John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language and Words on the Move

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🗓️ 21 August 2017

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

How did bad come to mean good? Why is Shakespeare so hard to understand? Is there anything good about "like" and "you know?" Author and professor John McWhorter of Columbia University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the unplanned ways that English speakers create English, an example of emergent order. Topics discussed include how words get short (but not too short), the demand for vividness in language, and why Shakespeare is so hard to understand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:09.3	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:18.9	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.7	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:26.1	back to 2006.
0:28.3	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:30.8	We'd love to hear from you.
0:34.6	Today is August 8th, 2017.
0:36.8	I'm, I guess, his linguist and author John McWorter of Columbia University.
0:41.2	He's the author of many books.
0:43.2	Today we'll be talking about words on the move why English won't and can't sit still,
0:49.0	like literally John Welcome to Econ Talk.
0:51.8	Thank you very much.
0:53.7	Emergent order is a common top-of-curity con talk and Thomas Sol and others, including
0:58.6	myself, have used language as an example of emergent order.
1:02.7	Language is undoubtedly the product of human action but not human design.
1:06.6	In your book, John, brought that alive for me in an incredibly rich way.
1:10.6	So you write, for example, one of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that
1:15.1	a language is something that is when it is actually something always becoming.
1:20.4	They tell you a word is a thing when it's actually something going on.
1:24.7	Is it an order thing?
	...

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