The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (23 page)

In Boston there is an old joke about a woman who landed at Logan Airport and asked the taxi driver, “Can you take me someplace where I can get scrod?” He replied, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

Occasionally a playful or cool-sounding form will catch on and spread through the language community, as
catch-caught
did several hundred years ago on the analogy of
teach-taught
and as
sneak-snuck
is doing today on the analogy of
stick-stuck
. (I am told that
has tooken
is the preferred form among today’s mall rats.) This process can be seen clearly when we compare dialects, which retain the products of their own earlier fads. The curmudgeonly columist H. L. Mencken was also a respectable amateur linguist, and he documented many past-tense forms found in American regional dialects, like
heat-het
(similar to
bleed-bled
),
drag-drug
(
dig-dug
), and
help-holp
(
tell-told
). Dizzy Dean, the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher and CBS announcer, was notorious for saying “He slood into second base,” common in his native Arkansas. For four decades English teachers across the nation engaged in a letter-writing campaign to CBS demanding that he be removed, much to his delight. One of his replies, during the Great Depression, was “A lot of folks that ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t’ ain’t eatin’.” Once he baited them with the following play-by-play:

But successful adoptions of such creative extensions are rare; irregulars remain mostly as isolated oddballs.

Irregularity in grammar seems like the epitome of human eccentricity and quirkiness. Irregular forms are explicitly abolished in “rationally designed” languages like Esperanto, Orwell’s Newspeak, and Planetary League Auxiliary Speech in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel
Time for the Stars
. Perhaps in defiance of such regimentation, a woman in search of a nonconformist soul mate recently wrote this personal ad in the
New York Review of Books:

A general statement of irregularity and the human condition comes from the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar: “Grammar, with its mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foretaste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience.”

For all its symbolism about the freewheeling human spirit, though, irregularlity is tightly encapsulated in the word-building system; the system as a whole is quite cuspy. Irregular forms are roots, which are found inside stems, which are found inside words, some of which can be formed by regular inflection. This layering not only predicts many of the possible and impossible words of English (for example, why
Danvinicmism
sounds better than
Darwinismian
); it provides a neat explanation for many trivia questions about seemingly illogical usage, such as: Why in baseball is a batter said to have
flied out
—why has no mere mortal ever
flown out
to center field? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the
Maple Leafs
and not the
Maple Leaves?
Why do many people say
Walkmans
, rather than
Walkmen
, as the plural of
Walkman?
Why would it sound odd for someone to say that all of his daughter’s friends are
low-lives?

Consult any style manual or how-to book on grammar, and it will give one or two explanations as to why the irregular is tossed aside—both wrong. One is that the books are closed on irregular words in English; any new form added to the language must be regular. Not true: if I coin new words like
to re-sing
or
to out-sing
, their pasts are
re-sang
and
out-sang
, not
re-singed
and
out-singed
. Similarly, I recently read that there are peasants who run around with small tanks in China’s oil fields, scavenging oil from unguarded wells; the article calls them
oil-mice
, not
oil-mouses
. The second explanation is that when a word acquires a new, nonliteral sense, like baseball’s
fly out
, that sense requires a regular form. The oil-mice clearly falsify that explanation, as do the many other metaphors based on irregular nouns, which steadfastly keep their irregularity:
sawteeth
(not
sawtooths
),
Freud’s intellectual children
(not
childs
),
snowmen
(not
snowmans
), and so on. Likewise, when the verb
to blow
developed slang meanings like
to blow him away
(assassinate) and
to blow it off
(dismiss casually), the past-tense forms remained irregular:
blew him away
and
blew off the exam
, not
blowed him away
and
blowed off the exam
.

The real rationale for
flied out
and
Walkmans
comes from the algorithm for interpreting the meanings of complex words from the meanings of the simple words they are built out of. Recall that when a big word is built out of smaller words, the big word gets all its properties from one special word sitting inside it at the extreme right: the head. The head of the verb
to overshoot
is the verb
to shoot
, so
overshooting
is a kind of
shooting
, and it is a verb, because
shoot
is a verb. Similarly, a
workman
is a singular noun, because
man
, its head, is a singular noun, and it refers to a kind of man, not a kind of work. Here is what the word structures look like:

Crucially, the percolation conduit from the head to the top node applies to
all
the information stored with the head word: not just its nounhood or verbhood, and not just its meaning, but any irregular form that is stored with it, too. For example, part of the mental dictionary entry for
shoot
would say “I have my own irregular past-tense form,
shot
.” This bit of information percolates up and applies to the complex word, just like any other piece of information. The past tense
of overshoot
is thus
overshot
(not
overshooted
). Likewise, the word
man
bears the tag “My plural is
men
.” Since
man
is the head of
workman
, the tag percolates up to the N symbol standing for
workman
, and so the plural of
workman
is
workmen
. This is also why we get
out-sang, oil-mice, sawteeth
, and
blew him away
.

Now we can answer the trivia questions. The source of quirkiness in words like
fly out
and
Walkmans
is their
headlessness
. A headless word is an exceptional item that, for one reason or another, differs in some property from its rightmost element, the one it would be based on if it were like ordinary words. A simple example of a headless word is a
low-life
—not a kind of life at all but a kind of person, namely one who leads a low life. In the word
low-life
, then, the normal percolation pipeline must be blocked. Now, a pipeline inside a word cannot be blocked for just one kind of information; if it is blocked for one thing, nothing passes through. If
low-life
does not get its meaning from
life
, it cannot get its plural from
life
either. The irregular form associated with
life
, namely
lives
, is trapped in the dictionary, with no way to bubble up to the whole word
low-life
. The all-purpose regular rule, “Add the
-s
suffix,” steps in by default, and we get
low-lifes
. By similar unconscious reasoning, speakers arrive at
saber-tooths
(a kind of tiger, not a kind of tooth),
tenderfoots
(novice cub scouts, who are not a kind of foot but a kind of youngster that has tender feet),
flatfoots
(also not a kind of foot but a slang term for policemen), and
still lifes
(not a kind of life but a kind of painting).

Since the Sony Walkman was introduced, no one has been sure whether two of them should be
Walkmen
or
Walkmans
. (The nonsexist alternative
Walkperson
would leave us on the hook, because we would be faced with a choice between
Walkpersons
and
Walkpeople
.) The temptation to say
Walkmans
comes from the word’s being headless: a Walkman is not a kind of man, so it must not be getting its meaning from the word
man
inside it, and by the logic of headlessness it shouldn’t receive a plural form from
man
, either. But it is hard to be comfortable with any kind of plural, because the relation between
Walkman
and
man
feels utterly obscure. It feels obscure because the word was not put together by any recognizable scheme. It is an example of the pseudo-English that is popular in Japan in signs and product names. (For example, one popular soft drink is called Sweat, and T-shirts have enigmatic inscriptions like
CIRCUIT BEAVER, NURSE MENTALITY
, and
BONERACTIVE WEAR
.) The Sony Corporation has an official answer to the question of how to refer to more than one Walkman. Fearing that their trademark, if converted to a noun, may become as generic as
aspirin
or
kleenex
, they sidestep the grammatical issues by insisting upon
Walkman Personal Stereos
.

What about flying out? To the baseball cognoscenti, it is not directly based on the familiar verb
to fly
(“to proceed through the air”) but on the noun
a fly
(“a ball hit on a conspicuously parabolic trajectory”). To
fly out
means “to make an out by hitting a fly that gets caught.” The noun
a fly
, of course, itself came from the verb
to fly
. The word-within-a-word-within-a-word structure can be seen in this bamboo-like tree: