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Revisionist History: The Staten Island Problem
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
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- [00:00]
Malcolm Gladwell
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- [00:43]
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Malcolm Gladwell
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John McWhorter
Pushkin.
- [02:09]
Malcolm Gladwell
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.
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John McWhorter
Listen, there is nothing there to hide. I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has been an open book. And, you know, this is another demonstration of that.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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 a 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. Yes. 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 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.
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John McWhorter
Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. John, thank you for agreeing to join us tonight.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm, thank you for having me.
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John McWhorter
This is. I wanted to. 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, it was Tom Bradley. That's right.
- [05:38]
John McWhorter
And I was listening to tapes of him speaking, and he sounded like the whitest sky I could imagine. And I was trying to figure out.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Why I sounded like a Disney announcer.
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John McWhorter
Yeah, like a Disney announcer.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
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John McWhorter
And you gave. Wait, tell me a Little before we even get into this. It was so much fun. Your answer. Explain to me why that would be so.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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. He was born a slave. If you listen to recordings, you 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. Yeah, Didn't I say that?
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John McWhorter
I think you said something along that lines. And we were the thing. The fascinating question is, when did that stop? It stopped.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
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John McWhorter
He doesn't sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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.
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John McWhorter
The minute I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh, I remember I played you a tape. You're 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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 langu 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 Bert 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.
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John McWhorter
This is. Sounds like a fantastic obsession, by the way. How does that. Like, is this something you do sort of for. 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 both of those things?
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Malcolm Gladwell
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 4 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. And you get just enough to put into books and to mention to you and things like that.
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John McWhorter
So when did you. When did you. At what point in your. In your career, life, whatever, did you realize that this was something of particular interest to you?
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Malcolm Gladwell
You mean linguistics in general?
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John McWhorter
No, no, this thing you're just talking about.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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 gonna write Suwannee 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 don't. 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.
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John McWhorter
You gotta do better than that. You can't say for some reason it interested me. You gotta tell me. You gotta tell us more than that.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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. This little kid. I talk like this, and I say, you say Carrie when we would say take. And they would get tired of that. But I realized that it was because I was interested in dialect also. 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, and they would use features of black English. And I would listen and not think nothing. You know, 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? I had one cousin who was using what we call the narrative ad people who study black English. And so. 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. And then we had gone back upstairs and I keep waiting for you. Had what? And then what? And it was just all had. 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.
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Wait, my wife, who is black.
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John McWhorter
She uses that. That's where it comes from.
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Malcolm Gladwell
What?
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John McWhorter
She sticks had in the craziest places.
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Malcolm Gladwell
It might be a black thing. Yes. Or like when Will Smith says, well, what had happened was he's taking.
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John McWhorter
That's what she did. Yeah. Today she said, I had went. Now, understand this is a highly educated. Went to Princeton, corporate lawyer. She just takes had and just kind of like shovels it in randomly into her sentences.
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Malcolm Gladwell
That is because it's a good, earthy, yet systematic way of using the language. It's called narrative had. There are papers about it. Notice I say papers. There's one paper about it.
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John McWhorter
So her father. Wait, I want to. Her father grew up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida. And he would be growing up in the 50s.
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Malcolm Gladwell
He would have gotten that narrative had from Harlem, most likely.
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John McWhorter
From Harlem.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. That's good, solid northern black English. Yeah.
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John McWhorter
Now, you said something earlier that you. You didn't speak black English growing up. Why not?
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Malcolm Gladwell
That's deep, Malcolm. Actually, that gets into my parents and what they were like. And so plenty of black family speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Airy. And 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. 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. 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, 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. She sounds just like this. 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. 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, you know, neurons or something. You know, I like, like the way I talk. I'm not going to talk like someone else. But that is the reason. And I wish 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. 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 wish 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.
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John McWhorter
I remember the first time I saw that kind of to switching as a kid in Jamaica, seeing my uncle, you know, a brown skinned Jamaican who talked to us in the Queen's English and he was getting gas at a gas pump.
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Malcolm Gladwell
That must have been amazing.
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John McWhorter
I'm maybe nine, gets out of the car and he starts talking to the guy pumping the gas. And there's some. It wasn't just that he switched into patois. It was that he also. His manner completely changed.
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Malcolm Gladwell
You're a different person.
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John McWhorter
He was. They were doing that Jamaican thing where they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yes.
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John McWhorter
Which I had never seen before. And 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell
And that kind of trash talking. Just like there are papers written about that one, actually. Yeah. That is very common. That must have been wild. Yeah. 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.
