John McWhorter

Two cheers for this philippic against the contemporary phenomenon of woke (a word I despise, if that matters). The author posits that the practitioners of the ideology constitute a religion in a long, perhaps somewhat labored, section, and he believes that their irrationality and attendant vendetta against all who do not join with them whole-throatedly constitute an assault upon reason and civility. All true, and I agree with the main thrust of his book, but I do have reservations to my enthusiasm. He begins by citing examples of three ruined careers of individuals who ran afoul of what he refers to as The Elect; none of them should have lost their jobs, but one of them was soapboxing the cryptoracist formulation of All Lives Matter, which was quickly adopted as a slogan by the alt-right to express their contempt for Black Lives Matter. Now, I hold no brief for Black Lives Matter, and perhaps some early adopters were innocents, but that slogan quickly became just another dog whistle. The Elect, he posits, have three foundational documents for their faith and I have read only one, but the excerpts he quotes seem to me to be pretty astute analyses of the rise of the Trumpista phenomenon, and if the author really thinks that wokiness constitutes one-tenth of the threat to America that Trump does, he needs to pay attention to his news feed; he does, toward the end of the book, issue a four-paragraph refutation of me here, which I found annoyingly facile, and soured me more than a trifle on the rest of the book. As for his three-part panacea for the problem, they range from the trivial (teaching reading by phonics) to the mostly already done (legalizing narcotics). McWhorter is an able and interesting writer, and I agree with most of his argument, but the book does have a faint odor of too much Q.E.D. for mine, and I found myself wondering if he would be any happier with ninety per cent agreement with his arguments than his rhetorical adversaries seem to be with partial acceptance of their own.… (mere)

John McWhorter will dazzle you with insights into what language is and what it is not. Many of our assumptions are just wrong. Language is verbal behavior that tends to change over time. We may feel compelled to follow the rules made up by grammarians, but deep down language is arbitrary; most languages are festooned with grammatical frills that are unnecessary to basic communication. So-called primitive languages are often more elaborate and complicated than languages spoken by what McWhorter calls "tall building" cultures. Also languages that live next to each other tend to pick up each other's traits.

Language tends to have surprisingly little to do with culture and more to do with accidents and the erosion of words in the native speaker's mouth. Much of what I thought I knew about language turns out to be wrong.… (mere)