access. English speakers don’t have that. We struggle to understand Shakespeare who was writing less than five hundred years ago. And if you go back a bit farther? It gets hard and harder.
Medieval English (1066-1485) is, at best, almost guessable from context. The opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales from 1387 are almost understandable if you squint.
Reading by Jordan, Ancient Literature Dude
Translation from Larry D. Benson., Gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer (2008)
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small fowls make melody,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England to Canterbury they travel,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
Who helped them when they were sick.
But if you go back to the 8th(ish) century to find Beowulf (we don’t know the author), you will find it written in Old English. While the word “English” is in the title of the language, modern speakers will find it entirely incomprehensible and unrecognizable.
Reading by Hillsdale College Professor of English Justin A. Jackson
From R. M. Liuzza’s Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000)
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodo-setla ofteah
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah
oðþæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hron-rade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs god cyning.
Translated by Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A Verse Translation (2002)
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
The philosophical question is whether the English of today and the English of Old English are the same language? At what point is a language so changed that it is something else? Could we really be speaking the same language if we can’t understand one another? It is something to think about, but that won’t change the fact that English continues to stretch and change, or, for the pessimists, be that voracious, unthinking garbage can that takes in anything you wish to throw into it.
Enter the Emoji
In decades to come the early twenty-first century may be known to linguists as the emoji period. Certainly the wishy-washy, topsy-turvy, language soup of English has set its eyes on these ideograms.
Every time my phone suggests I replace a word with an emoji, I wonder why I would take that extra step after I’ve already written the word? I do, sometimes, because it’s cute or silly. But is it possible that emojis might actually step into English as English?
I believe it’s something we’ll have to think about in the years to come. I used to tell engineering students to never use emojis in any professional communication.
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever.
That was only a few years ago. Now I encourage them.
Last year that I began to suggest that professional engineering communication could include a few select emojis, including the👍(thumbs up).
I tell them that they should be cautious because there will still be an older generation who might push back against the idea of emojis. However, a lot of professional work now takes place over text and while holding a phone in the field. It makes sense for this shorthand to exist.
ANECDOTE
A first-year student team came to me because one member who was not a native English speaker was angry with the team leader because of a text message to the group. To give you some context: the message was about a grade for their most recent team assignment. They’d been struggling and hadn’t done well on the first team assignment and I guess everyone was feeling down and insecure. The next assignment didn’t get a fantastic grade, but it showed improvement.
The text from the team leader was something like:
“Not great, but better than last time.”
The non-native speaker felt that the leader was chastising them for being “not great” and felt the leader was insulting them when they were already down and not being supportive, i.e., not being a good team leader.
The team leader was really surprised and felt that she was being honest and supportive in her text. A quick poll of the group found that the native English speakers understood the complex subtext in the way she’d phrased the text, but the people in the team who spoke English but not as their first language, didn’t pick up on that subtly and saw only a negative statement.
I wondered out loud with them whether this situation might have been avoided if the leader had used a couple of emojis. For example:
Not great 🤷♀️but better than last time 👏👍
I leave it to you to consider whether “not great but better than last time” is different than “not great shrug emoji but better than last time hand clap thumbs up.”
From my point of view, I think the emojis communicate important complicated information about feeling that text messages of words almost always fail to do. These little packets of feeling are things we naturally convey when in person.
In person, we would modulate our voice, sigh, and smile (or even shrug and smile) to communicate the complexity of feeling disappointment that the grade wasn’t high (again) but also feeling a sense of accomplishment that improvements had been made as a team. In other words, the leader wanted to convey a complex sense of bittersweetness that the team should be proud that they had improved even if they were sad that it wasn’t as much as they had wanted, and in a subtext that only the native English speakers could see, there was a sense that the team leader still believed in them and they were all in it together. That subtext is the hidden shrug that the phrase “not great” often comes with in English, as we use that particular phrase to lessen bad news and take the sting out of it while also showing a sense of support.
That is a lot of information to convey in a text. And text messages are often misinterpreted because there are hidden subtexts to words and phrases that one group may know and another may not. I wonder if while writers may not understand the intricacies of words, they might instinctively know the emojis to use.
END ANECDOTE
Emojis in Judgment
When I started to suggest to students that they could use certain conservative emojis, my understanding was that the thumbs up emoji was contextually acceptable, but I hadn’t really thought that it was becoming part of the English language. I didn’t think of it as a word because words seemed more powerful and concrete and important. I thought of the thumbs up emoji similar to a physical gesture, like a nod or, a thumbs up, and not language as I understood it. However, a recent legal case suggested that a change may be happening in dictionaries sooner rather than later.
In March of this year, in Saskatchewan, Canada there was an appeal being heard about whether a thumbs up emoji was a legal and binding electronic signature. In this case, a photo of an agricultural contract about buying flax was sent to a farmer over text with the words “Please confirm contract.” The farmer responded with a thumbs up emoji. The argument is two-fold: first does the thumbs up means “I confirm the contract” or does it mean “I’ll take a look at the contract” and second if it does mean “I confirm,” does the emoji itself count as an electronic signature. In other words, where does this emoji fit into the English language? The defence—the farmer—says that emojis are informal and inconsequential and the prosecution says emojis are valid communication that result in definitive actions. Back in 2023, a judge ruled that the emoji was valid communication and meaningful in this context and the farmer owed the company money. That is why it is currently under appeal. So as of now there is no final word on the thumbs up.
Conclusion
The conclusion here is that things are a-changing in English but change has always been a defining feature of English. However, this is a much different kind of change than the language has seen up to this point. We are talking about putting pictures alongside words in the dictionary. (Just to note this is not unheard of: Egyptian hieroglyphics existed alongside written words for a long time.)
It’s hard to guess the future because English is Darwinian. Are we witnessing a radical change? In a hundred years, will English newspapers have a mix of words and emojis? Or will emojis survive as the most fit way to communicate only in certain circumstances? It’s impossible to guess because English is made not by a panel of experts but by the consensus of the masses.
For those using emojis in professional contexts, however, I think that you should know two things:
1. Emojis are useful and being used.
2. They have meaning and may stand up in a court of law.
So hedging my bets and knowing that when lawyers get involved things are serious, I guess I should congratulate the thumbs up emoji and all its emoji brethren.
All salute our new language overlords!
