SmartMouth hangs out on the corner of culture and communication. The act of naming happens to be one of my keen professional interests as a brand marketer and trademark consultant. I like naming babies too.

With this installment, I’m happy to sit back for a change and turn the Smartmouth reins over to a guest blogger ‒ my professional colleague and former professor of psycholinguistics, Mike Kelly, Ph.D. Enjoy this brief excursion through names and the ingenuity of the English language in masking or muting sentiment through creative spelling.

Nine Emmys testify to the appeal of a sitcom that kept viewers engaged and laughing for six seasons. But before anyone had ever heard of Moira, Johnny, David, and Alexis, viewers were already hooked on that provocative one-in-a-million title. Who, after all, could resist at least taking a peek at a show called Schitt’s Creek? By using the flexibility of the English spelling system to slip in a couple of extra unpronounced letters, the creators managed to say on TV one of George Carlin’s seven words you can never say on television.

“Schitt’s Creek” works so well because the creators cleverly borrowed a familiar device in English orthography that “pads” proper names with extra letters to disambiguate them from common words. Along with initial capitalization, the doubling of final letters in surnames like “Pitt” and “Penn” clearly signals in writing that they are proper names, distinguishing them from mere common words like “pit and “pen.” More importantly, letter doubling helps insulate proper names from the meanings and connotations of their common-word homonyms. Ideally, surnames like “Grimm” and “Sadd” should not imply that someone is disinclined to see the bright side of life, and letter doubling erects a barrier that helps to prevent such semantic leakage.

These examples suggest a hypothesis: There should be more pressure toward padding of names with negative sentiment – to avoid connotations that might otherwise transfer via psychological “contamination” from the surname to the person. If true, we would expect, on a proportional basis, more cases of padded surnames with a negative sentiment (like Sadd, Glumm, Robb, and Grimm) than with a positive sentiment (like Gladd, Starr, or Hugg).

Analysis of census names bears that out. Although positive surnames far outnumber negative ones, there are twice as many padded negative names in the US Census database as there are padded positive names. That’s consistent with a bias in all languages toward words that have a positive sentiment – both the number of such words and the frequency with which they are used. This padding pattern is a clear signal that English (and its users) want very much to “clean up” or neutralize names with negative connotations, assuming they’re not prepared to change them altogether. On the other hand, nearly everyone is content to tap the positive sentiment of a cheerful-sounding name.

One last point, in case you’re wondering: “Schitt,” “Shitt,” and “Shitte” do not appear in the US Census database of surnames. And neither do various padded versions of the seven other words you’re not supposed to say on TV. It looks like some words simply can’t be cleaned up, even with a little padding.

Gray type is the invention of people who would just as soon you ignore the words on the page and focus on the pictures. In the service of design esthetics, those people have added needless pain to the pleasure of reading. After squinting at emails all day, my weary eyes are filming up even as I write this. Gray type makes your brown eyes red.

I am hardly the first to complain about this. Even graphic designers have challenged the perceptual principles of “ideal” visual contrast used by their colleagues to justify what is fundamentally an esthetic preference. Still, people who hold the power to determine how we experience words in print or email persist in thinking that gray scale is doing eyes a favor, even though “science” does not clearly support that conclusion. What gray type does do is make it harder to read certain kinds of print – and easier, therefore, to justify not reading it. This is particularly true in remote work settings where many people are seeing materials on visually inhospitable laptops. Gray type is just another excuse not to read at a point in time when the cup of excuses already runs over.

In a lamentation about gray type written for Wired some years back, Kevin Marks pointed out that the guidelines for ideal contrast – while ostensibly drawing authority from psychophysics – can be subjective. A viewer’s optical experience is also heavily device and context-dependent, which means that what’s acceptable on your smart phone with its vivid white-on-black display option may not work so well for you on your laptop. And as it happens, internet typography generally uses a lower contrast ratio than even its own style-makers, Apple and Google, recommend.

Low ratios like 4:1 and 5:1 (barely half the ostensible ideal) have become pervasive for two apparent reasons. First, technological advances have made lower contrast typography feasible. Second, designers happen, almost overwhelmingly, to like them because gray type is submissive, it cedes prominence to graphic design. In other words, people who rule the way the internet looks tend to consider words expendable.