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John McWhorter
Or my mother hearing my. 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 at mernacular. That idea as well.
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Malcolm Gladwell
No.
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John McWhorter
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 telling, 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Grammar. Yeah.
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John McWhorter
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? And I realized how deeply, kind of.
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Malcolm Gladwell
And it bothered you?
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John McWhorter
Oh, to this day, it works. I get bothered by it.
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Malcolm Gladwell
I always just assumed that people were gonna do stuff wrong and I would have been listening to what the grammar was.
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John McWhorter
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 are you? This is. I mean, come on. I want to call up the company and volunteer my services.
- [20:26]
Malcolm Gladwell
We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. One of the things that stops people from getting therapy is the cost. Right. It's not cheap. Traditional therapy can be as much as $100 to $250. A session. I used to bring this up with my therapist years ago and she would say, well, if you had a broken leg, you pay lots of money to get it fixed, right? So why wouldn't you pay lots of money to fix your mind? Which makes perfect sense. And I would remind myself of that every time I wrote her a check. But still, $100 to $250 a session is a financial impossibility for most people. That's one of the reasons why BetterHelp is so valuable. BetterHelp comes in at roughly half the cost, so therapy doesn't come with the same kind of stressful financial burden. Therapy should feel accessible, not a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense. Your mental health is worth it. And now it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus switch therapists at any time. Your well being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com gladwell to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelph E-L-P.com Gladwell Banking with Capital.
- [22:04]
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- [22:33]
John McWhorter
I want to talk a little bit about your. And by the way, I always find this question, if it's asked to me, deeply annoying. So you don't have to answer it if you don't. But I wanted to talk about your kind of place in the culture right now, which is really interesting to me. And I have a Grand unified John McWhorter theory.
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Malcolm Gladwell
I want to hear this, because I don't.
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John McWhorter
Here's my theory. At any given moment, in sort of popular culture, intellectual popular culture, there is someone who's 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Can you give me. 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. As in you wrote a beautiful.
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John McWhorter
Was it an OP Ed. I can't remember where you wrote it. A thing about your own experience with affirmative action.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Yes.
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John McWhorter
No one else could write that.
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Malcolm Gladwell
True.
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John McWhorter
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 gotta do it this way. Most of the time.
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Malcolm Gladwell
I forget them the minute I write them.
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John McWhorter
You can't.
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Malcolm Gladwell
This. Oh, today is. What's her name, the congresswoman. Jasmine Crockett.
- [24:06]
Lowe's Advertisement
Yes.
- [24:06]
Malcolm Gladwell
Okay.
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John McWhorter
Jasmine Crockett, you said very gently and nicely, you said to her, come on, now you get to do that.
- [24:13]
Malcolm Gladwell
I do. You know what?
- [24:15]
John McWhorter
Who else can do that?
- [24:18]
Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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. 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 a. 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. 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. 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 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, 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.
- [26:13]
John McWhorter
Part of it as well. I think there's other layers, but one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays as much attention to language as you do, you're better at it. By which I mean that just the example you just gave on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless, that someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of language might have said cowardly with a quite. There's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would be perceived and read.
- [26:50]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
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John McWhorter
But you are professionally alert to those nuances, and that permits you a great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically underestimate how important word choice is and how acutely sensitive we are to the word, the words that are used, particularly if they're directed at us. I want to talk about my favorite chapter in the book.
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Malcolm Gladwell
What's the favorite?
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John McWhorter
It's the chapter about you.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Thank you for it not being about they and them. Okay, you. Yeah, that was the one that was the funnest to write.
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John McWhorter
It's the fun. It is. So just to explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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.
- [28:46]
John McWhorter
But you. So tell us the problem with you.
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Malcolm Gladwell
You is a problem. I don't mean that you all are a problem. Oh, there was some black English, too.
- [28:57]
John McWhorter
We will get there.
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Malcolm Gladwell
That was silly.
- [28:59]
John McWhorter
That was the problem.
- [29:00]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 too, then it was yeet. And so thou, yeet, and you. And then they had case forms. Thou, if it's subject. The if it's an object. You was the object form. Ye was the subject form. Like hear ye and then yeat. 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.
- [30:06]
John McWhorter
Thou is the one we missed.
- [30:07]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's like it had a disease. Yeah.
- [30:09]
John McWhorter
Thou is the one we missed.
- [30:10]
Malcolm Gladwell
We need thou.
- [30:11]
John McWhorter
We need thou.
- [30:12]
Malcolm Gladwell
We need it back right now. But we can't do it.
