The first time I met with scientists eager to examine the goings-on of my mind, I was given a vocabulary test. Fifteen years on, I still remember how my heart sank. I had volunteered for their research with the intention of talking, explaining, recounting—of condensing my multicolored thoughts, my unusual (as I had been told) creative processes, into words. I had never had that conversation before, could scarcely wait to have it (though, as it happened, the wait would ultimately grow by three more years). Before leaving for central London and the psychology department there, not knowing the sorts of test that lay in store for me, I had made a mental inventory of what I hoped to find: television-handsome doctors, open ears and open minds, answers to my zillion questions. I was prodigiously naive. My disappointment was almost immediate. No sooner had I arrived than I contemplated turning on my heels and taking the next underground train back. The whitecoats asked only for my age, my school grades, whether I was left- or right-handed. Then, they gestured toward a thin, impassive lady who led me down a narrow corridor. The woman introduced where we were going and rattled off a list of rote instructions to follow. I was told to speak clearly because her pen would record my every error. A taker of tests, that was all the people here saw in me. But I was too intimidated to back out. And so, once I had been shown into a low-ceilinged, white-walled rabbit-cage of a room, the vocabulary test began.
Fifty words, printed on a foolscap sheet, which I was to read aloud one by one. Clearing my throat gave me enough time to take in a surprising pattern in the list of words: quite a few of them—aisle, psalm, debt (as in “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”), catacomb, zealot, leviathan, beatify, prelate, campanile—had to do with the Church. And there were, it seemed to me, further clues to the identity of the person behind the list. Medical words—ache, nausea, placebo, puerperal—suggested a doctor. Still others—bouquet, cellist, topiary—hinted at a life far removed from the East End factories and pound shops of my own childhood.
“Chord,” I muttered to the invigilator. It was the first word on the list.
“Please go on,” she said. Her voice was glassy.
I wanted to say, “It is a golden word. Gold, white, and red. Like the colors of the flag of Nunavut. And if you retype the word in small letters, reordering them to spell dcorh, and then trim the tops off the tall letters, the d and the h, do you see the anagram acorn?” But I didn’t say any of this.
“Please go on,” she said again. My responses came reluctantly.
Some words later, when I reached equivocal, I stopped and let out a small gasp, which was like laughter. Equivocal! A green word, a shiny word. A word comprising each of the five vowels. So beautiful. I was beside myself with enthusiasm. But the woman with the glassy voice didn’t seem to notice. Equivocal! A word cool to the touch. The greenness. The shininess. The coolness. They all came at me simultaneously. The word radiated the sea on a late British summer afternoon—the briny, occasionally garlicky, smell of the sea—and aroused a momentary nostalgia for the coast. Equivocal, lifting my mood, offering me color and beauty in the ambient drabness—suddenly made my coming here seem worth the trouble. Even if I had to reduce it to a game of pronunciation, to four syllables with accent on the second.
Much of my learning had come from library books. If I could recognize prelate and beatify (though I was unchurched, and my parents nonbelievers), knew that gaoled was an olde worlde way of spelling jailed, and was able to place quadruped as the Latin for four-footed, it was because of all the years I’d spent around assorted dictionaries and encyclopedias. But the one-sidedness of this instruction had its limits, something the test would now proceed to amply demonstrate. “Aeon.” It brought me to a halt. From this word forward, I apprehended the certainty of fumbles. While understandable enough in print, “aeon” was a sound that I could only vaguely make. A-on? Air-on? E-on? It was like a shibboleth, like pronouncing Lord Cholmondeley as “chumly,” or Magdalen College, Oxford, as “maud-lin.” You had to be in the know.
You are what you say. But this notion of “verbal intelligence”—so dear to the box-tick-happy psychologist—that language is something you can measure precisely and put an exact number on, struck me as false. And the list that had been compiled by this notion contained some kind of assessment. What was it? What action, I wondered, what social task might ever require me to say something like drachm (and pronounce it “dram”)? It was hard to dispel my doubts. The dubiety ran deep in me. I knew from my days at school that obscure and rare words—“dictionary words”—spoiled dialogue more often than not and banished their user to solitude. The experience had not been easy on me.
