Words on the Move

Why do we grumble when someone says “literally” to mean “figuratively,” or cringe when teenagers end every sentence with “like”? In Words on the Move, linguist John McWhorter invites you to rethink those reactions. He argues that English, like every living language, is constantly transforming—not deteriorating—and that what sounds like linguistic chaos is, in fact, the natural process of language evolution. Words are not static things; they are events, continually reshaped by speakers’ habits, emotions, and social contexts.

McWhorter contends that we misunderstand language because we’ve spent centuries treating writing as its true form. Since the eighteenth century and the rise of dictionaries, English has been perceived as something fixed on the page—“embalmed,” to borrow Samuel Johnson’s phrase. But writing is merely a snapshot of speech at one moment in time. Real language, McWhorter says, is like a parade: ever-moving, ever-changing. When we insist on keeping English stationary, we’re like spectators demanding that the parade stop marching halfway down the street.

How Speech Becomes ‘Frozen’

McWhorter recounts how the invention of the dictionary contributed to our obsession with linguistic permanence. Lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson aimed to preserve “proper” English against corruption, creating the illusion that words have sacred meanings that should never drift. Yet Johnson himself admitted the futility of this task—no nation, he observed, has ever preserved its language from change. Despite this recognition, modern speakers continue to treat dictionary definitions as eternal truths. We see deviations as errors rather than reflections of ongoing transformation.

The Nature of Linguistic Change

Every language in human history evolves. Some changes are visible: new words enter the lexicon to name technologies and cultural trends—think “selfie,” “vape,” or “emoji.” Others are invisible but profound: sounds shift, meanings drift, grammar morphs. McWhorter demonstrates that even in a completely isolated cave society, speech would mutate over centuries. Just as wind reshapes clouds, human habits reshape words. For example, Old English gahstlitch (“spiritual”) became our modern ghostly, while Middle English blessed subtly transformed from “holy” to “fortunate.” Words don’t simply sit still; they wander through meanings and pronunciations like travelers changing routes as they age.

The Problem of Print Thinking

Writing, McWhorter explains, distorts our perception of language’s fluidity. Because written words stay put, we mistake them for the language itself. We even imagine that we “speak writing” rather than “write speech.” This confusion makes us equate change with decay. If spelling or usage shifts, it feels as though civilization itself is unraveling. But speech predates writing by at least 143,000 years. Most languages—roughly 5,800 of the world’s 6,000—exist primarily in spoken form and have never been “frozen” by literacy. Real language lives and breathes in conversation, where speakers constantly retool words to match emotional nuance, rhythm, and social connection.

Why Linguistic Fluidity Matters

Recognizing that English is dynamic changes how you listen. Those “wrong” usages—“literally” for emphasis, “like” as filler, “nucular” for “nuclear”—become signs of evolution, not decline. McWhorter urges you to view them as stages in the same process that produced Shakespeare’s English from Beowulf’s. The gap between “ghostly” and gahstlitch may seem ancient, but the same forces operate today as teenagers coin “hangry” or “textaholic.” To complain about linguistic change, McWhorter quips, is a bit like scolding the weather for shifting from rain to sun.

The Five Paths of Change

Throughout the book, McWhorter explores five major forms of linguistic evolution. Words become personal, taking on emotional tones (well, like, totally). They shift meanings through implication—as when “awful” moved from reverent to unpleasant. They erode into grammar—ordinary words such as did or like shrink into suffixes and particles. Sounds change in systematic patterns, seen in historical vowel shifts from Chaucer’s “leet” to today’s “light.” Finally, new compound words—like blackboard or hangry—emerge as earlier phrases fuse into single units. In each case, the push for intimacy, efficiency, or clarity rewires English from within.

Why McWhorter’s Argument Feels Necessary

By the end of the book, McWhorter has reframed linguistic irritation as wonder. Complaining about “incorrect” usage, he says, is the last socially acceptable form of classism—a way to express superiority over those who speak differently. Understanding language as a living process dissolves this hostility. It replaces disgust with curiosity, and fear of change with the joy of watching English evolve. Like clouds in motion, words are beautiful precisely because they never stand still. Language lives, and the more we learn to love that movement, the richer our connection to humanity becomes.