- [30:16]
John McWhorter
No. So let's convince us about why we need to have thou back.
- [30:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 learned 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. 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. And you don't have v used for everything. You don't have the use for everything. English is different in that way. English is a very odd language in certain corners of its being. And to tell the truth, it's. 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 yin's. 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 now.
- [31:26]
John McWhorter
So what's your preference here? There's two parallel strands of argument here, and I want to figure out which side you're on. So you originally is the plural. Thou is the singular singular. What has happened is that you has come to encompass both. But we've developed these colloquial forms, Yal, et cetera, to take up the plural position. And we've moved you to the singular. Do you think you should remain the singular, or should you be moved back into the plural position?
- [32:01]
Malcolm Gladwell
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, 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.
- [32:24]
John McWhorter
And.
- [32:25]
Malcolm Gladwell
And that's really tough, too, because of the aforesaid odors of those words.
- [32:29]
John McWhorter
Why did. I was thinking of. You know. So if someone wrote the hymn how great thou art today, it would be.
- [32:35]
Malcolm Gladwell
How great you are, how great you are.
- [32:36]
John McWhorter
Then sing my soul.
- [32:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's not as good.
- [32:39]
John McWhorter
My savior God to thee. How great you are, how great you are. It doesn't work.
- [32:48]
Malcolm Gladwell
That was great for art. Yeah, but art thou. But it would be hard to use out on the street, I think. Do I say it in the book? No, that was about something else. You could not say thou naked. You know, it just. It wouldn't seem quite right. It was I. You have to use you.
- [33:08]
John McWhorter
But no, you've said there's problems with both positions, but come on. You're not answering my question. Try if you had to. If I make you language tsar and you get to push you to the singular apparel position and either reinstate thou or establish you's end, y'all, which move are you making?
- [33:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 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. You need a y'all. In that sense.
- [34:02]
John McWhorter
One of the things that had not occurred to me until I read that chapter was that in the south, y'all is only is the plural. That is to say. And if it's addressed to a person, you're invoking, isn't that unseen others. I hadn't realized it. So if I go to the south and I say, well, that's what y'all think. And I mean just you. Yeah, I've committed a violation.
- [34:27]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. Because they don't use it to mean the singular. But when they say it's one person, you're at a 7 11, and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't mean y'all. That one person right there, it means. It's implying that there's somebody out there in the car or something, which is the following. It's a politeness strategy. 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. That's a little direct as opposed to y'all come back. It's a very courtly thing that y'all.
- [35:11]
John McWhorter
I want to go back to something you said. Well, we need to distinguish between the plural and singular you. But what problem does it create for us when we can't? Is it just a lack of specificity?
- [35:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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. 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.
- [36:22]
John McWhorter
Yeah. What I would like to see is the country divided on the street question so that there's a. There would be thou districts, and then they would be y'all.
- [36:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, that would be adorable.
- [36:32]
John McWhorter
And then, because I. I don't like y'all, to be honest. I do like thou. I would like thou to come back.
- [36:40]
Malcolm Gladwell
Thou. Thou art.
- [36:42]
John McWhorter
Thou art.
- [36:44]
Malcolm Gladwell
Thou art reading. It just sounds like somebody who died 150 years ago, but I could get used to it.
- [36:50]
John McWhorter
But is that. This is another sort of interesting language question, though. Is that because. Is that going to be as true for our children? Will our children have the same associations with thou? I mean, once. Why do I think I sang that hymn for a reason? I grew up singing that hymn. All of my associations with thou are biblical. If we move into a world in which people's association with religious practice is vanishing, then doesn't that free us up to go back and pick up a lot of that stuff?
- [37:25]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's possible. It's funny you say religious, because I forgot something, which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friend select in Philadelphia in the late 70s, and back then, there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers, who were still using the and thy. And in natural speech, the ones who were super Quaker, as in dressing Quaker. 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 thou, I never thought about this. You're making me think about a lot of things I haven't thought about. 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. 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.
- [38:42]
John McWhorter
And what about the. You mentioned this in, I believe in passing, the English use of one. You do? Yes, one do. The English upper crust resolve this problem by. If I say one in the way the English one doesn't think that does one, right? What am I? Am I explicitly freeing up you to be in the plural form? Is that what I'm doing?
- [39:03]
Malcolm Gladwell
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. Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves for some reason. But you have the one. And you're saying, does that allow.
- [39:29]
John McWhorter
Is that why they're doing that? Why? Why does the English upper class use one instead of you?
- [39:36]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 man, then man shortened to m. And so you would say, you know, you gotta do it. And you would say muh gotta 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. There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called barak. 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.