And, oh, yes, there’s another reason. The internet is the land of the fit where no one cares much about the vision-impaired. The terms of engagement for humans and computers are set by people under 30, who happen to know nothing about ripening cataracts.

Anyone old enough to be troubled by gray type is reluctant to acknowledge it because the work force, like the internet, belongs to the young and visually fit. It takes courage to complain that a document in feathery gray-type is difficult to read on your laptop. Thus, it’s not clear that complaints ever manage to reach, much less persuade most of the people empowered to design our online written environment, including the PowerPoint templates that shape information exchange in corporate environments. If those of us with more or less “ordinary” or “aging” eyes object to gray type, imagine the struggle for people with true impairment. A poor usability track record makes our limitless web metaverse far less inclusive than it is expansive.

Unfortunately, the graying of the internet has also accelerated the graying of the printed world where less saturation yields another benefit: cost savings. Black pixels on the screen are free; ink is not. Newsprint is currently running at about 16 cents an ounce – a bargain compared to the ink jet in your home printer but costly just the same. The Faustian deal we made to preserve the paper in newspapers is that many of us can no longer curl up in the incandescence of evening with a printed copy of the NYTimes. And the drive to conserve paper with smaller font makes the shift to digital consumption a prophesy that continues to self-fulfill. I have certainly taken the hint. My shift to digital word consumption both for news and books is now nearly complete.

But to talk about the price of ink is to take a purely tactical view of things. We should focus on the cultural roots of this “grey is the new black” in typography. Fashion trends have always been metaphors that signal what is happening in society. The most influential of designers are cultural commentators – the rest of us just need to know how to decipher their code. Gray is what words wear when information engulfs us but much of it is untrue or discredited, and when “facts” are changing too fast for the ink on anything to dry. The very indefiniteness of gray, its failure to take a position on anything, also explains its preeminence as an interior design color for at least a decade. Gray seems civil. Tasteful. So much talk these days is not.

Gray type is, therefore, faint irony in an otherwise strident world where social media make words an instrument of cultural disintegration. If gray type could do anything at all to calm the conversation, it would be worth the sacrifice, eyestrain be damned. Unfortunately, gray type just makes it easier to look away from words. And when we take less notice of them, we take less care with them. All hope for nuance is lost.

The Hey Day of Informality

There are many strangers in my inbox on any given day – some welcome and some not – but I can count on at least a few who try to elbow in with the greeting, “Hey, Susan.” Or worse, Sue. After that, they go on to wonder whether I might need their services or whether I have seen an earlier email requesting a meeting. What every one of the “Hey-Susan” emails has in common is that almost none of the senders knows me. When someone writes “Hey Sue” in an email, I feel pretty confident without reading further that I can safely dispatch them to trash.

Which is not to say that I am completely unreceptive to emails from people marketing their services. That would be unforgivable hypocrisy. But I am firm in my preference for being solicited in a way that does not imply the sender already knows me when clearly, they don’t.

There are several points to make about this. Hi is the most common written and spoken greeting in English by far, but Hey – once a regionalism largely limited to the South and to rural areas – has made major inroads among people under 45, who are several generations removed from the influence of Emily Post. For urban Baby Boomers, Hey was really a shout of warning or protest, which our mothers shut down with the canned quip, “Hey is for horses.” So, what happened to put Hey, once routinely used to wave people off, into broader national circulation as a legitimate way of waving Hello? And why are email marketers running wild with it?

You Say Hi, and I Say Hello: The Origins of English Greetings

Hey and Hi have long careers in the English language – first as negative interjections going back to the 12th century, and later evolving into more neutral shouts for attention. Their resemblance to exclamations in other languages might imply “natural” origins.

Over time, both Hey and Hi evolved further into greeting variants, always informal. Emily Post was sniffing at the popularity of Hi among young people in 1922, and in that same edition, advised sternly against its use as a greeting in social situations where people were first being introduced. Hey would have escaped her attention altogether, it was that uncouth. Post might have advised her readers to say, “Good Day,” a greeting that brings to mind the tip of a gentleman’s hat. It is largely gone from American English but remains standard polite usage throughout European languages today.