McWhorter opens his inquiry into how words “get personal” with one simple example: the word well. When you answer, “Well, horses run fast,” what does well actually mean? Not “expertly.” It signals attitude—a polite acknowledgment before you disagree. This is the first of countless words that have drifted from purely semantic meaning (naming things) to pragmatic meaning (expressing feelings and social awareness). The change from objective to subjective, McWhorter argues, reveals that English has always been “ahead of the curve” in emotional expressiveness.

From Words to FACE

To explore how English embeds personality into speech, McWhorter introduces the acronym FACE: Factuality, Acknowledgment, Counterexpectation, and Easing. These functions explain how everyday words operate beyond literal meaning—how they signal sincerity, empathy, surprise, or comfort.

• Factuality marks truth or emphasis: “Really cold” versus “very cold” expresses emotional conviction.
• Acknowledgment shows awareness of others: “Well” or “you know” gently respond to another’s state of mind.
• Counterexpectation flags surprise: “He didn’t even bring a present!” adds a sense of disbelief.
• Easing softens social tension: “LOL” or “I know, right?” create warmth and comfort.

Why ‘Really’ and ‘Literally’ Matter

McWhorter revisits “really” and “literally,” two words that drive grammar purists mad. Originally, really meant “in reality”; literally meant “by the letter.” Yet over centuries both words evolved to mark emotional sincerity. When someone says, “I literally died,” they mean “I truly experienced the feeling.” Purists may rage, but McWhorter reminds us that this shift is ancient. By the 1700s, writers like Francis Brooke and David Hume were using literally figuratively. Words drift toward emphasis; it’s human nature.

“When a note stays unchanged for an eternity, it’s unexpected. Words change as music does—eternally in motion.”

Politeness and Playfulness

The same emotional pull explains how phrases like “and stuff,” “you know,” and “LOL” color conversation. These aren’t empty fillers; they function as humility and empathy markers. “You know,” for instance, invites listeners into shared understanding—it achieves “the pretense of intimacy.” Even uptalk, the rising tone at the end of sentences often mocked in young speakers, is simply another way to acknowledge others’ minds, a tonal “Are you with me?” McWhorter argues that such changes make speech warmer and more cooperative.

Language as Humanity’s Mirror

Through FACE, McWhorter says, you glimpse the essence of human communication: sincerity, empathy, perspective, and harmony. Language isn’t just a system of nouns and verbs—it’s a living mirror of our social nature. Every time someone says “Well...” before disagreeing, recounts a story with “like,” or finishes a text with “LOL,” English becomes more human. Criticizing these changes is like faulting a person for smiling differently over time—it’s only another face of English.

In the second major chapter, McWhorter turns from emotion to semantics—how meanings drift through time. Shakespeare’s characters, he notes, frequently sound strange not because they are poetic, but because their words have shifted meanings since 1600. Words like reduce, science, and curiosity meant something quite different back then. Reduce meant “return,” not “diminish”; science meant “knowledge” rather than laboratory expertise. When Hamlet says “see thou character,” he means “write down,” not “judge.” The confusion is historical, not poetic.

Why Words Drift

Words change through implication. As meanings overlap and contexts shift, speakers infer new shades of sense. Awful once meant “full of awe”—a compliment—before gradually acquiring negative connotations. Fine wandered from “end” (as in French fin) to “high quality,” then “delicate,” then “I’m fine” as a polite deflection. Merry, surprisingly, began as “short,” then “pleasant.” Through centuries, each step feels logical in its moment—it’s only later that the original sense vanishes.

