John McWhorter
Appearances
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And it was just that kind of... And that kind of trash-talking thing. Just like... There are papers written about that. One, actually. Yeah, that is very common. That must have been wild. Especially to see that big a switch. Because in my case, it was like from here to here. But with Patois, first he's Margaret Thatcher, and then suddenly he's Bob Marley.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I always just assumed that people were going to do stuff wrong, and I would have been listening to what the grammar was.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I want to hear this, because I don't.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Can you give me one half of an example of what you mean? Like, I'm allowed to say it, but no one else is.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I forget them the minute I write them. You can't. Oh, today is, what's her name? The Congresswoman, Jasmine Crockett.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
What you're saying is something I'm feeling as I get a little older because I'm pushing 60 and so I'm no longer the young pup and I feel like I've got a certain amount of life experience and also just I'm beginning to come off as the kind of person who you call sir or in the parking lot, okay boss, you know, that sort of thing.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so I'm beginning to take those chances to an extent. With Jasmine Crockett, I will say this. I was very careful in the wording of that because I thought, especially because she's 40 and a bit, and I'm about to be 60. I'm male. I have an imperious demeanor. I don't think that she did anything that was absolutely sinful.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so honestly, in the editing of that, we were very careful with the words. And so near the end of it, I say that, Her explanation for why she made fun of the man in the wheelchair was, what did I call it? Clever, but hopeless. There was an idea that I was supposed to say clever, but cowardly. And I said, no, that's too mean. I don't want to call her a coward.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I want to say that the explanation just doesn't work. So I think part of it, but the fact that I wrote that at all, I don't know if I would have written that one 20 years ago, or if I did, it would have been read as John just likes to criticize black people and he does that every week when I actually do it very rarely.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But I think what you're talking about is that I'm getting a little older and therefore feel like I can say things that I couldn't when I was Coleman Hughes's age, like 30, where if I would say things, even if I thought I was right, it would be, you're too young. How dare you? And I really felt at the time I need to respect my elders. I would try very hard to do that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Especially in black American culture, you don't sass your elders. You don't sass your parents. Well, now I'm my parents. And so I'm going to start doing some constructive sassing. I think that's part of it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Thank you for it not being about they and them. Okay, you, yeah. That was the one that was the funnest to write.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
The book is, it's not just a book about they. I mean, I think there already is a book Just about they, I couldn't have sustained anyone's attention for that long. It's each pronoun. So there's I, there's you, there's he, she, it, there's we, and there's they. So that's seven chapters. Notice that it's compact.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And the idea is to give the history of each one of those little words and then to discuss some controversy that is connected with them. we kind of resist controversy. That chapter was a challenge because I was thinking nobody fights over we, but I got a chapter out of it anyway. But that was the point.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And of course, when I was writing it in 2023 on a sun porch upstate, I was thinking, ha ha, happy linguistic pronouns, because The book before this was called Woke Racism, and it was a bourbon-fueled, angry little screed that needed to be written in 2020. But it's this book where I'm screaming on every page, and books like that are not fun to write.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So after that was over, I thought, I want to do one of the happy language books. And I thought, what about the pronouns? The last thing I was thinking was all of this debate we're having now about trans identity, et cetera. I was just writing about pronouns. So the book has fallen into a different atmosphere than I was expecting. But really, it's just
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Me enjoying pronouns like in Nine Nasty Words, I enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I don't mean that you all are a problem. Oh, there was some black English, too. We will get there. That was silly. That was the problem. So it used to be, yeah, exactly, exactly. Thou, Malcolm, as opposed to you in the audience. That's how English is supposed to be. Thou art sitting in a chair.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You are sitting, to be honest with the lighting, I can't tell what you're sitting in, but I presume they are chairs. And so thou. and you. You're supposed to have singular and then a plural one. In early Middle English and before, there was a dual. So if it's just you two, then it was yeet. And so thou, yeet, and you. And then they had case forms. Thou, if it's subject, thee, if it's an object.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You was the object form. Yee was the subject form, like hear yee. And then yeet didn't do that. But the possessive of yeet, if you wanted to say you two's book, ink book. Get that. And so Got it wrong. No. Ink was the object form. Yeet and then ink. So I've done it all for you too, my children. I've done it all for ink. Inker was the possessive.