The word, hello, (hallo in German) comes to us by a different, rather circuitous route, having apparently evolved from “holen” – which in our Germanic “mother tongue” means to fetch. It was presumably a shout to hunting dogs retrieving quarry. The trail gets complicated if you consider the similarity of Hello to the word Hail (as in Hail Mary or Hail, Caesar), but because hail comes from a Greek word that means to rejoice, any similarity to hello may be coincidental. As of the 1820’s, Hello was still largely used to express surprise -- the same usage preserved today when we say “Hello?” as a kind of lilting faux-question.

Credit for the use of Hello as a standard greeting belongs to Thomas Edison, who advocated for it as standard phone etiquette over “Ahoy,” Alexander Graham Bell’s own candidate for the job. Both terms reflected the idea that a telephone “call” was a shout for attention and needed a very specific greeting to match. Because Edison was the entrepreneurial winner in most things electric, his suggested phone usage, published in early phone books as the preferred greeting, ultimately won the day too.

But although Hello has stuck, it has always been a bit of a misfit in English -- one of those terms that escaped the telephone, but not quite. People who are being introduced to one another often drop it altogether in favor of “Nice to meet you.” Hello fits very few situations, other than maybe an exchange of greetings between TV hosts and their guests (“Hello, Chris, good to be with you) or the synthetic, automated voice response you get when you call in a prescription at Rite Aid. I don’t mean to beat up on Hello, but it is getting edged out of the real vernacular.

The Hi’s Have It

In fact, Hi had pretty much taken its place by the middle of the last century, but the written salutation was always “Dear so-and-so.” Today, “dear” is reserved for formal correspondence and hand-written condolence notes. Thanks to email, Hi is true common currency in written and spoken English.

Emails may have looked like letters at first, but they quickly became an extension of talk, functioning as a replacement for conversation (in lieu of phone calls) rather than just a replacement for letters. Like Bell’s ahoy, meant to wave someone down, Hi is a bid for attention, not a show of respect. “Hi, Sue” is just-right for a medium that qualifies as neither speech nor writing. And, of course, in a true email conversation, the salutations get dropped altogether, even if names are left in.

But once Hi established itself as an email greeting, something else was needed for in-person exchange. Hi had, essentially, been formalized a bit against its will or intention. And when Hi became co-opted by email, a vacancy began occurring in speech. Systematic shifts are a natural phenomenon in the evolution of language. As speech patterns move over or merge, they open up spaces that other things are bound to fill.

This easily explains why Hey has made its way into speech. Hi has moved uptown, leaving space for a more informal, downtown greeting. But why is Hey also jostling its way into email, notably in situations where you would least expect it? Why has Hey become the preferred usage of strangers accosting you in your own inbox with something to sell? The explanation is simple. The huckster’s presumption that informality is irresistible.

Among people who write scripts for personal marketing outreach, there has long been an unshakable view that pantomiming friendship makes it harder for targets to reject you. It’s a gambit that plays on deeply ingrained habits. Think of the old “Hi, I’m Justin calling from the March of Dimes. How are you today?” Those were always the people I hung up on fastest because they really didn’t want to know how I was, and I certainly didn’t want to tell them. If anything, that opener invited, “too busy to talk to you!” But the same faux ethnography has persisted, unshakably, into the protocols of email spam. If you want to disarm your targets by feigning a preexisting friendship, then “Hi, Susan” is actually too formal. Hey is the new Hi.

When Hello Is not Enough

If greetings change over time, it’s because they need to match the moment. We should expect that Hey will gain even more traction as we resume routine contact and relearn what it means to hold others in the true grasp of a greeting. Even encounters with casual acquaintances – people we used to see routinely in the check-out line or the nail salon – need to be celebrated with a fulsome, breathy, almost incredulous Heeeyyy – drawn out an extra second or two to relish the moment of fresh togetherness. Saying hello, in whatever way you say it, is not to be taken lightly. The mere act of greeting someone freely in person, once the most ordinary of behaviors, has become an uncommon pleasure. Hey may be just the right word for the job.

True Confessions

The expanse of my wardrobe is embarrassing. So is the depth of my dedication to it. There is no point in being discreet about this fixation because anyone who knows me is already fully aware of it. My wardrobe is not just about vanity and self-worth, it’s about artistic self-expression and esthetic problem-solving. It is inspired by a cinematic view of life and how one should be costumed for it. Capturing a mood with clothing is what I do instead of paint.

