If you read this post, you probably won’t look at the world the same way ever again.
I didn’t, and I think it’s only fair to warn you.
English is a mix of two languages. Around 500 BC, three tribes—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—invaded the British isles. We call that language Anglo-Saxon. As the English interacted with the Roman empire and France over the next 2000 years, their language adopted new words that came from those Latin speakers (and in some cases the Greeks that the Romans conquered.)
As a result, English has two words for everything. Don’t believe me? Check out this list:
| Saxon | Latinate |
| Give | Donate |
| Build | Construct |
| Help | Assist |
| Watch | Observe |
| Buy | Purchase |
| Meet | Encounter |
| End | Terminate |
| Make | Manufacture |
| Speak | Articulate |
| Death | Mortality |
| Work | Labor |
Here’s a sentence from Just Evil Enough, written three ways.
- From the book: “In modern marketing, the only thing that matters is whether you can capture attention and turn it into behavioral change.”
- In Saxon: “In today’s world, what works best is when you can catch eyes and sway how folks think and act.”
- In Latinate: “In contemporary markets, success depends exclusively on obtaining attention and inducing behavioral response.”
All three of these sentences are English. All three mean the same thing as the original sentence. They just hit different.
Do elites favor Latin?
Beginning with the first book off the printing press—the Bible—Latin was the default written language of the Western world. Even today, law students use Latin words like bona fide (in good faith), habeas corpus (may you have the body), and pro bono (for good.) If you’re a scientist you may have studied anthropology (of man), or morphogenesis (how shapes form.) A physician might prescribe something for bronchitis.
Latinate is the language of expertise. One might even say the language of the elite. You speak English, and yet you’ve probably never noticed that it’s actually two distinct languages. It’s hard to see a system when you’re in it. Yet recognizing the system is the first step in subverting it.
Consider two sentences you might have heard recently: “Lock her up” and “Incarcerate that felon.”
You know exactly which political party would say which sentence. One is plainspoken, blunt, and short. The other is verbose, prolific, eloquent, and elongated. Once I noticed that English was actually two parallel languages, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
But wait, there’s more!
English has plenty more of these implicit systems which we take for granted until they’re pointed out to us.
Pronunciation
The way we say certain letters depends entirely on their context. Emma Wilkin offers the example of the sentence a rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed. This sentence contains 8 different ways to pronounce “ough.”
Vowel order
The rule of ablaut reduplication is why we repeat certain words in a specific order. Sandals are “flip-flops” rather than “flop-filps”; table tennis is “ping-pong”, not “pong-ping.” When we talk we “chit-chat”, rather than “chat-chit.” We always put the “i” sound first. Try saying one of these words out of order. It sounds weird.
Descriptive word order
This one may be the strangest hidden system of all. Whenever a list of descriptive words appears in a sentence, they almost always happen in the order of opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose. As The Elements of Eloquence author Mark Forsyth points out, “you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”
(This is also why English is so hard to learn.)
Why this obsession with systems?
If you want to change the world, you need to hack the system. That means recognizing that it’s a system in the first place, then getting it to behave in a way its creators didn’t intend, or find unfair advantages others overlooked.
Imagine how much more effective your political speechwriting would be if you understood this language split, and wrote accordingly.
Finding unfair advantages is is the key to success in modern business, but while there are plenty of books on product innovation, there are precious few on how to turn attention into behavioral change. That’s why Emily and I wrote Just Evil Enough.
Resources
Some extra tools, links, and context.