- [40:34]
John McWhorter
Sorry to be a dog with a bone here, but why don't we all use the English one?
- [40:40]
Malcolm Gladwell
In order to give you a break? Yeah, because if it should.
- [40:44]
John McWhorter
In order to give one a break.
- [40:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
Right? To see. 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.
- [41:04]
John McWhorter
As a kid, we would make fun of this because my father would. I think he would use this locution. And then he abandoned it because you're trapped. Once you start with the one one, one doesn't think that one should do that, does one? And then you realize this is an endless stream of ones in your future.
- [41:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
Or Fats Waller saying, one never knows, do one. But that was arch. He was. He was. He's saying that while he's knocking back the gin. 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. And it ends up being ye poor little you all the time.
- [41:51]
John McWhorter
Yeah. It's a heartbreaking chapter.
- [41:53]
Malcolm Gladwell
It is.
- [41:56]
John McWhorter
We'll be right back with more of.
- [41:58]
Malcolm Gladwell
My conversation with John McWhorter.
- [42:10]
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- [42:41]
John McWhorter
We have questions. Some of these questions are really good.
- [42:45]
Malcolm Gladwell
The questions are always fun.
- [42:46]
John McWhorter
How does English compare with other languages in terms of words on the move, the shifting of words meaning over time.
- [42:55]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 it usually. Not always, but usually happens very slowly. 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 or. That's not the. 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, 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. There's no language where that's not happening.
- [44:03]
John McWhorter
Someone once told me, I don't know if this is true as a Canadian, that in Quebec, the French that is spoken is archaic French. So why is Quebecois French not moving at the same pace as French French? So that does suggest that different languages move at different rates.
- [44:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Language changes very quickly until it's yoked to the page, which is true of only about 200 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 and so it's faster for them.
- [46:14]
John McWhorter
What are your thoughts on black American English being adopted by younger generations in the slang they use? I'm assuming this question is about by younger and in some cases non black generations.
- [46:27]
Malcolm Gladwell
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 couldn't happen, especially with the mainstreaming of hip hop. 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. 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. 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 black, black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source of our new words. And really it's a word. I, I try to avoid two words, holistic, because it just makes everybody happy to hear the word holistic and also the word dynamic. 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.
- [48:15]
John McWhorter
I think, yeah, we have to end, sadly. But I want to ask you one last question, and that is one of my. It's my favorite question for someone like you. Let's imagine you were made languages are of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell me the three language fixes you would impose on all of us. We've done you. You want, y'all. We've given that to you. I want three new ones and then we're done.
- [48:49]
Malcolm Gladwell
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. 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 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, but. And it sounds pushy to me. Kind of like, you shut up. And that's not what they mean. But to me it's just, what do they mean? 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, exclamation points in our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind of be there In a second. 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, you know, sections of DNA replicating and, you know, so that's. That was a weird analogy. But yeah.
- [50:40]
John McWhorter
No one uses more exclamation marks points in email than me. You know, this.
- [50:47]
Malcolm Gladwell
Are you really doing this?
- [50:48]
John McWhorter
Oh, my. I. It's so accessible. It's to the point now where I think that with people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two, they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so why is Malcolm so cold today? He. He's cut back to two exclamation. So I got to do, like, three and four.
- [51:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
That's the way it is now. 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.
- [51:25]
John McWhorter
Well, you might be angry, but you might well be angry, John.
- [51:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
I have my days. But I would disguise it by using a meaningless exclamation point.
- [51:36]
John McWhorter
All right, one. One last one for the road.
- [51:40]
Malcolm Gladwell
So it was. You just can't. It was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there was the. What was the first is what it is. And it is what it is. People have got to stop that. So I would. I would have those three, and then maybe, y'all.
- [51:53]
John McWhorter
It's the correct response to it is what it is. It isn't what it is. Is that what. Yeah, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it isn't what it is in this case.
- [52:03]
Malcolm Gladwell
And see, you can say that what they're really saying is stop. It's kind of like, yeah, 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.
- [52:24]
John McWhorter
John, this has been great fun. This is a wonderful book. You should all go and get it and give it to your friends as well. And thank you for joining us tonight. And thank you.
- [52:37]
Malcolm Gladwell
Thank you, Malcolm.
- [52:41]
Thanks for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about faces. An episode on raccoons and another on English muffins. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan and Ben Nadaff Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Mixed and mastered by Sarah Bruguer. Engineered by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Original score and music by Luis Guerra. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Greta Kohn. I'm Malcolm Glaprell, SA.