Malcolm sits down with the linguist John McWhorter, to discuss his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. Among other things in their wide-ranging conversation, John makes an impassioned case for the return of “thou.” Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Chapter 2: Who is John McWhorter and what is his background?
I was a fan of John McWhorter long before I met him for the first time. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University and a music lover and a New York Times columnist, basically a Renaissance man. It was maybe 2019 when we first spoke. At the time, I was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993.
And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I was struck by something I heard. Listen.
There is nothing there to hide. I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has been an open book, and this is another demonstration of that.
Chapter 3: Why does Tom Bradley sound like Cary Grant?
Tom Bradley is black, born in Texas, grew up in South Central Los Angeles. So I went to see McWhorter, went to his rabbit warren of an office, played him that bit of tape and said, explain this to me. Why does a black guy whose parents were sharecroppers from Texas sound like Cary Grant? And for an hour of the most wonderful conversation, he explained to me exactly why he did.
Fast forward a few years, I was doing our series on the 1936 Olympics, and I got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important journalists in the world in the 1930s. And I heard some old tapes of her, and she sounded like she was the Duchess of York, only, do you know where she grew up? Buffalo.
So who do I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John McWhorter. My point is that there is a certain kind of question about language, about race, about why we speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is, let's call up John McWhorter. I love John McWhorter.
And when he said he had a new book coming out called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him, could I interview you about it? And lucky for me, he said yes. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going to run the conversation I had with John McWhorter this spring at the 92nd Street Y, which was delightful.
I did this interview with John right after finishing up the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard it is and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot from someone like Oprah.
And that episode was very much on my mind as I was interviewing the quarter because I was thinking, oh, am I going to measure up? Where do I land on the Oprah-Joe Rogan continuum? I'll let you be the judge of that. Although I will say this is not exactly a fair test. The degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John McWhorter is very, very low. Hello, everyone.
Thanks for coming. John, thank you for... agreeing to join us tonight. Malcolm, thank you for having me. I was thinking back when I first met you, and I think it was I called you up or went to see you because I was doing something on the first... black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley.
Yeah, it was Tom Bradley, that's right.
And I was listening to tapes of him speaking, and he sounded like the whitest guy I could imagine.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of dialect and language in culture?
The minute... I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh! I remember I played you a tape. You were like, oh! And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John. This is what it means to be a linguist. You're constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't let a... More or less.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you say you have... This sounds like a fantastic obsession, by the way. How does that, like... Is this something you do sort of for fun? In other words, do you have places you go to find these historical... Or are you just watching a movie from the 30s and you stop it and you go back five minutes and you play up a... Both of those things.
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?
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.
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Chapter 5: How has American English changed over time?
When did you, at what point in your career, life, whatever, did you realize that this was something of particular interest to you?
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?
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.
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.
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.
John, you've got to do better than that. You can't say, for some reason, it interests me. You've got to tell me. You've got to tell us more than that.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What are the key themes in John McWhorter's book 'Pronoun Trouble'?
They were doing that Jamaican thing where they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry. Yes. Which I had never seen before. I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life. That he could go from literally, Malcolm blah, blah, blah, and then boom.
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.
That must have been amazing. That's right. Then I began to hear my mother when she would get angry. She would lapse, not into full-on Patois, but You could hear the Jamaican coming out of voice.
The vernacular.
That idea as well. No, it's funny, because I'm making the same, on some level, observations you are as a child, but I have no... What sidetracks me at that age is not how people are speaking, but how they're explaining things. I get obsessed in the same way that you, I think, it's funny, in the same way that you get obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves. Grammar, yeah.
To me, it was about, we're playing hearts and our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts and my brother starts explaining hearts to my cousin. He's doing it all wrong. That was my obsession. I'm six, I'm just like, why, why, start with the point of the game. Like, what are you doing? You know, like that. And I realized how deeply kind of... And it bothered you? Oh, to this day, it works.
I get bothered by it.
I always just assumed that people were going to do stuff wrong, and I would have been listening to what the grammar was.
No, no, no. The surest way for me to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that someone has written for something. Just like, what is this? I mean, come on. I want to call up the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter. I want to talk a little bit about your, and by the way,
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Chapter 7: Why is language considered a window into the soul?
I want to hear this, because I don't.
Here's my theory. At any given moment in sort of popular culture or intellectual popular culture, there is someone who is allowed to get away with saying anything. You're that person. I think you get to say whatever you want. For a variety of reasons, which I'd like you to unpack.
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.
Well, you wrote a beautiful, was it an op-ed? I can't remember where you wrote it. a thing about your own experience with affirmative action. Yes. Nobody else could write that. True. You write about... You, in your column, are constantly... in a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules for discourse, particularly around your code-switching column of yesterday.
Like, all right, you're not allowed to do that. You're going to do it this way.
I forget them the minute I write them. You can't. Oh, today is, what's her name? The Congresswoman, Jasmine Crockett.
Jasmine Crockett. You said very gently and nicely, you said to her, come on now. You get to do that. I do. You know what? Who else can do that?
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.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: How does code-switching play a role in identity?
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.
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.
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
Me enjoying pronouns like in Nine Nasty Words, I enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.
But you, so tell us the problem with you. You is a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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