And yet I didn’t speak my mind. I was to regret that afterward. But looking back, I can understand. Just what could I have said, assuming that I would have even been granted a hearing? That simply knowing a word like drachm, its pronunciation, did not make you a better, more intelligent, speaker? That listing words on their own, denuded of context and meaning, was impoverishing? That language, that feeling and thinking and creating in language, bore no resemblance to so pointless and inane an exercise? But the men and women here were psychologists, with the brisk deskside manners and the degrees of psychologists. Who was I to say anything? I, a twenty-two-year-old, underemployed man. Parents, a former sheet-metal worker and a stay-at-home mom. Higher education, none (at that time) to speak of. Obediently, I kept my head down and stuck to reading the list through to the end.
I remember now that there was a moment of confusion over the final item on the list. “Campanile.” I said it in the French way, à la française. I had learned French at school; during my teens I’d had French pen pals; I had holidayed one summer at the home of a family in Nantes. So I had a good accent. But the invigilator hesitated; she raised her free hand to her bell-bottomed black hair. And let it drop. “No,” she said at last, since it was time for the debriefing, and added “Campanile comes from Italy.” Cam-pa-nee-lee, she said, with what she insisted was the correct pronunciation. It was what her notes told her. I started to object, but checked myself and let it pass. Another concession. According to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, either way of saying the word is right.
After a few other tests (equally mind-numbing, like having a story read to me and being asked to recall it), I left and never went back to the department. I never heard from its staff again. But whenever, in the years that followed, I came across one of those newspaper or magazine advertisements for “word power packs”—“At the Crucial Moments of Your Life, Do Your Words Fail You? Give yourself the chance to become the articulate man who succeeds in business… the fluent man who enjoys a rich social life… the facile speaker who is esteemed by his community”—it would remind me of that wasted day in central London and the psychologist with the glassy voice. The smudgy shill in the ad, the whitecoats’ picture of articulateness in his thick-framed glasses and three-piece suit, appeared inches across from the pitches of scalp specialists and Positive Thinkers. A Get-Glib-Quick scheme. I didn’t buy it. But the message continues to seduce to this day. The salesmen understand their buyers, the complexes of working-class vocabulary, the desire of many to improve themselves. They charge a few cents for every ten-dollar word and make you believe you’ve got yourself a bargain.
I’m not divulging any great trade secrets if I tell you these “word power packs” don’t work. The associations they teach, like the vocabulary test’s list, seem pointlessly artificial. Take, for instance, the cousin of timid and SAT favorite, timorous (“timorous, adj.: Full of or affected by fear”). Instead of picturing a Tim Burton movie, or the British tennis choker Tim Henman, better to read from the poem “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns:
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
As a teenager, that was how I learned the adjective: I let the poet’s imagery animate it for me. The learning did not cost me a penny; and I suppose if it had, I would have been sore as hell at the seller, because not once have I heard or said it since. Most native English speakers seem to get happily by with afraid or frightened or fearful, or even, in the north of the United Kingdom, frit. Few, if any, have ever found themselves short a timorous.
Even as a very young man, I had certain intuitions about language being irreducible to individual pieces of vocabulary. But for a long time that was all they were. My thoughts needed clarifying. But I couldn’t rush them. After my diagnosis at 25—high-functioning autistic savant syndrome (“with excellent adaptation in adulthood”) and synesthesia, big words in their own right—I traveled, I read, I wrote. I became a writer. Time and experience did their work: clarity gradually came to me. Two things helped my thinking in particular. The first and biggest, almost ten years after reading aloud aeon and drachm and campanile, was my decision, upon entering my thirties, to finally study at a university. Remembrance of that list, of not speaking my mind out of self-consciousness or lack of social skill or confidence, niggled and played its part in prompting me to put a portion of my author royalties into a bachelor of arts degree. Among my other courses in the humanities, I chose sociolinguistics and discovered in it, like a revelation, the work of Shirley Brice Heath.
A sociolinguist and ethnographer, too little known in her native United States, Shirley Brice Heath concluded as early as the 1970s that schoolchildren from different social classes and cultures were set apart academically, not by deficits in IQ or vocabulary size, but by the differing “ways with words” in which they were raised. Heath, who has risen to the academic stratosphere at Stanford, is a former foster daughter of a milkman and a factory employee. She is passionate about her studies in language development and child literacy. Her painstaking fieldwork, in the Piedmont Carolinas, took close to ten years to complete. With the chameleon qualities of a born anthropologist, Heath lived, talked, and played with the children and their relatives and acquaintances in two neighboring textile mill communities: one (“Roadville”) white, the other (“Trackton”) black. She compared her findings with the behaviors of young “Maintown” families like her own, white and middle class, whose children had doctors and professors for parents. In all three groups, Heath showed, the children grew up speaking a rich, fully-formed American English; only the manner in which they attained that fluency and the uses to which they put their English differed.