So what happens to a clothes horse when there is nowhere to ride and no one to see? Many of them are flooding malls right now as the economy opens up, eager to engage in the activity that makes having clothes necessary. Shopping. There is no escaping the absurd irony that many people shop primarily for things to shop in.

I love me a good ole rationalization so here’s one. As a species, we can thank evolutionary biology for our love of adornment. Anthropologists look at burial as evidence of “humanity” in our family tree, but the desire to decorate ourselves emerges even earlier with primates. There is also anecdotal evidence of fashion trends among chimps, who exhibit both an enthusiasm for adornment and an aptitude for mimicry – the two defining requirements of homo fashionistas.

Shelter-in-place means, of course, that no one really gets to see much of what you’re wearing. We’ve probably all entertained ourselves by imagining news reporters on air in their ties and boxers. For much the same reason, I find it hard to get my knickers in a knot over Zoom-shots showing only my collar. It feels almost like an abdication of fashion duty to think only about your neckline – but even someone who truly relishes couture must make peace with futility.

Business Very-Casual

I’d be embarrassed to wear anything as put-together as an “ensemble” to an on-line meeting, especially when I’m actually sitting in my kitchen with the dog at my feet and oven mitts nearby. It doesn’t help to be talking to someone seated in front of a waving palm tree or the window in his den – or maybe Zoom’s stock photo version of the window in someone else’s den. Apparel decisions are calculated to reflect a sense of place and circumstance – who I am and where, what I’m doing there, and what kind of assumptions I might want people to make about my competence and my intentions.

The problem with remote work is that those projections and calculations are far more challenging to make when we can’t be together. The virtual environment is a set of on-line adjacencies, not one shared space. The context is in entirely in our heads, an unclear version of “there.” How can we possibly dress for that prismatic place? And how can we “dress” even for the one literal environment in which we spend most of the time? It’s a place where social activity consists largely of hands-free, face-free deliveries, leaving as proof of human presence only the parcels at the door. And when we do encounter others, our COVID masks – the indispensable wardrobe element that every truly well-dressed person should now be wearing – must inevitably upstage the idea of casual adornment. Which brings me to the notion of accessories.

Accessories After the Fact

There is much more to whine about than the wardrobe semiotics of our public health leaders, but in the early terrifying weeks of the pandemic, one of the things I found particularly frightening was Deborah Birx’s scarves. They were extensively written about, although I don’t believe that they earned quite as much condemnation as they actually deserved. At a time when most of us were huddled in our homes, thinking about our food and paper inventory as “rations,” and wondering when we would ever again have the privilege of getting our clothes dry-cleaned, Dr. Birx was turning an accessory into an insignia. She was insisting we look at her wardrobe, and in doing that, she was implying that her oddly fixated fashion decisions were an instrument of her professional credibility. By making us scarf-watch, she was winking at us. The rest of us can use our power suits to good effect on a conference podium, but when the stakes are truly high, fashion must not be allowed to matter. Or, at least, not in a way that people actually notice that it’s mattering. You can’t spread cultural optimism in times like these by accessorizing. Fashion flagrancy is appropriate only when nothing is grave. (It is perhaps worth noting that she made her last appearance without a scarf. She might just as well have waved a white flag.)

So here I sit in yoga pants from Marshall’s which I never thought I’d wear, much less wear to the “office,” and I look ahead to a life in which all forms of interaction will be limited for a long time. Every one of us thinks constantly about when life will return to what we used to recognize as “normal” – a word that has spiked astronomically in Google Trends these past three months – or, if normalcy forever eludes us, what the alternative future reality will look like and whether we’ll be able to bear it. I visit my closet every few days with a sense of yearning, and also a sense of estrangement. It’s particularly painful at this moment, when the start of a new season and the celebration of life’s renewal cannot be enacted by unsheathing all my favorite summer outfits from their plastic storage bags. I am actually starting to forget why I cared so much about my clothing, and that is, itself, an alienating idea that I’d like to banish.

