Jan 30, 2019
The Wall Can’t Stop Undocumented Language
Word Talk by the Cunning Linguist
As Trump promotes the wall, I have been thinking about boundaries — real and imagined — when it comes to standard English. Non-standard language is the ultimate coyote; it slips past international boundaries, walls, constructed identities, and even enters the hegemony itself, becoming part of it and altering it.
Nevertheless, undocumented word usage faces stiff resistance from a surprising source — liberal academic teachers and professors. While academics with their heralded leftist bias scoff at Trump’s lame attempts to block out immigrants, are we not perhaps guilty of building our own walls in our classrooms with our insistence on dictionary and standard English usage?
Language, it turns out, will resist our attempts to enforce our grammatical laws.
By way of analogy, I was interested to learn that geneticists have found the DNA for multitudes of viruses and invading organisms in our own genome. The cell wall doesn’t succeed in keeping out foreign objects. Nature, it turns out, is made up of coded information. Information is unstoppable.
Similarly, a steel wall is powerless against an abstract entity: language. Our own ‘accepted’ code of language — English — cannot be protected by physical or academic walls. The “bad hombres” are already here, as evinced by that very phrase. It shows hombre has entered our lexicon. Must we even italicize it anymore? Probably not.
In Los Angeles, the sanctuary city it is, language is evolving at a breathless pace. Not just vocabulary but grammar and syntax are being altered daily by popular culture and the various immigrant diasporas.
“Woulda gave you everything,” sings white native speaker Post Malone on the radio. That’s incorrect, of course. But is it? Maybe it’s the white guy trying to appropriate some kind of ‘hybrid’ identity by intentionally making the mistake. Or maybe the music couldn’t handle the extra syllable of “woulda given you everything.” Who knows? But if the entire world starts using “woulda gave,” is anything or anybody going to stop it? No. In fact, this kind of street ‘mistake’ is the very lifeblood of language and culture.
One of the most common ways a language evolves is through mistakes, mistranslations, and errors. By the time the dictionary catches up to some mistakes, they are no longer mistranslations or mistakes. They have become new sense definitions — or as linguists refer to them: neologisms, collocations, coinages, or calques (loan translations).
Young people of all ethnicities today are strongly influenced by African-American slang, given the huge popularity of rap music. An example of this would be the rapid inclusion of “my bad” in the lexicon to mean “my fault” or “I’m sorry.” When I first heard this phrase back in the nineties, I thought it thoroughly repellent. My bad — I was wrong. “My bad” is awesome, and I now accept it and embrace it.
But Spanish is having perhaps the most profound influence of all on the mother tongue here in LA, and this influence is rapidly spreading throughout the nation, as Los Angeles is such a center of media and culture.
An example is an emerging new meaning for the word “barely.”
“I barely got to class,” a student says to me. Why? Was he in a traffic accident? No, it turns out, he meant to say he just got to class a few moments ago. There was no traffic accident.
What is the etymology of this new (mis)use of “barely”? When English language learners arrived from south of the border, they were taught that their Spanish word apenas meant “barely,” which it does, in one sense. (When we use “barely” in the sense of “hardly.” For instance, “I barely have any money left.”) However, this word apenas is also used in Spanish to mean “recently,” or “a few moments ago,” as in “I just got to class a few seconds ago”: Apenas llegó.
Thus, the use of I barely got here to mean I arrived a few moments ago is quickly traveling across ethnic divides and being adopted by younger people of all ethnicities. Older people may soon even pick it up. Why? Because “barely” already has an association with a small amount: “there was barely any food left.” So when we transfer in our minds this “small remainder” to the small portion of time implied by a recent arrival — “I barely got here” — it seems to make sense.
Another one I’ve noticed is the word “after.” This is due to the double meaning of the word después, which in Spanish (depending on the context) can either mean either “after” or “later.”
Where a native speaker would normally say, “Bill came over, and later Joan arrived,” in hybrid Spanglish you might say, “Bill came over and after Joan arrived.”
There is a subtle distinction between later and after. But this distinction could be disappearing. Time will tell. We will have to wait until later. Or after.
The dilemma of the academic is whether to take arms against the sea of sorrow that the accepted lexicon is facing or whether it’s nobler to ignore it — or even reward it! Are we building a wall when we correct the 19-year-old immigrant or dreamer who barely got to college? I say barely because both meanings apply: 1) the cards were stacked against him even graduating high school here in LA, and 2) he’s just a freshman. He just got here.
Academics tend to give As to the students who write in standard English. But there’s a new movement afoot nowadays to not penalize the English language learner whose mistakes now might be the standard English of the near future. In fact, there is a movement to reward students who struggle with standard English with a better grade, not a worse one. After all, they have to work about five times harder than the native speaker. Can you imagine going to China and trying to write a five-page essay in Chinese after two years of high school Mandarin classes?
Nowadays, by the way, is also an interesting expression in Los Angeles. Freshman students nine times out of ten write “now in days.” I puzzled over that for years. Last week a student explained it to me. Nowadays in Spanish is hoy en dia. So, “now in days” makes a sense, sonically.
Do we erect a wall against these non-standard uses of “now in days,”, “barely,” and “after”? We can try but language will tunnel under, hop over, and even walk ghost-like right through our academic wall. And that is the great beauty of language. It is an ever-emerging river, not a static thing.
I hope you enjoyed this little intro to linguistic walls. More later. Or after. Sorry, it seems I barely began this article a few minutes ago, and it is already done!
(See what I did there?)
More Cunning Linguist here