Maintown parents, Heath noted, treated even toddling sons and daughters as their conversational equals. “School-oriented,” the parents behaved much like teachers, accompanying a bedtime story with bright-voiced explanations of the narrative, riffs on theme and character, and little quizzes, concocted on the spot, to assist (and assess) the child’s comprehension. By the time the child began school, classroom decorum came more or less naturally. The pupil had appropriate responses to Mr. Brown’s or Mrs. Cooper’s questions down pat.
In Roadville, boys and girls learned to read whatever picture books their parents’ dollars could stretch to buy; but, contrary to their peers in Maintown, come reading time, they fidgeted. The books, picked out from grocery checkout stands, quite often failed to hold the attention of either party for very long, making the experience a chore. Parental explanations of a narrative tended to be perfunctory. No riffs, then. No little quizzes. Instead, the children would mostly hear stories by listening to adults “tell on” themselves for laughs among friends, family, or townsfolk. A Roadville story was typically a story that diligently recounted a past event and held some kind of moral: storytelling in the normal sense was considered tantamount to lying. If asked by the schoolteacher to write a story about coming down from outer space or levitating in the air, the Roadville-raised pupil would hardly even know where to start.
Trackton’s preschoolers were hardly ever addressed directly by adults. As one grandmother explained it, “Ain’t no use me tellin’ ’im: learn this, learn that, what’s this, what’s that? He just gotta learn, gotta know; he see one thing one place one time, he know how it go, see sump’n like it again, maybe it be the same, maybe it won’t.” But there was no speech delay. The infants learned as if by osmosis. Many became uncanny mimics, able to reproduce the walk and talk of family, neighbors, and regular visitors down to the gas meter man. Trackton talk was more allusive than that heard in the other communities: listeners were expected to mentally fill in any gaps. Impromptu stories had no formulaic “once upon a time” beginnings or verbal wrappings-up to signal the end—the narratives ran on analogy, leaping from one thought or incident to another, and lasted however long audiences would entertain them. Schoolteachers often found pupils from Trackton boisterous (or else withdrawn) in class and less ruly in their compositions, finding in a lesson parallels that might not have been intended.
In 1983, Heath published her findings. She urged teachers to ponder the background of every pupil and their Maintown biases carefully. Too often, red pens penalized Roadville and Trackton students’ different ways with words, mistaking them for deficiencies; the bar of academic ambition was correspondingly lowered. Abandoned to their frustration, their incomprehension, class laggers found themselves relegated to the shock of remedial lessons from which their young confidence frequently never recovered.
Such a waste! And yet, more than thirty years after Heath’s publication, the cruel circle remains intact. As an ideological shortcut, the equation of poverty with poverty of thought is as popular as ever. Media and lawmakers fret that the less well-off are “word poor.” Nothing, though, could be further from the truth. As Curt Dudley Marling, a professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, writes, “All children come to school with extraordinary linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources, just not the same resources.… Respect for students’ knowledge, who they are, where they come from… is the key to successful teaching.” Indeed, in those schools where children’s differences have been roundly welcomed, their particular strengths nurtured (and weaknesses thoughtfully attended to), poorer pupils demonstrate just as supple an attention and just as ravenous an appetite for words, stories, and puzzles as other students do.
Shirley Brice Heath’s linguistic anthropology fed my understanding of language. So, too, did my encounter with the work of a young American lexicographer, Erin McKean. In her various media appearances, widely relayed on the Internet, her slogan—if a word works, use it—struck home. I liked what she had to say about modern dictionaries, that they map a language and explore every nook and cranny of its well- and lesser-trod acres; that they avoid the snobbery of their older counterparts: high culture’s doormen charged with excluding all words they judge “bad,” “uncouth,” or “incorrect.” And I liked how, in keeping with her colorful published guide to the semiotics of dresses (her other passion), McKean’s sole editorial criterion is whether this or that word “fits,” whether its form and the speaker’s (or author’s) purpose sufficiently “match.”