Chance and Cultural Drift

McWhorter insists that change is not deliberate; it’s shaped by chance. No committee decided that awesome would mean “great” and awful “terrible.” Like genetic mutations, linguistic drift happens randomly and harmlessly. The pronunciation shift from uh to um in fillers, or from “hey” to “huh,” reflects unconscious habits rather than logic. Words migrate across what McWhorter calls “the grid of meanings,” covering new conceptual territory as old ones fade, just as “meat” moved from “food” to “animal flesh.”

Why Shakespeare Needs Translation

One of McWhorter’s boldest proposals is that Shakespeare should be translated into modern English. A play like King Lear uses hundreds of “false friends”—words that look familiar but mean something else. We might admire the poetry, but in live performance, most audience members miss much of the sense. Translating “Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom” as “Why should I tolerate these traditions” preserves the drama without loss of dignity. Understanding linguistic evolution makes such modernization not a desecration but a restoration.

The Peace of Lexical Change

Instead of fearing semantic drift, McWhorter urges peace with permanence in motion. Language, he writes, is “a film sliding over a grid of meanings.” At any moment, words occupy certain spaces—but they are always gliding somewhere else. Knowing this can transform frustration into fascination. Every protest against new usage—literally, totally, like—repeats ancient resistance to natural change. As with evolution, the right question isn’t “Why did it change?” but “Why wouldn’t it?”

Grammar seems eternal—rules carved in stone—but McWhorter reveals it as another product of change. In Old English, verbs ended in -an (“wæscan,” “listenan”). Those endings wore off over centuries, leaving verbs bare. Even suffixes like -ly began as independent words; slowly once meant “slow-like.” The process, called grammaticalization, turns ordinary words into functional markers. What starts as meaningful speech—“I did paint” or “I will” —drifts into suffixes or helpers like “-ed” or “will.” Grammar arises when meaning wears down but usefulness remains.

From Words to Tools

Consider used to. It began as “is accustomed to,” as in “Thomas Casberd hath used to set his cart in the street.” Over time it moved from describing habitual action to marking past habit, “She used to live in Columbus.” We now pronounce it “yoosta,” evidence that much of grammar hides in plain speech. Similarly, can once meant “know,” and ought was the past of “owe.” Emotional and pragmatic wear smoothed these into abstract markers of ability or duty.

The Cycle of Wear and Renewal

Grammatical elements constantly wear out and get replaced. Old endings disappear, new helper words emerge. English dropped most of its noun cases, while to stepped in as the infinitive marker (“to run”). Other languages follow similar patterns. Latin’s complex case endings vanished in French, while East Asian languages created entirely different grammatical markers for shape or politeness. Grammar, McWhorter insists, is not perfection—it’s an echo of history.

Why Change Is Universal

Languages build grammar through redundancy and clarity. We say “rise up” even though “rise” already implies upward motion. That redundancy clarifies, and over time, repetitions become structure. McWhorter humorously calls it “underlining”—our instinct to make meaning unmistakable. Every “preference” for exactness generates new particles like “yoosta,” “let’s,” or “big-ass.” Even slang participates in grammaticalization, as ass evolves into a counterexpectational suffix: “big-ass truck.” Grammar is less a system of logic than a living record of mistakes turned norms.

In his playful, accessible chapter on phonetics, McWhorter tackles how vowels and accents shift over time. Sound change, he says, follows predictable patterns driven by the physical reality of speech: mouths move, tongues relax, generations mishear parents. It’s not random—it’s organic. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift, for instance, makes “cat” sound like “key-it” in Chicago or Buffalo. Californians pronounce “bit” closer to “bet.” These trends feel cultural but stem from the mechanics of articulation and the natural fluidity of sound.

The Great Vowel Shift

One of history’s most dramatic sound changes, the Great Vowel Shift (1400–1600), explains English spelling madness. Before the shift, mate was “mahtay,” meet was “mayt.” As long vowels slid upward in the mouth, spelling froze mid-motion. We still write mate for “mayt,” not knowing it once rhymed with “cat.” McWhorter likens vowels to bees in a hive, endlessly buzzing between positions. As each generation tweaks pronunciation, vowels migrate systematically across the mouth’s “grid.”