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So you had all of these you forms and everything's chugging along. And today all we have is you. Not even ye and you, just you. Thou is gone, no thee, just you. It all just falls away.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's like it had a disease, yeah. Thou is the one we miss. We need thou. We need thou. We need it back right now. But we can't do it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Well, if you think about it, if you're going from English to almost any language you're likely to learn, Notice the first thing you learn is that there's something like du, and then there's some plural form. You never learn that the word for you is the same both in the singular, if there's a chart in front of you, the singular and the plural. That's not how languages work.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so all over Europe, this is preserved. This difference is preserved. There are different spheres of influence that it has in different languages and at different times. But if it's Russian, it's supposed to be du and vi. You don't have vi used for everything. You don't have vi used for everything. English is different in that way. English is a very odd language in certain corners of its being.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And to tell the truth, it's obscure. We need a singular versus a plural form, and we try to create a plural form by saying y'all or yous or yins. And we're told that that's just funny. It's just slang. It smells like fish or bubble gum or marijuana. It's not a real word. And yet all we're trying to do is be a normal language.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Take a stand. I'd like to see thou come back. I think we need thou. There was nothing wrong with it. It's just like German du. We need thou. The problem is that thou sounds antique. Thou sounds like somebody in a periwig who's about to die of yellow fever because it's so far back. But if we bring in you, then we have to accept y'all as legitimate. Or yous. Or you guys. Or yous.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And that's really tough, too, because of the aforesaid odors of those words.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Thou is great for art. Yeah. Art thou. But it would be hard to use out on the street. Do I say it in the book? No, that was about something else. You could not say thou naked. You know, it wouldn't seem quite right.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
If I were the Tsar? Like if I could do an executive order, yeah. I would, you would be in the singular, and I would enforce that you all was more widely accepted. I would say that the Wall Street Journal has to start allowing you all, and it has to start being taught in school with a teacher with a stick at a blackboard. That's the way I would do it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Already when I teach about language, I say it's going to be I, you, he, she, it, We, y'all, they. I always say that because you need a y'all in that sense.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah, because they don't use it to mean the singular. But when they say, it's one person, you're at a 7-Eleven, and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't mean y'all that one person right there. It's implying that there's somebody out there in the car or something, which is the following. It's a politeness strategy.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So with du and vous, you can address a single person as vous, as if they're two people, and so you're not hitting the person like this. If you say y'all come back now, you're kind of saying vous come back now. You're taking away the directness to say you, you one individual, I hope you come back and buy another Slim Jim. It's a little direct as opposed to y'all come back.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's a very courtly thing that y'all.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Is it just a lack of specificity? It's just that you need to pause and clean something up. And you'd rather not have to. Imagine never having to say, I don't mean you all. I mean just you. Or I mean just you, not you all over there. There are larger tragedies. But nevertheless, that is one of those things where, oh, that is one of those things where we have a ding.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Like, for example, in French, you're driving a rental car. And you're in a big hurry. And all the other cars are parked in a line. And you pull into a space. And you don't really park it right. And the butt of the car is kind of pushing out. So you run down into the little hut and you say, I'm sorry, but my car is sticking out. There's no way to put it that way in French. Nothing can stick out.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You can say, I didn't park properly. You can say that the row is uneven. But if you try to say, the car is sticking out and I'm sorry, They don't have it. Now, does that mean that it's hard to be French? I doubt it. But it would be nice if they had that word. It would be nice if we had a thou, or if we could use y'all in the same way. Yeah.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Oh, that would be adorable.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Thou. Thou art. Thou art reading. It just sounds like somebody who died 150 years ago. But I could get used to it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's possible. It's funny you say religious because I forgot something, which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friends Select in Philadelphia in the late 70s. And back then, there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers, who were still using thee and thy and in natural speech, the ones who were super Quaker as in dressing Quaker.