The Half-Life of Facts (27 page)

While there are biases for how we assimilate facts, we can’t even rely on common sense for understanding how factual inertia works: We have to test our irrationality. This is encapsulated in the work of Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Watts has demonstrated, in numerous studies that explore everything from how certain songs become popular to how marketing works, that we are very good at telling stories to ourselves that sound true but must be subjected to the rigors of quantitative analysis for verification.

Understanding how concepts penetrate a group’s consciousness in the scientific realm combines both the spread of knowledge through a population and all the cognitive biases we’ve discussed so far. But only looking at a single discipline, like biology or even economics, doesn’t quite capture how prevalent the issues are that affect the delicate interplay between individual beliefs or ideas and the overall “facts” of a community.

One area in which we are forced to grapple with all of this interplay in its wonderful complexity—between what the community knows and what each of us knows—is in the realm of language.

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LANGUAGE
is a fickle thing, always changing. This is even recognized in the two ways linguists discuss grammar:
prescriptive grammar
and
descriptive grammar
. Prescriptive grammar is the way things ought to be, while descriptive grammar is the way things are. Prescriptivists held sway in centuries past, declaring what is allowed and what is not. They are responsible for such blanket rules as bans on split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions.

On the other hand, descriptivists aim to chronicle the way we actually use language. While it turns out that we are still subject to many rules, these are often subconscious and less set in stone.
There can be a great deal of overlap between these two areas of grammar, but it diminishes as time goes on, as our actual language shifts and changes around us, widening the gap between the stone-inscribed rules of the prescriptivists and the observations of the descriptivists.

Language is a complex mix of flux and stability. On the one hand, there is evidence that the frequencies of the sounds of consonants in Old English are by and large the same as those in modern English, even though we modern English speakers are separated from Old English by one thousand years.

On the other hand, we also have many cases of linguistic change, such as new words being introduced and old words going extinct. Similarly, words themselves change, such as when verbs become more regular over time, and become more adherent to grammatical rules. In English we have verbs that are both regular and irregular. For example, the past tense of
discuss
is
discussed
(a regular verb that fits the “-ed” past tense), but the past tense of
speak
isn’t
speaked
; it’s
spoke
. Luckily, this change is not random: It turns out that the more frequently used words are those that are less likely to change, with a clear quantitative rule. Specifically, the rate of a verb’s regularization is inversely proportional to the square root of its usage frequency. So how can we understand linguistic facts, and their interplay between change and stability?

Most of the facts we have examined so far are either what we as a society think is true (as in scientific truth) or what is the current state of the world (such as the speeds of the fastest computers). But when it comes to language, we’re in a different sort of factual realm. Unlike those people who adhere to a prescriptive approach to linguistics, there’s no real objective truth, with immutable rules that reside in some manual and that is completely independent of language speakers. A misuse of a word isn’t wrong if enough people begin using it that way. Once most people start using
disinterested
and
uninterested
interchangeably, it just becomes annoying to continue to correct everyone.

The facts of language are a sort of population average of each
individual’s set of rules. Each person’s approach, known by the delightful term
idiolect
, is a mercurial thing that is subject to what you learned when you were young, and to who’s around you. It includes your vocabulary, grammar, pronunciations of words, and accent. Our linguistic facts hit the knowledge change jackpot: They are a complicated combination of slow adaptive change, factual inertia, and shifting baseline syndrome.

When speaking to others, we push and pull their speech patterns in various directions, even if only subconsciously, and they in turn influence us. There are many examples of this; one is
voice onset time
, which refers to how long it takes to produce the sound of certain consonants. This is performed completely automatically, but it is not unchangeable. While speaking with someone who has a longer voice onset time, a conversant often subconsciously begins to mimic the other.

Another subconscious language example is the
situation-based dialect
: A team of linguists studied Oprah Winfrey and how she introduced guests of different races. They found that she actually changed how she spoke during introductions, depending on whether her guest was white or black. This is similar to the person I know who was born in South Africa but raised in the United States: He only has a South African accent when speaking to his parents. Or how my wife switches between using
soda
and
pop
, depending on her location.

Of course, we’re not entirely products of the influences of those around us; there are certain limits to our malleability. For example, while lengthening voice onset time causes a similar change in a listener, doing the opposite, shortening one’s voice onset time, does not cause the conversant to also shorten theirs. Henry Kissinger, who has lived in the United States for well over seventy years, still has a very strong German accent; his idiolect has not changed one bit. Understanding language acquisition and change at the individual level is a complex and highly multidimensional issue.

But ultimately, seeing how language changes, and how we
mentally respond to this, can give us insights into how we adapt to the facts around us.

In an article about taboos and curse words, the linguist John McWhorter examines how this linguistic change happens around us:

We are often like objects being dragged through mud. We change, but slowly, and with the residue of where we came from upon us.