Fashion Instincts

It is tempting right now to assume that I will never again care so much about what I look or dress like when so much of our social and professional lives will be lived in tight virtual spaces for a long time. But I’m banking on the fact that old habits (around which personality has grown like a gnarled tree) are not so easily discarded. Though shaken by the irrelevance of couture in the face of tragedy, this old clothes horse will someday ride again – even if new priorities dull her fashion instincts and she is maybe too old by then to wear some of the things in her closet. The apparel industry will survive so long as the species survives. It will merely express our anguish and our yearnings and our new ways of living with a new set of style imperatives. We are human, after all. We bury our dead and we adorn ourselves. We are persistently vain and trivial. But the impulse to express ourselves to others through adornment is part of what makes us profound.

The write stuff

It’s ironic that a culture unschooled in the art of writing is once again so heavily dependent on the written word for communication. My generation had to nourish long-distance relationships with letters in the 70’s because phone calls were still too expensive. I recall feverishly scribbling my news on crisp onionskin stationery and dispatching a few thin sheets via airmail, the affordable alternative to talk. Penmanship gave letters a unique sort of intimacy. My fingers tingle as I think of it.

Phone calls had a good three-decade run. They added spontaneity and immediacy to communication, in our personal lives and in business. But now it’s rare to call anyone (except those close to you) without an appointment unless you’re trying to reach a help desk. We do most of our “speaking” in email – quickly but not always clearly. (How often have you urged someone: “Just get on the phone and talk to her, already?” But spontaneous phone calls are a thing of the past, now that calls have been upgraded to “meetings.”

Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery is my personal metaphor for dead cultural trends that return, against great odds — always with a peculiar, potentially sinister twist. When old-fashioned correspondence died, it came back as email. Not quite letters, something else. A reincarnation that’s both hauntingly familiar and curiously different, tough for even the most adept writers to manage.

You are what you email

Like any dark dependency, email is both vilified and cherished. Everyone agrees that there’s way too much of it, often unsolicited and unwelcome, and always demanding a rapid response. Fake urgency is the cadence of modern life. Our psychomotor skills are simply not up to it.

Summoned to attention, we root around in our heads for words like mis-matched socks in a messy drawer, reenacting errors we thought we’d shed back in grade school (it’s/its, bear/bare). Even autocorrect cannot shield us from those petty humiliations.

But typos and dumb errors are not the half of it. The big challenge is content ― how to say exactly what we mean without giving offense. It’s hard to be clear and expressive in writing, and email is an especially impoverished medium. While meant to function as spoken dialogue (where intonation can matter more than word choice), email is flat and voiceless. We can’t hear what we’ve written, and we don’t necessarily know how to interpret what’s written back. Even a simple request like “please send it to me” can sound imperious.

And then there’s the pain of delayed response. While we know rationally that everyone’s inbox is managed by triage, it’s easy to over-interpret silence as evidence we’ve not been nice enough or likeable enough to deserve a response. To compensate, we offer lots of well-wishes powered up by the mighty, now indispensable, exclamation point. Hope you’re well! Have a great weekend! Let me know! These Marvel Comic “punch-lines” are now ubiquitous in email – functioning not as signs of aggression so much as reassurance of good intentions.

The original power point

Its origins are not entirely clear. The prevailing theory – which is to say, the theory that seems to have picked up more internet reverb than any other ― traces the exclamation point to the Latin symbol for jubilation, a dot followed by a dash. (I note, for the record, that one 19th century expert on the history of printing dismissed that theory as imaginative folklore.) Another plausible thesis attributes the exclamation point to early music notation. Regardless, historians of punctuation would agree that by the 15th century, it was established as a symbol of emphasis, and for 500 years, it remained so. An exclamation point brooked no challenge. Jubilant or not, it has always served as a signal of force, urgency, and conviction. Pay attention! I mean it, no kidding!

From power to submission

While Google Ngrams can give us some insight into the use of punctuation in literature, there are no publicly available data on contemporary trends in the use of exclamation marks in “private” correspondence. (Surely the masters of artificial intelligence at Google know every jot and emoji in our gmails but they do not share those data.) The Victorians were apparently prodigious users of the mark, often to signal admiration or wonderment, but its use subsided in the 20th century, only to see a resurgence in the 21st with the advent of texting. Now, exclamation points are attached to every good wish we extend in email. That’s great! So nice to hear from you! Enjoy your vacation! Without them, good wishes would seem anemic or insincere. Exclamation points are the heart and the voice of our emails.