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And I remember there was this one teacher who would come and look at your paper and say, don't forget to put thy name on thy paper. And he meant it straight. He didn't mean it ironically. And you know part of why I don't like that? I never thought about this. You're making me think about a lot of things I haven't thought about.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Because one day, he decided to take a long trip in a canoe, and he happily you know, pulled out into the Delaware River and, you know, was talking about when he was going to come back and no one ever saw that man again. And I must admit that I associate thou with that man. And that is much too arbitrary. So I can't, laughing at this man's demise, but I need to stop that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I would enjoy there being thou, but I'm trying to imagine it imposed on a whole society. And I cannot see my 10 and 13 year old feeling differently about it. But then again, there are aspects of them that I may never know. I'll ask them next time I see them.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Well, in that case, we use you colloquially. Well, why suddenly can I not talk? And he had a stroke that night. You, colloquially. But we would actually say, you can't do that, can you? And so you gets dragged even into that one usage, which ended up replacing, it was originally a word mon, which was not man, but it was mon. And then mon just dropped away.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves. for some reason. But you have the one, and you're saying, does that allow space?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Because you is overstretched. Because not only is it used in the singular and the plural, but you also use it for this indefinite. Real Germanic languages, normal European languages, have some dedicated pronoun, as we call it, for the indefinite. That's one thing that a pronoun should do. That book should have an extra chapter. In Old English, it was mon. Then mon shortened to muh.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so you would say, you know, you got to do it. And you would say, muh got to do it. That's not very accurate Middle English, but you get my point. And then it just, that muh flew away. And you ended up being dragged in for that too. We work that little word so hard. It's a miracle that we don't trip over our linguistic shoelaces with it more. But Languages aren't usually like that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called Beric, and all they have is I, we, then you, and then there's one word that means he, she, it, and they. One word like quack. It's not quack, but it's just one thing. But we're more like that than we are like the European languages that we're actually related to.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
In order to give you a break? Yeah. In order to give one a break. Right. But we can't because if you use one in that way, you sound like you have a big mustachio and you walk with a cane and you're in black and white in an old movie played by an actor named C. Aubrey Smith. One mustn't do that. It's too high.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah, it was Tom Bradley, that's right.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Or Fats Waller saying, one never knows, do one. But that was Arch. He's saying that while he's knocking back the djinn. That was funny. In his real life, he certainly wouldn't have said, you know, one never knows. And so one, for arbitrary reasons, is marked. And so it has that upper crust meaning. And most of us are only upper crust on occasion. And so we need something more casual.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And it ends up being, yeah, poor little you all the time. Yeah. It's a heartbreaking chapter.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And I was trying to figure out why... He sounded like a Disney announcer. Like a Disney announcer.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Words are on the move. That was the title of one of my books, actually. Words are on the move all the time in all languages. Some of them are moving faster. than others, but there's no such thing as a language where the words just stay where they are. And it can be hard to process that the words are on the move, because usually, not always, but usually, happens very slowly.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But words' meanings are always kind of morphing. Obnoxious used to mean vulnerable to harm. And so don't render yourself obnoxious by wearing too few clothes to the jousting tournament. You take my point. So it only came to mean noxious because it sounded like noxious. And so we now use it to mean that. If you look in a grammar guide in about 1900,
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
There's always some person, the kind of person who says one and has that mustache, who is complaining. People are using obnoxious to mean annoying when really it's supposed to mean subject to harm. Sniff, sniff. We're going to have to deal with this. This is a sign of the lack of education. And so that is what happens to all words, and that's true in Japanese, Hungarian, Tahitian.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
