“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English”, by John McWhorter

 

256 pages, Avery, ISBN-13: 978-1592404940

Hmmmmm...what to do, what to do, what to do about a book that simultaneously interests and annoys you, for that is what Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter does throughout its brief 250-or-so pages. He engages in several fascinating subjects, such as a whole chapter dedicated to the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. What the hell is that? I hear you ask Okay:

        Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that         cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The hypothesis states that the way             people think is strongly affected by their native languages.

‘kay? ‘kay. While interesting in and of itself, does it really deserve a whole chapter in a book that is purportedly about “the untold history of English”? There is also a discussion of the relativism of what constitutes “proper” English, which has only some incidental value to that history but doesn’t really advance the cause, as well as a chapter about possible visits by the Phoenicians to northern Europe and how that affected “Proto-Germanic” language, which is so speculative as to be of only passing interest and has, I would argue, no place in a book about the history of the language – that is, hard history which relies on facts and not theories. His discussion of the Scandinavian influence that resulted in English dropping gender for nouns, I found, was very good: the author basically says that it happened because Vikings learned Old English (badly) and so they just gave up trying to learn the Old English noun genders, like damn-near every European language has. And good for us, too; who needs a lot of repeat-words junking up the language?

As I read this book, however, it occurred to me that McWhorter was having an argument with the academics of the linguistic world that didn’t necessarily include us. As I don’t belong to this particular insular world, his sarcastic asides and acerbic innuendos were often lost on me, at least not after the first several chapters. Then there are the errors, which even a non-linguist such as I noticed, perhaps the most obvious one being a discussion of the very few languages that use clicks of the tongue: in enumerating them, the author omits the Naabeehó bizaad, the language of the Navajo, perhaps the one most known to the general public and the basis of at least some of code talkers in WWII from intercepting Allied messages. I mean, c’mon, man: Nicholas Cage spent all that time making a movie about them, and you couldn’t remember to include them in your list?

Sheesh.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is ultimately a weird book: while it seemed that McWhorter initially tried to write a popular discussion of what can be a very dry and technical field, his attempt at jocularity and colloquialisms appeared forced, as if he were trying to present the material to a classroom of high schoolers (English grammar is “freaky”, did you know?). He then lapses into fairly long, technical discussions to support his arguments, and a split-personality contrast to his earlier breezy, pop culture, wanting-to-be-liked voice emerges. I’d say the first half of the book is okay for adding some new twists to the history of English, even if the discussion gets repetitive and you have to take the author’s claims with a grain of salt. The second half seems to be filler.