Words on the Move

Thursday, April 7, 2016
6:00–8:00 p.m. 
Davis Auditorium

It is often thought that a dictionary captures what a language really "is"—that the official code is what is written down, and that when words are used in new ways, it is newsworthy, amusing, or even downright wrong. In fact, it is as inherent to a language to change as it is for weather to change—even if a group of people were in a cave for a thousand years, separated from technological change and cultural developments, they would emerge from the cave speaking a language quite different from the original one. A language is, at heart, a metamorphosis, not a list.

Biography

John McWhorter teaches linguistics and American Studies at Columbia, as well as music history and philosophy. He specializes in how languages change and mix, and has done much work on creole languages. He also writes on language, race, culture and other topics for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, and Politico and his columns and essays have appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere. He has done a TED talk on texting, and four audiovisual sets for the Teaching Company on language and linguistics.

Read about Dr. McWhorter's work in The Atlantic!