There's no language where that's not happening.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That's a very good question. And the answer to it is that Parisian French is one thing. The French of Quebec, and it's actually very similar to Cajun French, is a different grouping of dialects. And so you can say that these things are older. But the thing is that those dialects have changed a great deal since they were moved over to Quebec.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And the Quebec dialect is very different than what it would have been in, say, the late 1600s and the 1700s. It's just that you can still see the likenesses. It's not that Quebec stayed the way this was. And so all languages move along. And the truth is, I have not done a study of the joual spoken in, for example, Montreal.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I don't remember what I said then because it was before you know what, and therefore it feels like it was 75 years ago.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I'm sure that that variety has changed more in the past 300 years than French, standard French in Paris, because written languages change more slowly.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So if a language is just allowed to do what it wants to do, like some language in a rainforest spoken by indigenous people, it's never written down, that language moves along considerably, such that you might even have a little bit of a problem understanding your great, great grandparents.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Once it's on the page and your brain is kind of on writing, as I put it, and you think that the real language is written, then it tends to slow language change down. So what we know is how language changes, where when the new they comes in, we're thinking, good Lord, what happened? That would not shock people as much if this were an unwritten language.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Language changes very quickly until it's yoked to the page, which is true of only about 200 languages. of the 7,000 languages that there are. The idea that you think of the language in writing and then you think of speaking as just a sloppy way of how it's done on the page, that's only a very few languages, and we happen to be speaking one. Normal human language gets to mind its own business.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But I know that I probably would have said that he would have grown up in a time when the unspoken cultural expectations of oratory culture were such that if you were trying to make your way in the world, whatever color you are as an American, there was an expectation that you would learn the standard dialect and be absolutely comfortable in it. Frankly, Booker T. Washington did that too.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so it's faster for them.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I think it's great. And I know that there is a strain of thought that says that non-black people are stealing black English features and appropriating them and that there should be a line. But for one, there could never be that line. That line couldn't happen, especially with the mainstreaming of hip hop.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And it's getting to the point where you can be a thoroughly mature person and not really remember when rap was listened to by basically all kids. That happened really in the 90s. But once you've got that, and you've got that music in people's ears, and just in general, I think that it's a sign that there is less of a color line than there used to be. And we all know that we still have work to do.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But There was a different time. There was 1950, and then there was 1980, which was very different from today. And I think that this business of supposing that non-black people aren't going to borrow what is probably the most vibrant slang in the United States, it'll never happen. It's actually a good sign that it is happening.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And it really is at the point where if you're going to look at how modern English is changing, which is mostly the words, Two times out of three, it comes from either black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source of our new words. And really, it's a word I try to avoid two words. Holistic, because it just makes everybody happy to hear the word holistic. And also the word dynamic.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's dynamic. What the hell does that mean? But I think that black English jumping into mainstream English is quite dynamic, and I enjoy watching it. So, yeah, I'm not giving the right answer because I know there are people who think that it's appropriation. That's complicated, though, and I think that's an over-application of the appropriation concept, I think.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I want people to stop saying it is what it is, because I find that the chilliest, most dismissive expression, that's got to stop. There's something pickier. You can't just walk into this room and start yelling. That's how the sentence should be. You can't simply walk into this. You can't just walk But everybody says, you just can't walk into this room and start yelling.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That is now ordinary American English, and I have no right to have any problem with it. But it's kind of like you wanting the order in the Monopoly directions. It doesn't make any sense. You can't just walk in, but people say just can't all the time. There was an episode of The Lucy Show where somebody did it, and so I know that it's not new. But it really, it hurts me. And then...
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Let's see what else. This is one that I didn't like when I started hearing it in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people say when they're having a conversation. They'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they also make it in an orange color. You're trying to say something. They say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it sounds pushy to me, kind of like, you shut up. And that's not what they mean.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But to me, it's just one yeah would do. What they're trying to do is... take their turn in the conversation, and they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same way that now both you and I probably use exclamation points in our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind of, be there in a second, ding!
