Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter Page A

to give the star, Ethel Merman, some script changes and she said, “Boys, as of right now I am Miss Birds Eye of 1950: I am frozen. Not a comma!” What is it that made English Miss Birds Eye around a hundred years before Call Me Madam opened? Why just then?
    Some might answer that in the old old days, English was transformed by various large-scale historical developments that no language could remain unchanged under, such as the Viking and Norman invasions, the genius of Shakespeare, and the general expansion of English into a language suitable for elevated writing styles. Today, one might suppose, English sails along dominating the world, such that suffering the kinds of abbreviations and distortions it did way back when would be—now I’m guessing what the idea might be—beneath the language’s dignity? An unnecessary source of confusion that modern education can and should retard?
    What that answer misses, however, is that a massive proportion of the way a language changes is a matter of chance, unconnected to words or grammar from other languages or the way the language comes out of the mouths of foreign invaders. Namely, much of what constitutes ordinary Modern English today began as random novelties that floated in, despised as mistakes by the elite.
    For example, in the nineteenth century, the time about when so many seem to think English was “done,” many grammarians considered the following words and expressions extremely déclassé: all the time (quality folks were to say always ), born in (don’t you know it’s born at ????), lit (What did I tell you, darling? it’s lighted ), washtub (I don’t know why people can’t say washing tub as they should!). Standpoint, to us a rather cultivated word, was spat upon for supposedly not making sense, since you’re not standing anywhere. Believe it or not, it was also considered a tad vulgar to say Have a look at instead of Look at , and to say The first two children instead of The two first !! At classier affairs one would also have been advised to avoid popping up with louche vulgarities such as The house is being built— until then, one said The house is building —and if you said stacked and fixed the way we say them instead of “stack-ed” and “fix-ed,” to many it sounded like you were clipping the end of the word !!
    A certain crowd back then were every bit as exercised over those things as so many of us are today over Billy and me and singular they (they didn’t like these either, of course). Yet from our vantage point, these concerns look arbitrary at best and comical at worst—I myself find fusty old complaints about these words and expressions every bit as funny as the late, great television show Arrested Development . ( Standpoint, according to one fellow in 1867, was just “not an English word.” Hmm.)
    So I hereby make up an English sentence:
     
    Let’s have a look at the first two chapters I have excerpted, where we learn about the period when the Cross-Bronx Expressway was being built from the standpoint of people who were born in East Tremont and lived there all of their lives.
     
    To people who prided themselves on their concern with “proper” English 150 years ago, that perfectly innocent sentence would have been a galumphing mess full of “mistakes.”
    The lesson again: the conception of new ways of putting things as “mistakes” is an illusion. It reflects nothing but a natural human discomfort with the unfamiliar, as well as a certain degree of the herding instinct, such that “we” speak properly while “they” do not.
    Right?
    No?
    Is it that you can’t abide the fact that so many of the “errors” in question strike you as not just new but illogical?

Stop Making Sense
    Well, let’s have a look at that. I get what you mean. Billy and me went to the store breaks a rule. Because it’s I who went to the store, as a subject, me is downright illogical. It should be fixed. They “is” plural. It means two people.