Ok, this is not a post about books or music, which is what I said at the beginning of this year that I would stick to. But it's not very far removed: it's about developments in language, English in particular. This is something I notice a lot, mainly when it's a development that irritates me, such as the decline in the use of transitive verbs, or horrible mis-usages such as the current damage being done to the word "iconic." I could think of others but I'd just as soon not. 

Amit Majmudar, writing in the April 2024 issue of The New Criterion (that's a link but it may be subscriber-only) says something which alarmed me a bit. 

A rule of thumb in linguistics gives any language a thousand years. At that point, linguistic drift will have made the mother language nearly incomprehensible to its descendants. That drift is inexorable, a feature of language itself, in spite of the best efforts of an Académie française or a priestly caste. That average lifespan, a millennium in the sun, accounts for slower and faster rates of change.....

We read Shakespeare a century before the midway point of our drifting, shifting language’s lifespan. These four-hundred-year-old plays, by this time next century, will be only half-intelligible even to the few who make time for them.

Or, to look at it another way: five or six hundred years from now there may well be no such thing as a "native speaker" of anything that would be recognizable to us in conversation as English. English as we know it, which is already significantly different from English as Shakespeare knew it, will be a dead language. In the year 1000 AD, no Italian, or few, outside the Church would have been able to carry on a conversation with a Roman of 1 AD, though the Italian might not have been aware that his language was no longer that of his ancestors. Or, conversely, that it ever had been. And even churchmen probably had much of the pronunciation wrong. 

Well, that's a gloomy thought. That Shakespeare's poetry would have to be translated for everyone except specialists would be a massive loss to the world. Of course it's already a loss to the billions today who can't read English, either at all or well enough to read poetry and grasp that it is poetry. But one way or another it's almost certain to happen, whether or not the expected timetable is followed.

In spite of that fatalism, I was oddly, though only slightly, cheered the other day when someone in the comments section on National Review's web site wrote the words which are the title of this post. In case the meaning isn't obvious--it was clear in context--it means "That's obvious."

Consider the history which made that statement possible and comprehensible. First came the association of the vocalization, not really a word, "duh" with mentally handicapped people: an inarticulate response signifying incomprehension. Then it became, for people of normal intelligence, an ironic way of saying "what you just said is so obvious that a mentally incompetent person would grasp it." (Notice, by the way, that I am deliberately avoiding the use of the older and cruder words for that condition that are now considered unacceptable in polite use.)

"Football is a dangerous game."

"Well, duh!"

For a while it was usually a two-syllable thing: "duh-uh," with the first syllable stressed and a bit higher pitched than the second. It wasn't really a word, just an interjection, like "hey." Or like "well" as I just used it. 

It also has a role as a form of mockery, frequently self-mockery, meaning "you [or I] just said or did something stupid." "I was looking everywhere for my keys and they're right there on the counter. Duh." 

And now, if that instance at NR is not a solitary quirk, it is being used as a noun. Perhaps it will stick, and make it through the centuries, so that 500 years from now one philosopher will say to another something along the lines of "Your premise is a duh, but your conclusion does not follow."

What I like about this is that it's entirely a spontaneous development, driven by people using language that comes naturally, with a creativity that comes naturally, and always involving constant change. Part of what makes some of the trends which annoy me so objectionable is that they come out of commercial or journalistic practice which is manufactured in a sense that "duh" was not. They occur in language that is deliberately composed for some utilitarian purpose, and therefore ought to involve some minimal degree of skill, but instead is the work of people who are attempting to sound more literate than they actually are but are indifferent to or ignorant of standards. 

And then there's the academy, now filled with people who are deliberately trying to force language into some unnatural shape to accommodate their ideology. Oozing out into the rest of the world, that effort is responsible for a TV journalist saying "The interviewer wasn’t themselves--he was rude...." (That also was from National Review, quoting the journalist.)

To use another word that's been reshaped by popular speech: that's gross.

I had written most of the above when it occurred to me to check with the dictionary makers. Sure enough, they have recognized "duh" as an interjection. Nounhood may or may not eventually follow.