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
He was born a slave. If you listen to recordings, you'd think he was Teddy Roosevelt. And that's because that's what you had to do, which was kind of unfair. But I was thinking he comes from the time when black people were expected to speak that way if they wanted to have public influence. And I'm sure that he spoke in different ways when he did not have the camera on him.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And so that has become, and so now if you want to really exclaim, if you want to say something like, the tangerine is the best flavor, then you have to use two exclamation points. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, is kind of long for what used to be just, yeah, but, it's just this kind of natural, It's kind of like sections of DNA replicating. And so that was a weird analogy, but yeah.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's completely out of control. That's right. And all that is is that you're being cheery and polite. Yeah. That was not the way we wrote emails 30 years ago or even 20. But now I'm doing the exclamation points because I'm thinking if I just have a period, it makes it look like I'm angry. And that's how punctuation changes.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I have my days, but I would disguise it by using a meaningless exclamation point. All right, one last one for the road. So it was, you just can't. It was, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there was the, what was the first thing I said? And it is what it is. People have got to stop that. So I would have those three. And then maybe y'all.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And see, you can't say that. What they're really saying is stop, it's kind of like, yeah, it's stop talking about that. Like it is what it is, and therefore there's no point in dwelling on it, and now let's talk about RFK Jr., Or something. And what I wanted to talk about was the tangerine ice cream. So that's how that goes.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
No, no. That ended in the late 60s. And there was a new idea. And in some ways, a healthy idea that to be taken seriously, you don't have to learn to talk in the standard way you can express yourself, how you feel like it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah, although I happen to be what's called a historical linguist, which means that I'm interested in how language changes. You can be somebody who's interested in just how language is right now. In which case, that Tom Bradley question would be less of interest. But for me, it's all about what was going on in the past. And especially nowadays, we're at the point where you have 100 years.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It's actually technically 102 years of people recorded speaking and moving at the same time. And so there's some sound films starting in 1923. And that, to me, is history, especially now that we've got the internet. And so you can just see these things happening, and you can listen to the way people talk. And so that's something I do. Not all linguists would be inclined to do that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
They would do other interesting things. But it's a little obsession of mine, especially lately, how has American English changed over about the past 125 years when you can actually hear it? You can listen to, this won't go on for too much longer, but you can listen to the black musical theater artist, Burt Williams, who has a certain name, But he first became famous working with George Walker.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
They're two black men. You can see them in pictures. And, you know, they've got the minstrel makeup, and they're in these forced poses. And you kind of think, what were they like? And it's hard to tell. There's some recordings of them. There are a few. And they're like, like that. And you can listen to the way they spoke and sang.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
They both sound Caribbean, including George Walker, who grew up in Kansas, because black English vowels were different back then. If you listen to black people on cylinders from the 1890s, And then them, they don't say coat. They say coat like that. Somebody's going to marry me. Somebody's going to marry me. That's how they sounded. And so these are the obsessions that one starts to have.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Both of those. Yeah. And it's not only black people. It's just people in general. Listen to that vowel. Why did the person use the word fantastical in that particular way? There are all sorts of things. And then, like, do I go looking for it?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Not necessarily, but if I find out that there is some four-CD player set called Sounds of the Deep Past, the first thing I'm thinking is how interesting could most of that be? But there'll be two things where somebody is black or somebody is using something colloquial, and so I'll listen to all four of those damn CDs once because you never know what you're going to get.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And you get just enough to put into books and to mention to you and things like that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You mean linguistics in general? No, no, this thing you're just talking about. Oh, that. It's a summer day in 1975. And my father's got his beer, and he's watching this bad old movie. And it was a movie biography, old one, of Stephen Foster. And the people keep walking through, and the vowels are different. I'm going to write Swanee River. And I asked Ed, why do they talk that way?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And he said, well, you know... Things change, and that's about all he had. But I remember thinking, those were real people, and yet they don't talk like us. Why? And then a seed was gradually planted. There's an episode of, I've never spoken about this, there's an episode of The Lucy Show. Not I Love Lucy, but her second show that got bad.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And in one of the early episodes, Lucy gets a maid, and the maid is snobbish, and so Lucy starts buying the maid lunch. And at one point she says, oh, it's a roast chicken. It's broasted. And she says, it's broasted. And I was listening to that when I was about 13 and thinking, that's not a word anymore, is it? That sort of thing, for some reason, interests me.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And next thing you know, you've got so much of it stuck crowding out more important things in your head. But you can write books about it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
