Talking About Words: Watching Language

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

Back when decorum (or prudery) exercised a strong force in conversation, the admonition "Watch your language" was a warning to someone skirting the edges of blasphemy or obscenity. "Damn!" an angry person might exclaim, only to hastily repair the damage by saying: "Sorry! Darn!" (Or maybe "Drat.")

If someone said, "He ain't to home," a person presuming the power of corrector might say "Watch your language!" and get that person to mend his linguistic ways: "Sorry! He isn't home."

Nowadays, language watching isn't so fraught with peril as it used to be, though collisions of usage still take place. "It's fishin'" said a friend of mine (perfectly aware of my professorhood); "Not fishing. Don't talk stuck up." Since it was his boat, I did my best to talk fishin' and huntin' and teachin' as we trolled.

Watching language can be fun, too, particularly if we put questions of "right" and "wrong" behind us and search to see what's going down where.

Anymore

In some places (hereabouts for one), anymore as an adverb has to have a negative word in its orbit: "They don't have good salads there anymore." From the perspective of a person demanding the negative, there's something strange and wonderful about: "Anymore they have really good salads." Those who think that sentence is just fine treat anymore pretty much the way that everybody uses nowadays. Positive anymore is scattered around the American linguistic scene and used by people of all educational attainments. It's particularly popular in places where the Scots-Irish settled.

Innit

Not nearly as many Americans as Britons use innit for "isn't it," and the use of innit in this way is the focus of powerful anger in England. Writing about Caribbean vacations, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph in London (for March 27, 2005) wrote: "When they get home they can wave their luxury hotel brochure in front of their mates—'Lushinnit?'—and show off their tans and tattoos by wearing minuscule items of clothing in the middle of the British winter." For the hopelessly hidebound, she provides an explanation for Lushinnit: "Isn't this delightful." Obviously, people who say innit shouldn't enjoy winter holidays. People who talk this way are called chavs nowadays. Chavs are described with the usual British attention to fine grades of social nuance as: "a nasty, thieving element."

She is being tall

Verbs and adjectives expressing states do not usually appear with the progressive aspect. Or, in ordinary language, what is (relatively) permanent or habitual isn't expressed with the –ing form of verbs. Most speakers of English would say, "She is tall," or "I find Agra delightful." It seems strange to them when someone says: "I am being tall" or "I am finding Agra delightful." English-speakers in India don't see anything strange about these expressions at all: "She is having many saris."

I wish I would have

In North America, we find elliptical clauses with the second verb deleted quite normal: "I didn't buy a lottery ticket and I wish I would have because the winner was the date of my birthday." British English speakers find sentences like that one bizarre. They want it to be expressed as "I wish I would have done" where the verb done connects explicitly to buy. Of course sentences with (or without) done are perfectly intelligible, but we think that people who don't follow our preferences are, well, foreign.

Anymore we are all being foreign, innit.

Urban dictionary definition of chav >

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.