The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.

Aaron and I are fans of the Red Wings and Tigers, so imagine our vexation last Saturday. Both teams were playing on television at the same time. My father is with us. He’s not into hockey. He wanted us to stick with the baseball game in Camden Yards. Aaron and I preferred the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals from Joe Louis Arena. We figured that behind their ace Justin Verlander, the Tigers would end the O’s five-game win streak. They did, 6 – 3.

I enjoy the story my father tells of the time a Latino player stepped into the batter’s box and crossed himself, as ball players are wont to do, and the Yankees’ catcher Yogi Berra tapped the guy’s knee with his mitt and said to him, “Whaddya say we just let God watch this game!”

That story has to do with why I don’t want my children to have values. That and some notes written by a soldier in a foxhole. Let me explain.

During World War I, a young Austrian soldier — an aristocratic Jew who was said to have fought with “reckless bravery” — used his time in a foxhole and in prison to jot down his thoughts on logic and ethics. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, these thoughts were published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an almost impenetrably complex landmark work on the relationship between language and thought. The soldier’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He published only this single book in his lifetime.

He was an intellectual high-watt bulb, Wittgenstein, especially on the subject of “language games.” We play games, he observed. So do languages. When we reach for words, especially technical words, to apprehend and articulate reality, we do well to note what language game they belong to.

The language of values, like the language of ‘fastballs’ ‘bunts’ and ‘sacrifice flies’, belongs to a game with its own grammar or rules. Whereas values assume a closed system — more about which in a moment — baseball assumes an open one. Baseball’s played in a paradise whose only canopy is the heavens. This is the world a baseball player inhabits and late-night talk show hosts do not. The baseball player thanks God, or the Big Guy Upstairs, for his success. The late show hosts, Leno O’Brien or Letterman, make him the butt of jokes for it. As if God cares, they say. As if God has any interest in a game.

Athletes make easy targets. They want to believe — they believe inveterately — that God cares about what they’re doing and wishes them well, a notion quaint these days. Such a thought is incongruous in a world where our lives entire, not merely our sporting lives, are no longer seriously imagined as beheld by divinity. The reason we doubt God watches baseball is not that we think sport trivial but that we think God is. We lack the moral imagination the ancients had, or John Donne or Jane Austen. Most of us who have fiber-optic TV and 457 channels no longer imagine God watches anything. We are Nietzsche’s “last man.”

It was Nietzsche who made this values language up. He argued that whatever the rules of the game concerning our behavior shall be, they can only be rules we make up or choose for ourselves. A nihilist, he defined reality in terms of negation, negating that particular and strange history of the Jews. No more “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” and the Ten Commandments and so on. The ancient Hebrew and Christian notion that the grammar of our lives is in league with a particular history involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David; the claim that our story is somehow part of the story of Israel and her children; the hope that we inhabit that story and are headed somewhere, all this belonged to another day. That day, Nietzsche said, and his values language assumes, is gone.

This is the language game of values, a language that presupposes God is not watching us any longer because there is no God to do the watching.

If values are what people are supposed to have instead of God — and I’ve just made the case that they are — why would I want my kids to have them? I’d rather they have virtues, especially those with narrative entailments. I’d rather they have the ancient sense that their lives are beheld by divinity, watched and worried after by the God of the Exodus and Mt. Sinai, the Lord who hung the stars in the heavens and raised Jesus from the dead. I want my children to live in a universe that is more like Camden Yards or Comerica Park than Mellon Arena or the venerable Joe. And I want the Wings to win the Cup.

If D. H. Lawrence doesn’t convince you that John McWhorter is wrong about Shakespeare, let me chime in. I could list about a dozen false or at least questionable assumptions McWhorter makes in his post, but let me confine myself to two. First, he assumes that difficulty in drama is bad. Second, he assumes that difficulty is a function of linguistic change — of course, he knows that there are other reasons why plays and stories and poems are difficult, but he doesn’t mention any of them. This is a great flaw.

Let’s remember that Shakspeare could write as staightforwardly as anyone when he chose to. Consider this wonderful little moment from Act V of Henry V, when the young victorious king is wooing the daughter of the King of France, encumbered by certain linguistic barriers on both sides:

HENRY. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus much English, canst thou love me?

KATHARINE. I cannot tell.

HENRY. Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I’ll ask them.

But then consider this passage from Act II of Troilus and Cressida, in which the woman referred to is Helen:

HECTOR. Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost 
The keeping.

TROILUS. What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?

HECTOR. But value dwells not in particular will: 
It holds his estimate and dignity 
As well wherein ‘tis precious of itself 
As in the prizer. ‘Tis mad idolatry 
To make the service greater than the god, 
And the will dotes that is attributive 
To what infectiously itself affects, 
Without some image of th’ affected merit.

This is not difficult because it is old; it’s difficult because it’s difficult. That is, Troilus and Hector are engaged in a serious philosophical debate about what constitutes worth — it’s a word that turns up repeatedly in the scene — and that’s an extremely complex topic. Shakespeare doesn’t try to simplify it in the least. Does anyone think that the average playgoer in 1601 understood the argument that Hector is making here?

So, McWhorter wants “richly considered [translations], executed by artists equipped to channel Shakespeare to the modern listener with passion, respect and care.” I’d be happy to turn that scene fromTroilus over to any poet who thinks he or she can “channel Shakespeare” and see what comes out. I don’t think it’ll be pretty.