McKean says she always wanted to be a lexicographer, ever since she read about one in a newspaper as a kid. She started out doing manuscript annotation (“a fancy word for ‘underlining with colored pencils’”) for the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, before landing positions consecutively at Thorndike-Barnhart Children’s Dictionaries, and the American Dictionaries division for Oxford University Press. In 2004, only thirty-three, she was tapped to become New Oxford American Dictionary’s editor in chief. But lexicography has evolved so rapidly since then that she now works exclusively online, having come to the conclusion that “books are the wrong containers for dictionaries.” The nonprofit Wordnik, which McKean launched in 2009, is billed as the world’s biggest online dictionary. It forages for words within meaningful phrases and sentences on the Internet and in the contents of millions of digitized books going back centuries: words that, for want of space or knowledge of their existence, appear in no print dictionary, no vocabulary list, no SAT test. Wordnik includes never-before-documented words such as slenthem (a Javanese musical instrument) and deletable. The resulting map of English, its boundaries expanding by the day, is like no other; it is changing how we define English, since—on the conservative estimations of data scientists—the lexicon is more than twice as big as anyone ever previously imagined.
“My biggest frustration is not having enough hours in the day to do all the work that I would like to do,” writes McKean in an email. “Although (going by the actuarial tables) I’m barely halfway through my expected lifespan, it’s more likely than not that I will die before Wordnik is ‘finished’—the nature of the lexicography is that most lexicographers don’t live to see the culmination of their projects, because English never stops and so the projects never really end.”
“English never stops.” It could be McKean’s motto. Every minute of every hour of every day, someone in the English-speaking world plays a new combination of sounds, letters, and meanings on a listener or reader. Who, understanding, nods. English! Only tweaked, stretched, renewed. Words—but also what we talk about when we talk about words—are constantly shifting. When I clicked on Wordnik’s “random search” option, “to-dos,” the eminently logical plural of “to-do,” popped up. Intrigued, I performed a quick side search on the Internet and turned up a 2001 New York Times article featuring “not-to-dos.” Back on Wordnik, I clicked again:
“‘Nonfraud, adj. Not of or pertaining to fraud’: ‘The SEC alleges that Assurant violated certain nonfraud-related sections of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 with the accounting of this reinsurance contract’ (from a 2010 article in Insurance Journal).”
And once more:
“‘Goaltend, v. To engage in goaltending’: ‘Saturday afternoon, we were certain that… NBA commissioner David Stern would plop atop the Orlando rim and goaltend all of Rashard Lewis’s three-point attempts’ (from a 2009 article in The Wall Street Journal).”
Predictably enough, some of McKean’s correspondents, particularly those fondest of the Caps Lock key, will complain that a Wordnik entry “isn’t a word, because it isn’t a word that they like.” The pedants’ grring is a smaller frustration, since she knows she cannot reason with her critics. Better to save her attention for mail like the enthusiastic message that came last Christmas from a class of Australian schoolchildren, proposing their own (and who knows, perhaps impending) words, such as insaniparty, kerbobble, and melopink.
McKean’s own English, her own “way with words,” doesn’t seem all that much like the English of a lexicographer (though, apparently, her son’s is that of a lexicographer’s child: at the age of six he wrote—and without a letter out of place—discombobulated in his first-grade class journal). She can tweet, “just fyi, if I ever ‘snap’ it will be 100% caused by someone loudly popping their chewing gum on public transit.” She is not above typing gonna and gotta; lookupable (as in “every word should be lookupable”), madeupical, and undictionaried are all words of her invention, and in her sentences they read just fine. (“Words only have meaning in context,” she notes. “If I just say ‘toast’ to you, you don’t know if you’re getting strawberry jam or champagne.”)
“Chord.” “Drachm.” “Aeon.” “Campanile.” What, I still wonder, did the psychologist listening believe she understood? You are what you say—well, maybe, up to a point. Every voice carries certain personality traits—the tongue-tiedness of one; of another, the overreaching vowels. Every voice, in preferring dinner to supper, or in pronouncing this as dis, betrays traces of its past. But vocabulary is not destiny. Words, regardless of their pedigree, make only as much sense as we choose to give them. We are the teachers, not they. To possess fluency, or “verbal intelligence,” is to animate words with our imagination.
Every word is a bird we teach to sing.