For the Love of Words

If you've spent any time glancing around at this blog, you may have spotted the quotes page. I've got quite a fondness for quotes and have spent years amassing a collection of them - scribbled into notebooks, tacked to bulletin boards, stashed away on index cards, lining my mirror on Post-it notes.



Today I want to address one of those featured on the aforementioned page:

And so people say to me, 'How do I know if a word is real?' You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it! That makes it real! Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction; it doesn't make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real.

I believe there are many people who don't understand this, and I'll admit I used to be one of them. I was one of those quiet, nerdy middle schoolers who performed uncannily well in spelling bees and always had her nose buried in some novel or other, and so I became the person that people would ask about words' existence. What I didn't realize was the reason for those habits: love. An absolute love for and fascination with words and language and everything that we can do with them.

That love was an enormous factor in my major declaration once I got to college. I'm officially on track to earn a Bachelor of Science in Linguistics (for those unfamiliar with linguistics, it's loosely defined as the scientific study of human language. You can find out more at Wikipedia) with an eye for a career in language acquisition (specifically acquisition in Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnoses).

But anyway, let's move back to love. There are several terms for those who harbor a certain fondness for human language: bibliophiles, those who love books; logophiles, those who love words and playing with them; and glossophiles, those who love languages (and are often polyglots, or speakers of multiple languages). Of course, all these pseudoclinical terms are a little difficult to apply to people like me who aren't addicted to grammar and aren't particularly good at Scrabble and don't hold their novels up as pillars of wisdom (and sometimes pillars of houses, in the case of bibliophilic collectors). If it comes down to pure classification as it so often does in our world, I guess I'll lump myself with the glossophiles; I like to know how language works, especially in our brains. But there are other tendencies there too - I devour books when I can and etymology is one of my favorite things to read about. (Fun fact: grammar is related to glamour via an old Scottish word meaning "sorcery.")

So what happens when no one understands your love and insists on believing that you're a grammarian, a pedant, a prescriptivist, a fighter for the Right Language and an opposer of the dreaded Change?

My first linguistics professor, when discussing linguistic evolution, once told our class:

Language is always going to hell in a handbasket, and the old people will always tell you about it.

What people don't see when they insist on preserving the "integrity" of the standard language is that this language only exists because it's changed. I find it hilarious that those who tout the benefits of knowing "Standard English" never fail to cite Shakespeare as their champion - Shakespeare, that word-inventing, language-butchering rascal! Oh, you bemoaners of verbifying nouns and nounifying verbs, Shakespeare helped to shape modern English precisely because he so avidly undertook the very actions which you now condemn - blatant invention, "inappropriate" language, writings rife with slang. In a word and in the eyes of his contemporaries, Shakespeare was foul.

The obsessors over language purity are no better than the touters of eugenics. They are opposing the natural evolution of a beautiful thing and striving to halt the forging of our language's path. They bemoan the non-standard use of English and yet conveniently forget that it wasn't standardized in any way until the mid-19th century: even their beloved Shakespeare would spell words differently from one sentence to the next and split infinitives left and right. All our so-called "rules" are completely fabricated! Trust me, AAE (the much-criticized African American English) is just as if not more rule-based than our silly little Standard American English.

So next time you tell someone a word doesn't exist or that they're using the language wrong, just think about love and take a look at everything that has led to your own language.