If you don't read John McWhorter who writes for the New York Times and who's an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University (spoiler alert: Linguistics is not a form of Italian pasta) you're really missing out. Language, in many ways, is what makes humans human. And understanding how words form and languages are used is a window into how people, cultures and communities think.
When I think about language, and my own fascination with words, I think much of that comes from being raised an outsider--a Jew in a Gentile world. Because my parents didn't grow up speaking English, when they learned English I think they were more attuned to its vibrancy. Outsiders are almost always better observers than insiders. It might be why so many of the people who guide amerikan culture come from outside of the main avenues of amerikan life.
I win pitches, get assignments, do scopes, do the work, sell the work, revise the work, and sometimes produce the work. But I do it all without formality. I do it in a way that accommodates how I think, live, breathe and walk Sparkle, my one-year-old golden retriever. I do it in a way that lets me do business with a minimum of busy-ness.
I have a way to create accurate scopes in minutes not days.
And I am able to reach the highest level of clients to get briefed so as not to be bogged down and confounded by an elaborate game of corporate "telephone," where the more the message is relayed the more it gets muddled.
Somewhere along the way, our corporate culture has conflated looking busy with getting things done. We've equated nervous activity with accomplishment. We've likened a long to-do list with actually doing.
Maybe busy-ness will show your boss how valuable you are. Becuase if you're so busy you have to work all night and work all weekend, it makes you feel important. But it makes me think of a bit I read by John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist who wrote this in his 1958 book, "The Great Crash of 1929." (BTW, Galbraith's book is great and accessible. And, I fear, burning in its relevance.)
Some words go abstract. We say “It’s none of your business” as a single chunk and think nothing of it, but it’s an odd expression. It doesn’t refer to a business in the dictionary sense. It means, “It isn’t something that you are supposed to busy yourself about.” Things went even further with an expression my parents used to playfully use, saying “Nunya” as a shortening of “It’s none of your business,” in the same way as “goodbye” began as “God be with you.”
Then business was used even more abstractly in the old-timey expression “like nobody’s business” which meant “to an extreme degree.” This is where “So Long Letty” comes in.
Letty runs a beauty shop, something considered kind of racy in a time when ordinary women were just beginning to wear makeup. She sings about her clients:
You ought to see ’em
When Letty gets through with ’em
Oh, what I do with ’em
It’s nobody’s business!
But how does this refer to business at all? Think also of “Give him the business!” or an animal “doing its business.” None of these uses have anything to do with capitalism.
I hope I do not seem to expatiate (it means to go on at length). But there is no reason that the basics of linguistics — how sounds actually work, why sentences come out the way they do, how language changes over time, how children learn language — should be taught only to college students who intentionally seek them out. We teach schoolchildren about many types of transformation, including history and evolution. Why not the one they encounter every time they open their mouths to speak? (Incidentally, to get a sense of what a romp language and linguistics can be, I highly recommend a smart and also gorgeous card-based game League of the Lexicon. It’s a feast for the inquiring mind and even smells good.)
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