The way people talk is very resonant to me. And as I've gotten older, I've realized that for other people, it's the way people walk or the way somebody dances or the way people dress. But I know from a very early age, just speech was interesting. It was a window into the soul. People spoke differently. And that was about this much blackness.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It was just listening to people in general, getting a sense that my teachers had a certain accent that the white people on TV didn't have. In Philadelphia, you say lousy, whereas Lucy says lousy. And I was thinking, well, that's interesting. Annoying my southern relatives by noticing that they had different vocabulary here and there. You know, I'm this little kid. I talk like this.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And I say, you say carry when we would say take. And they would get tired of that. But I realized it was because I was interested in dialect. Also, um... One thing I missed, and I think it's partly from being black, is I never heard black English as wrong. I didn't grow up speaking it. I grew up hearing it. I have a good passive competence. But I remember cousins who very much spoke it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And they would use features of black English. And I would listen and not think nothing. Some people just not care. I would not think that's bad grammar, that's wrong. I wouldn't think it was exotic. I would listen to it and think, hmm, that's different from the way I would put it. And I wonder why. Is that based on something in history?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I had one cousin who was using what we call the narrative had, people who study black English. And then we had gone downstairs. And then we had seen that there was a raccoon in the basement. And then we had said, hey, let's get rid of that raccoon. And then we had gone back upstairs. And I keep waiting for, you had what? And then what? And it was just all had.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And I remember listening to Darren doing that and thinking, that must be different instead of him not knowing what had means. And then years later, I found out that linguists had written about that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It might be a black thing. Yes. Or like when Will Smith says, well, what had happened was he's taking... That's what she did.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That is because it's a good, earthy, yet systematic way of using the language. It's called narrative head. There are papers about it. Notice I say papers. There's one paper about it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
He would have gotten that narrative had from Harlem, most likely. From Harlem. Yeah, that's good, solid, northern black English. Yeah.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That gets into my parents and what they were like. And so plenty of black family speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Airy in Philadelphia was a very integrated neighborhood. The black people in the neighborhood had become middle class from mostly being working class. So there was plenty of black English spoken in the neighborhood. Close friends of mine spoke it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
My mother grew up speaking southern black English, but switched to a kind of generalized suburban northern when she moved to Philadelphia. My father spoke Philadelphia black English, but, and this is something I really have only wrapped my head around over the past year, really thinking about it. they were not inclined to use their vernacular around their kids. They didn't speak it to us.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I remember thinking mom gets on the phone with her relatives and all of a sudden there's this other way she has of speaking. I was trying to wrap my head around it. Whereas to tell you the truth, most black moms would have spoken that way, at least some to their kids as well. And the truth is both of my parents tried their best. They were both brilliant people.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
They provided a materially great existence. but they were both very closed-off people in general, and that played out in terms of dialect. Then also, my sister talks exactly like me. If I have a weird voice, there's one other person. It's my sister who's four years younger, and she sounds just like this.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So it was both of us, and I find myself thinking sometimes we both do that, but also I'm not an imitator. As much as I love other languages and trying to learn them and never doing it as well as I'd like to, Holly, my sister, went to Spelman and came back with this new repertoire. All of a sudden, she could switch. She had a kind of black English. She had the cadence. Whereas I never did that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And to be honest, if I had gone to Morehouse, I don't think that would have happened. I talk the way I talk, and other people imitate me. And I think that's just neurons or something. I like the way I talk. I'm not going to talk like someone else. But that is the reason. And I wish...
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
that I had picked it up for real because not having that natural competence means that you come off sometimes as thinking you're better than people when really it's just that that's not in your mouth and I can completely understand what it would look like from another perspective. But yeah, that's it.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Sometimes, to be honest, I have wished that I was, and I'm not just saying this because it's you except I am, I wished that I was black Canadian because I think that's less of an issue there in terms of the place of American black English in what it is to be a black person, but that's just an idle thought.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You're a different person.