But then something else happened. The exclamation mark got pressed into service as a signal of submissiveness. It’s now attached to every email ask or acknowledgment of appreciation – even when not much appreciation is required. (Please let me know if that time would work for you. Thanks! Looking forward to seeing that as soon as possible! I’ll have it for you by tomorrow!) These exclamation points are no longer exultant and powerful. They merely seek to avoid giving offense. Try as I might, I can’t manage to type the word, “thanks,” without an exclamation point. Without it, a thank-you sounds, well, pointless. Ungrateful. Even mildly hostile.

Giving voice to written ideas

Few turns of phrase can ever replace the miraculous expressiveness of the human voice (or face), which means that, in a world where so much of what we say must be written, the exclamation point is forced to shoulder extra burden. That’s clearly why we secretly yearn for social permission to use emojis in our emails when we’re kidding. (Admit it, you do!) In text messages, there is the privilege of inserting a wink or an eye roll that’s worth a dozen words and a wallop of emotional meaning. But in business emails, the use of emojis can seem gauche. So, we need the exclamation point to express not just gratitude, but humor and irony too. (Biking in the Alps was great, thanks, but now I need another vacation to recover!) How many jobs can one little notation handle? As marketers would say, there is clear evidence of unmet need.

Saying and meaning it

For a very long time, the emotional valence of our written words generally could be understood without extra notation. The basic requirements were a few stop lights and arrows to manage the traffic ― primarily the period, the comma, and the double-dash. (Technically speaking, we don’t require even the question mark. We have word order to signal when a question is being asked.)

But digital writing needs more signage. We are producing too many words, too quickly, for people who don’t have the time or context to interpret them properly. And for the “foreseeable future” (if that concept still has meaning), we are bound to produce many more written words per finger, per day, than any of us ― authors and readers alike ― can handle.

Since the digital world is bent on changing so many of the things I personally liked about the English language – largely in ways that dull and degrade it ― I would like to make a case for embracing, perhaps formalizing, a few useful enhancements. Ignore the scolds and the punctuation police. Let those exclamation points and emojis fly! If we bother to retain the question mark, why then should we not also have marks to let people know when we’re kidding? Or to reassure them we are earnestly grateful?

And grateful is what I most assuredly am. Anyone who has read this through to the very last line of text here really deserves my undying gratitude. A full-throated, three-mark, thank-you!!! I hope you know I mean it.

The brown, quick fox?

Not long ago, a BBC culture editor tweeted about English rules “we know but don’t know we know” citing a book by language writer, Mark Forsyth, called The Elements of Eloquence. What caught everyone’s attention was Forsyth’s observation that “Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.” 

When the tweet about that quirky rule went viral, Forsyth rode the wave with a blog post of his own, in which he doubled down, noting that “if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” 

Forsyth makes the assertion that every speaker of English would automatically assemble this improbably long stream of adjectives in the following way: “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife”. Actually, his go-for-broke example overstates (and in some ways obscures) the premise by packing in so many words that its relevance to ordinary speech becomes hard to hear. 

But we do naturally tend to order adjectives in certain ways. The preferred sequence charts a natural path from the “subjective” (observer) perspective to the “objective” view shared with others. We’re more likely to say the “quick brown fox” than the “brown quick fox” and more likely to say “the pretty little French girl” than “the French little pretty girl” or “the little French pretty girl” — without ever being specifically taught that any one sequence is “correct.” They are, in fact, all grammatically correct. Some sequences are simply more “natural” to our ear, more comfortable to say and to hear, or more deeply reflective of how we organize and perceive the world. That’s because even though we generate each fresh utterance in the moment, we grow up absorbing certain preferential word patterns and sequences that subconsciously shape how we say things. 

We all speak statistics

So is Forsyth wrong? No, not exactly — but not entirely right either. Forsyth is merely playing the odds when he talks about adjective order. And by overplaying one anecdote, he obscures the larger plot. Hidden rules like these are not curious exceptions to principles of conscious language production. Rather, the “rules we know, but don’t know we know” constitute the basis for all language.   Much of the common usage we call rules is actually just a set of statistical probabilities.  And the variance around those probabilities fuels language evolution.

The Nike rule of language acquisition: ‘Just do it’

Although most of us receive some formal education in the rules of grammar (not necessarily with long-lasting or useful effect), we all learn to speak our mother tongue fluently without ever being able to articulate a single rule. Listening to my two-year-old grandson learn to speak both German and English — which involves not just acquiring two sets of vocabulary, but also ordering words differently in each language — I am very much reminded that our brain is hard-wired to acquire language patterns. Only later do we ever come to recognize any of them as rules. 