Sometimes these changes are rapid and widespread, such as during the wonderfully named period in human history known as the Great Vowel Shift. The first time I stumbled across this phrase in my introductory linguistics textbook, I was fascinated. Apparently there were linguistic equivalents to the Black Death, the Great Awakening, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. When I looked more carefully, though, it wasn’t quite as dramatic as I first expected. While its exact causes are still unknown,
it involved a shift, over the span of a couple of hundred years, beginning in the fourteenth century, when the pronunciation of certain vowel sounds changed. It is the reason that we now say “mouse” and “mice” instead of “moose” and “meese,” which is what they used to be.

But imagine living during this. As people changed, what would be our response? Would we be confused by these changing facts or adapt rapidly to what was happening?

I had my own personal, far less great, example of this. It occurred when I was younger, when my brother and I were speaking with my grandfather. One of us described some activity as “very fun” only to have our grandfather inform us that this was not proper speech. One simply does not say that something is “very fun.” But we felt that there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I can
clearly remember our confusion, trying to tell our grandfather that people say this all the time, and that what we had said was correct.

Figure 9. The frequency of the phrase “very fun” over time, as a curve. Notice that around 1980, the phrase’s frequency increases rapidly. Data courtesy of Google Books Ngrams and the Cultural Observatory.

In fact, we were simply part of a shift in usage that was happening around us. While considered improper English for nearly two hundred years, this phrase became acceptable around the early 1980s.

This is an example of shifting baseline syndrome and can perhaps give us a hint of what it would have been like to live during the Great Vowel Shift. My grandfather had not recognized the slow shift in language around him until confronted with generational knowledge, or, in this case, a two-generation jump in the linguistic facts around him.

This sort of shift in one’s own mental linguistic rule set has actually been quantified in an attempt to understand it. When, and in what situation, we learn a language often affects how we process it for our entire lives, and sometimes even affects how we view the facts around us, such as in the case of my grandfather.

Linguists have looked at various aspects of a regional accent based on age. There are numerous examples of differences in the numbers of changes being present as a population is examined by age: The older the people examined, the less likely they are to have a certain linguistic innovation, whatever it may be. Of course, people also change during their own lives, too; despite numerous instances of people adhering to what they learned during childhood, there are also many instances when they alter their speech patterns both consciously and unconsciously over the course of their lives. The comedian and actor Stephen Colbert, for example, made a concerted effort to lose the Southern accent of his South Carolina childhood. But there are many times when linguistic change at the level of the community can be seen by looking at speakers of different ages.

Such linguistic decay is quite widespread. For example, something like the Great Vowel Shift occurred among French Canadians during the twentieth century. In Quebec, over the course of
several decades, they began to change their pronunciations of the vowels in certain words. And just as before, those who were younger were more likely to exhibit this shift.

But, intriguingly, it didn’t happen evenly across all words; there was a certain situational aspect to the shift. Words associated with the good old days, such as those having to do with parents, World War I, and even iceboxes, did not change alongside other words. There is speculation that younger speakers heard these words more often from their elders (who did not change their vowels), and were thus more likely to maintain the original pronunciations. One’s linguistic facts are affected in a very real way by who we hear them from.

This is similar to my relationship with certain terms from cellular biology. When I took a cell biology course in college, I learned the topics from a British professor. Since I haven’t gone on to study cell biology further, I am certain that many of the terms I use for cellular organelles are frozen in a British-style pronunciation. This was made clear when I was speaking with my father about programmed cell death, a process known as
apoptosis
. I said it as “a-puh-TOE-sis,” only to be informed that many Americans actually say “a-pop-TOE-sis.” While the American pronunciation sounded far sillier to me, apparently I was the one who sounded silly.

Ultimately, the facts of language—in this case, the prescriptive rules that we learn as schoolchildren—are those that are based on our own language experiences. Just as we view technological innovation, facts about dinosaurs, and even the acceptability of different types of LEGO pieces with a perspective formed in the crucible of childhood, the same thing happens with language.

Whatever sort of knowledge we have, at this point it should be abundantly clear that we are far from perfect when it comes to having our own up-to-date facts in our minds. But must it be so? Or can we adapt to all of this change? Can we recognize all the biases that are part of each of us and prevent our knowledge from being updated only once a generation or so?

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THERE
are already institutions that deal with the far reaches of the fact timescale, trying to help us deal with change. On the fast end of facts, there is a company started a few years ago called Ambient Devices. A spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, Ambient Devices has created a number of informational appliances for rapidly changing information, including market and weather data. For example, they offer an orb that can be placed on a desktop that glows red when the market is down and green when the market is up. They offer the Ambient Umbrella, whose handle glows when rain is in the forecast, so it won’t be forgotten. These gadgets provide a way for us to be kept abreast, in a vaguely useful way, of the changing facts around us. But these sorts of devices are only good for quickly changing facts.