When I was in seventh grade, I had a language arts workbook that asked us to fill in the blanks with one of four words. Approaches varied, but the idea was to give students a sense of the range of our language’s vocabulary and how to use it. OK, it could get a little twee: I remember a sentence instructing us in the meaning of “expatiate.” Not expiate or expatriate but expatiate. I’m not sure that lesson was necessary. But those exercises did leave me with a sense of our language as a great buzzing menagerie of words, many of which I didn’t yet know. I was excited about learning them.
But my girls — now in fourth and seventh grade at solid schools — tell me that they have never been instructed in anything like Ye Olde Language Arts. Instead, they are taught more general things such as how to structure a paragraph, along with instructions to write “expressively.” I have nothing but respect for their teachers, but the modern curriculums they are given to work from do not convey the sense that English — and by extension, all language — is a marvel.
I worry that my children will be left with the assumption, natural but unaware, that language is just words strung together. To think this is to lose out on wonder, and on great stories, too. Every word has one, like every creature and every nation. And not just the Latinate ones like “expatiate.”
A random example: the word “business.” It came to my mind not long ago when watching an antique musical talkie of 1929. I don’t recommend “So Long, Letty” unless you share my unhealthy fascination with the cultural detritus of the distant past. But in one song, the protagonist sings about her business yet uses the word in an entirely different way that reminded me how many stories the word has to tell.
Here goes. “Business” starts with “busy,” and the first mystery about busy is why it’s spelled that way. We are so used to seeing it that we may not notice how weird it is. You would think the word would be pronounced “boocie” or “boozy.” In fact, it was, in Old English — with the tight “oo” sound that French now has in words like lune for “moon.” An “oo” sound can drift into an “ee” or an “ih.” I once knew someone from suburban New Jersey who pronounced “shoes” with so little “oo”-ness that a Martian transcriber might think my friend was saying something more like “shizz.” It actually sounded quite normal. That’s how you get from boozy to “bizzy.”
So how do we get “business”? Once upon a time the word really did mean busy-ness — the state of being busy, in the way that happiness is the state of being happy. A Scottish poem called “The King’s Book,” from around 1400, describes “the little squirrel, full of busyness.” There was even an opposite word, busiless.
Today, however, you don’t really think of this word as meaning a state of being busy. That is partly because we pronounce it not “busy-ness” but “bizzness.” Unmoored from that audible connection, its meaning has been free to drift its own way, although if you squint you can sense the original meaning in a sentence like “Knock off that ‘Stranger Things’ business and get to work!”
Mainly, a business is a moneymaking venture. A company is a busy place, yes. But making money is a very particular way to be busy. The process by which the general category gets whittled down to a specific type is called semantic narrowing. The word “member” took a similar path. It originally referred to parts of the body (and not just a specific one that may come to mind), but then came to refer to a different, narrower kind of part: people who are parts of an organization or club.
Endless transformations, and relationships you wouldn’t think of: busy and business, slow and sloth, know and acknowledge. Every word started somewhere different from where it is now. But alas, someone can go K through 12 and learn nothing about how it happens.
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.)
Whether we like it or not, A.I. is poised to make it less urgent for students to learn how to compose sentences and paragraphs. Schoolkids from here on will always be able to summon fluent prose with the press of a button. A modest proposal: Might we spend some of the time traditionally dedicated to teaching composition to teaching the science of language instead?
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