Many of those rules, like preferences for certain cadences or sound patterns, are never overtly discernible to a native speaker. The “not-knowing-we-know” is the essence of language fluency. As a rule-following adult, I am very diligent about applying rules when I try to speak German, but the process is painfully slow, and sentences are often wrong, no matter how much time I take. When you have to think about the rules, it means you can’t apply them so easily. Knowing and doing are not the same things.

Making it up as we go

But the true genius of language is that, while it can be codified as a set of rules, those rules are always evolving and breaking down, even if the changes don’t necessarily progress toward some clear destination. New words or expressions are quite easy to spot and are, in fact, emerging much more rapidly because the internet is a fuel-rod of language change. On the other hand, grammar evolves much more slowly. It’s the foundational structure that supports comprehension. Words are merely décor. When we say, “the dog bit the man”, all English speakers understand that it’s the man who needs a bandage. Subject-verb-object. That’s by no means the universal way of organizing a sentence, but until we learn a foreign language, we tend to assume it is.

Even the rules of grammar change, if given enough time. The English spoken a few hundred years before Shakespeare had not merely two genders but three — masculine, feminine, and neuter — with a complex gender-sensitive grammatical structure woven densely around them. What’s extraordinary is how much deep structural change had to occur in English grammar as it migrated doggedly away from its two formative languages (Germanic and French), with no one consciously promulgating new rules, no authorities formally agreeing to shed critical structure. 

Nothing is more democratic than language. Over the course of centuries, everyone at all levels of society had to have been a full participant in the process by which English was so radically transformed.

Here’s another example, smaller in scale, closer in time. Today, the contraction “ain’t” signals a lack of higher education in most parts of the US, but in Regency England, it was a respectable colloquialism among upper-class speakers, just a slurring of am and not. Its fall from common to ‘’non-standard” usage probably owes to the way Dickens put it into the mouths of seedy underclass characters. Webster’s decision to treat ain’t permissively in its Third International Dictionary (1961) caused something of a ruckus because it seemed to breach the Maginot line between a stance on usage that’s considered “prescriptive” — rules we are supposed to follow — vs purely “descriptive” — the way people actually speak (or write). In truth, that line has never held indefinitely under the steady assault of change.

The loss of subjectivity – and can 'him' and ‘me’ break the rules?

Evolution in grammar is generally slow — and hard for speakers themselves to detect — but sometimes it can be spotted in the act. Take what appears to be the surprising marginalization of the subjective case in English: the “I, she, he, we” posse of pronouns who get things done in the world, English grammar’s go-getters. We are taught that he or I is always the subject of a sentence, but it’s now quite common for people to say things like, “him and I (or him and me) are having dinner together.” Not long ago this usage (like ain't) was associated with lack of formal education, but now it is increasingly common across all speaker subgroups and situations. Mass culture is sweeping away formalisms, breaking down grammatical rules as quickly as social walls. The implication is that at some point in the future, none of us will rely on pronouns to distinguish between the actor and the acted upon. And, arguably, so long as we don’t change the way we order our sentences, we will all understand that when “him kissed her”, he was the one to take the initiative.

The self-righteous among us should keep in mind that English has long allowed “you” to function as either the subject or object of a sentence. Speakers of Middle English started slurring “ye” (of “hear ye, hear ye” fame) somewhere around the 12th century. The resulting merger between you and ye was fully completed by the early 17th.

Things have been quiet on that front for three hundred years. So what accounts for this sudden turn of grammatical events? Whenever things happen quickly, it’s always safe to blame the digital world. The explosive speed and volume of communication are bound to accelerate language change.

But why should him and me prevail over he and I, the way you prevailed over ye? Well, perhaps the loss of the subjective case is a signal of personal disempowerment.  It's a terrifying world out there — shedding the subjective case may be a way of cutting everyone down to size.  Maybe a diminished sense of efficacy is reducing us to objects in the grammar of life rather than agents of autonomous will.  

The “public I” can no longer shield the “private me” from the intrusions of the web and social media. When “I” leave the stage, “me” will be left to do everything, in grammar and in life.