Of course, Troilus is a uniquely thorny play, so let’s take something more famous — clichéd, even:

To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause. There’s the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, 
The insolence of office and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of? 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action.

You think you can improve on that? Great. Knock yourself out. McWhorter thinks that someone reading that speech in modern French understands more of it than you or I do. Which means that to him the poetry is nothing. Not my view.

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Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College, writing at The American Scene

Professor William A. Read, a distinguished linguist, put it this way in a journal of philology: “The pronunciation of educated Americans is in many respects more archaic than that of educated Englishmen.” This should be no surprise, he said, since “the phonetic basis of American pronunciation rests chiefly on the speech of Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” And those Englishmen sounded much like the Americans of today. The “English accent” that we now associate with educated British speech is a relatively new phenomenon and didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Look at the way the letter r is pronounced (or not pronounced), perhaps the most important difference in the speech of educated people in the US and the UK. Since Anglo-Saxon days, the English had pronounced the r in words like “far,” “mother,” “world,” “church,” and “mourn.” English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the r’s in these words when the Colonies broke away from England. Most Americans still do. But educated people in Britain began dropping their r’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Americans most likely to drop their r’s were those, like New Englanders, who had strong commercial and social ties with the mother country.

This dropping of r’s in Britain didn’t happen all of a sudden, and the sticklers of the day didn’t take it lying down. “The perception that the language was ‘losing a letter’ was a cause of profound upset to some writers,” the linguist David Crystal has written. The poet Keats, for example, was cruelly upbraided by critics for rhyming “thoughts” with “sorts,” and “thorns” with “fawns.” Lord Byron blamed a critical article for hastening Keats’s death in 1821: “‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.” But by the time Keats died, the dropped r was a standard feature of educated British pronunciation.

The other letter that’s a dead giveaway in telling a Brit from a Yank is the a in a word like “past.” We all know how an American would say it — with an a like the one in “cat.” And as anyone who’s watched Masterpiece Theatre can tell you, the standard British pronunciation is PAHST. But it wasn’t always so. The Brits used to say it the same way Americans do now. Here again, the Americans stuck with an old way of speaking, one the British abandoned about the same time they dropped their r’s.

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from Stiff Upper Lips by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman

Celts invaded the British Isles millennia ago. After a few centuries of Roman rule, which ended in 410 C.E., tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians came pillaging. The tribes must have been abetted by a superhuman force — perhaps a plague or a climate catastrophe — because their Germanic languages drove out the Celts’ Brittonic ones almost completely. Another group, the Vikings, began attacking from the north and east in 789 C.E., and the Vikings’ language, Norse, merged in time with Germanic tribes’ Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps because the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons despaired of learning one another’s word endings, the language they forged together had very few and instead defined the grammatical role of words by the order they appeared in. Anglo-Saxon bequeathed the most common words in English today — the, that, of, from, in, by, to, with, and and. Norse gave us loose, weak, scare; such nautical terms as storm and sea, and such metaphorically nautical phrases as clear the decks, second-rate, and show one’s colors. In 1066, when the Normans won the Battle of Hastings, their French-speaking aristocracy replaced the Anglo-Saxon-speaking one, and French became the source of words for war (siege, armor), morality (courtesy, courage), fashion (ermine, style), and law (jury, crime).

By the 14th century, however, the Norman-descended kings were speaking the English of their subjects. The language achieved a certain glamour (a Scots word, from grammar) in the hands of writers such as Chaucer (responsible for ambassador and intellect) and Bible translators such as John Wyclif (puberty, zeal) and William Tyndale (beautiful, scapegoat). After America was discovered, sailors brought home such new words as Eskimo, Abenaki for “eaters of raw flesh,” and avocado, Nahuatl for “testicle,” a shape the fruit resembles. With the advent of the Renaissance, French jetted forth yet again, imparting perfume, mediocre, and naïf, while Italian gave carnival, disgrace, and balcony. It was a fertile era; Mr. Hitchings reports that the works of Shakespeare “contain our first sightings of some 1,700 words.” In the 17th century, when wars of religion erupted, English speakers learned to distinguish carefully between what was a matter of fact and what was mere opinion, and the high-living Samuel Pepys introduced the phrase have a good time. In the 18th century, which saw the birth of charming and low-bred, the novelist Fanny Burney described a character as grumpy, and the novelist Laurence Sterne described another as good-tempered. And on Mr. Hitchings goes, until Hemingway borrows cojones from Spanish and the British borrow nark from the Gypsies to describe someone who finks to the police.

The 20th-century food writer Elizabeth David, Mr. Hitchings has discovered, was single-handedly responsible introducing into English the words bruschetta, taleggio, and salade Niçoise. Alas, not long after announcing this discovery, Mr. Hitchings is sent over the edge by the etymology of cappuccino and wanders unhappily into diffuse social criticism, regretting consumerism, cell phones, and the violent language often used to describe male sexuality. “Life insurance is really death insurance, after all,” he writes, a truth that no one needs to be told, but he’s had an exhausting tour through the linguistic databases, and he deserves to nap through the last dozen pages if he needs to. It isn’t fair to end on such a note, so in a desultory fashion more appropriate to the book, here’s a different one: Mr. Hitchings reports that the bikini was named in a 1946 marketing stunt for a South Pacific atoll ruined by an atom bomb a few days before a line of swimwear’s debut.

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from Caleb Crain’s review of Henry Hitchings’ The Secret Life of Words in the sadly now defunct New York Sun

We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obligated first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use); it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.’

from Warranted Christian Belief