The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (66 page)

Safire replies, “The sentence should read ‘robberies, muggings and pocket-pickings.’ One picks pockets; no one pockets picks.”

Significantly, Safire did not answer the question. If the perpetrator were called a
pocket-picker
, which is the most common kind of compound in English, then indeed the crime would be
pocket-picking
. But the name for the perpetrator is not really up for grabs; we all agree that he is called a
pickpocket
. And if he is called a pickpocket, not a pocket-picker, then what he does can perfectly well be called pick-pocketing, not pocket-picking, thanks to the ever-present English noun-to-verb conversion process, just as a cook cooks, a chair chairs, and a host hosts. The fact that no one pockets picks is a red herring—who said anything about a
pick-pocketer?

The thing that is confusing Safire is that
pickpocket
is a special kind of compound, because it is headless—it is not a kind of pocket, as one would expect, but a kind of person. And though it is exceptional, it is not unique; there is a whole family of such exceptions. One of the delights of English is its colorful cast of characters denoted by headless compounds, compounds that describe a person by what he
does
or
has
rather than by what he
is:

bird-brain

blockhead

boot-black

butterfingers

cut-throat

dead-eye

egghead

fathead

flatfoot

four-eyes

goof-off

hard-hat

heart-throb

heavyweight

high-brow

hunchback

killjoy

know-nothing

lazy-bones

loudmouth

low-life

ne’er-do-well

pip-squeak

redneck

scarecrow

scofflaw

wetback

This list (sounding vaguely like a dramatis personae from Damon Runyon) shows that virtually everything in language falls into systematic patterns, even the seeming exceptions, if only you bother to look for them.

The third story deconstructs a breathless quote from Barbra Streisand, describing tennis star Andre Agassi:

Safire first speculates on the origin of Streisand’s use of
evolved:
“It’s change from the active to passive voice—from ‘he
evolved from
the Missing Link’ to ‘He
is evolved
’—was probably influenced by the adoption of
involved
as a compliment.”

These kinds of derivations have been studied intensively in linguistics, but Safire shows here that he does not understand how they work. He seems to think that people change words by being vaguely reminded of rhyming ones—
evolved
from
involved
, a kind of malapropism. But in fact people are not that sloppy and literal-minded. The lexical creations we have looked at—
Let me caveat that; They deteriorated the health care system; Boggs flied out to center field
—are based not on rhymes but on abstract rules that change a word’s part-of-speech category and its cast of role-players, in the same precise ways across dozens or hundreds of words. For example, the transitive
to deteriorate the health care system
comes from the intransive
the health care system deteriorated
in the same way that the transitive
to break the glass
comes from the intransitive
the glass broke
. Let’s see, then, where
evolved
might have come from.

Safire’s suggestion that it is an active-to-passive switch based on
involved
does not work at all. For
involved
, we can perhaps imagine a derivation from the active voice:

But for
evolved
, the parallel derivation would require a passive sentence, and before that an active sentence, that do not exist (I have marked them with asterisks):

Also, if you’re involved, it means that something involves you (you’re the object), whereas if you’re evolved, it means that you have been doing some evolving (you’re the subject).

The problem is that the conversion of
evolved from
to
very evolved
is not a switch from the active voice of a verb to the passive voice, as in
Andre beat Boris
Boris was beaten by Andre
. The source Safire mentions,
evolved from
, is intransitive in modern English, with no direct object. To passivize a verb in English you convert the direct object into a subject, so
is evolved
could only have been passivized from
Something evolved Andre
, which does not exist. Safire’s explanation is like saying you can take
Bill bicycled from Lexington
and change it to
Bill is bicycled
and then to
Bill is very bicycled
.

This breakdown is a good illustration of one of the main scandals of the language mavens: they show lapses in the most elementary problems of grammatical analysis, like figuring out the part-of-speech category of a word. Safire refers to the active and passive voice, two forms of a verb. But is Barbra using
evolved
as a verb? One of the major discoveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word—noun, verb, adjective—is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental category that can be verified by experimental assays, just as a chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. These tests are a standard homework problem in the introductory course that linguists everywhere call Baby Syntax. The method is to find as many constructions as you can in which words that are clear-cut examples of a category, and no other kind of word, can appear. Then when you are faced with a word whose category you do not know, you can see whether it can appear in that set of constructions with some natural interpretation. By these tests we can determine, for example, that the language maven Jacques Barzun earned an “F” when he called a possessive noun like
Wellington’s
an adjective (as before, I have placed asterisks beside the phrases that sound wrong):

: 1.
very
X:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: very intelligent

IMPOSTER
:
^*
very Wellington’s

: 2.
seems
X:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: He seems intelligent

IMPOSTER
:
^*
This seems Wellington’s

: 3.
How
X:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: How intelligent is he?

IMPOSTER
:
^*
How Wellington’s is this ring?

: 4.
more
X
than:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: more intelligent than

IMPOSTER
:
^*
more Wellington’s than

: 5.
a
Adj X Adj N:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: A funny, intelligent old friend

IMPOSTER
:
^*
a funny, Wellington’s old friend

: 6.
un
-X:

REAL ADJECTIVE
: unintelligent

IMPOSTER
:
^*
un-Wellington’s

Now let’s apply this kind of test to Barbra’s
evolved
, comparing it to a clear-cut verb in the passive voice like
was kissed by a passionate lover
(odd-sounding constructions are marked with an asterisk):

very evolved /
^*
very kissed


He seems evolved/
^*
He seems kissed


How evolved is he? /
^*
How kissed is he?


He is more evolved now than he was last year /
^*
He is more kissed now than he was yesterday


A thoughtful, evolved, sweet friend /
^*
a tall, kissed, thoughtful man


He was unevolved /
^*
He was unkissed by a passionate lover