The Game of Language

So rules, schmules. I love them, I tend to live by them, and I almost always write by them, but I also recognize this: that with anything complex, there is a lot of user error — and over time, user error becomes usage. If you love language, you really have to embrace that “unruly” thing about it too — even if the rule-breaking feels like a steep descent to hell for those of us who make a fetish of grammar. People have been whining about it since — no kidding — the Ancient Greeks.

Language is a game, and as in any game, there are rules and skilled users of the rules. But language is a unique game in which all users get to change the rules as they play, whether artfully or accidentally. And those language rules (the ones we know and the ones we don’t know we know) are really patterns of use in context. Context requires continual adjustment to advance the higher cause of communication.

The other day, I asked my husband to please grab me my black silk long dressy sweater. I had broken Forsyth’s inviolate rule for ordering adjectives, but that seemed the best way to focus his attention on the relevant options.

If he thought I was a “maniac”, he never let on.

One of the few truly non-digital innovations to enter the lives of consumers in the past few years is DNA testing, a technology that has expanded the voyage of self-discovery from the depth of our genes to the vast migration patterns of our distant ancestors.  Like advertising generally, the ads for those products are a cultural mirror of powerful yearnings.  If you watch TV, you’ve probably seen some.  One 23andMe ad takes a captivating young woman, whose luminous face gleams with racial variety, from East Asia to the Middle East to West Africa to Scandinavia, where she meets all the cultural components of “100% Nicole”.  That’s as good an excuse as any for what looks like a pretty terrific trip around the world.  In an interesting contrast, Kyle, who had always thought of himself as German, is inspired by a tour of his Scottish DNA, courtesy of Ancestry.com, to “trade his Lederhosen for a kilt” when walking down the aisle. That seems like profound self-reinvention, not genetic destiny.

There are societies that make a fastidious practice of locating and documenting all members on the genealogical tree – many of the world’s tribal cultures, for instance, as well as European aristocracies.  Though sharply divergent in many respects, those they have in common a means of equipping people with a personal identity rooted in a clear historical context.  Cultures that don’t provide that snug social fit, like our contemporary Western societies, leave us all with haunting questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we’re connected to others.  The allure of Ancestry.com, even prior to the introduction of its DNA testing business, was an expression of that powerful longing.  Now that we can reach so deeply into our genetic past, we are more interested in our distant forebears than in our posterity.

Genealogy used to be one of those slightly eccentric hobbies, available only to people from families with the luxury of baptismal records and “town hall” records – elusive for people like the Jews who lived on the run and on the margins of the larger social infrastructure. I’ve always craved a family history that could be traced farther back than the untrustworthy anecdotes of a few generations, and envied those with longer stories to tell.  But the appeal of the distant past is clearly universal.  None of us can help but marvel at how, against odds, we managed to get here, since so many other threads in the infinitely dense web of human origins have been cut forever.  Dead ends everywhere, quite literally. Exploring our ancestry won’t answer the profound existential question that asks why some of us get to be born (and who else does not) but a sightline to our ancestry makes us feel less alone and somehow less accidental.  Those people who are holding the ladder for us as we climb or descend into the future give us a sense of inevitability about the right to be here and the reason.  Inventing a history from the data in our DNA soothes us by directing our gaze toward the door we were destined to enter rather than pointing us toward the exit

But DNA, while it may be destiny of a certain sort, is not culture.  Culture is something we acquire from those around us, not from others who came centuries before.   At a time when we are looking hard at what it means to accept people (hospitably or not) from another culture, it is interesting that the advent of DNA testing is encouraging us to think of our genes as the carriers of our culture, bestowing traditions – headgear or holidays -- like entitlements we can reclaim just because our DNA tells us we are 67% something, 33% something else.  Kyle has little more claim on his kilt than I, a Jewish woman of Eastern European origins, have on a sari, even though I’d like to wear one sometime for the sheer fun of draping myself in another culture.  Whatever Kyle’s genes say, his kilt is borrowed.  And even if he has not a drop of German blood in him, he comes honestly by his Lederhosen.  They were a gift to him from others who aimed to shape him with that gift, whatever misconceptions may have manufactured it. That gift of instruction is what culture really is.  DNA testing is just another origin myth.  It may be scientifically valid but from a cultural perspective, it is inauthentic.