Regional Patterns and Humor

Sound shifting never stops. Brooklyn’s famous “toity-toid” (thirty-third) and Southern “woik” for “work” are products of the same vowel chessboard. St. Louisans saying “farty” instead of “forty,” or Wisconsinites bringing “bayg” for “bag,” follow predictable phonetic paths. McWhorter explains each with warmth and humor, showing how local accents arise not from ignorance but from normal linguistic physics—the bees keep buzzing differently in every region.

How Writing Distorts Sound

Spelling masks these motions. Our alphabet, designed centuries ago, no longer matches pronunciation. When we read “food” and “good,” we assume logic—but those words once rhymed. Writing locks sound into stone even as speech keeps flowing. Watching vowels shift is like watching evolution unfold in the mouth: visible, irreversible, and beautifully complex. For McWhorter, each accent tells a story of movement, contact, and imagination.

One of McWhorter’s most delightful sections, “Lexical Springtime,” shows how words mate and multiply. Language is less a sterile code than a stew, with words blending into new forms like “brunch” (breakfast + lunch), “motel” (motor + hotel), or “hangry” (hungry + angry). He calls this process “compound and blend reproduction.” Some combinations endure; others fade. “Broasted,” a 1960s food term, vanished, but “sitcom” and “camcorder” blossomed. Compounding keeps English fertile, constantly yielding new offspring.

How Compounds Become New Words

McWhorter describes how the Backshift—a subtle accent change—signals when two words have fused into one. We say “BLACKbird,” not “black BIRD,” or “ICE cream,” not “ice CREAM.” The shift marks that the phrase is now “a thing.” Early speakers said “super MARKet” and “French FRY,” but as those concepts became familiar, people started saying “SUPERmarket” and “FRENCH fry.” The Backshift is how new words are born unnoticed.

Drift and Blending

Over time, even fused words erode further. Cupboard becomes “cubberd”; forehead becomes “forrid.” Daisy started as “day’s eye,” world as “man’s age.” These fusions prove how meaning condenses through use. McWhorter’s examples—from “barnyard humor” to “crossword puzzle”—trace the hidden history in everyday phrases. Each compound records a snapshot of cultural habit, preserved like fossils of conversation.

Word Sex and Mutation

McWhorter jokingly calls these linguistic mergers “word sex.” Just as humans exchange genes, words splice sounds. “Burger” comes from “hamburger,” shortened because people assumed the “ham” referred to meat. “Helicopter” produced “copter,” reinterpreted as if “-er” meant “flyer.” Suffixes like “-holic” and “cyber-” also mutated from partial words into productive morphemes. Language reproduces not by invention, but by accident—its joy is promiscuity.

The Beauty of Compounding

For McWhorter, compounding is among language’s most creative powers. English hides thousands of compounds so familiar we forget their origins: “blackboard,” “highway,” “postman,” “breakfast.” In other languages, like German or Chinese, compounding is overt and constant—German can stack words endlessly, while Chinese uses syllable pairs to cover its entire lexicon. English does it quietly, one Backshift at a time, ensuring its vocabulary never stops growing.

In his final chapter, McWhorter examines how writing reshapes thought. “This is your brain on writing,” he says: when you hear “dog,” you imagine an animal; when you hear “already,” you picture the written word. Literacy pins language down, slowing its natural flow. That fixation makes us believe speech should resemble text, even though writing is only 6,500 years old and speech at least 150,000. We think of spelling as sacred law, though most of English orthography is historical accident.

Writing as Conservatism

Because print language stays put, it exudes stability. Literacy makes speakers believe they must talk “correctly.” Shakespeare’s English changed less than Beowulf’s because writing slowed mutation. But spoken English evolves relentlessly. McWhorter compares old words from Chaucer to Melville and Fitzgerald, showing how meanings drift beneath a veneer of sameness. Melville’s pitiful port meant “compassionate,” not “sad.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “proved” was normal; “proven” came later. Each century leaves fingerprints of change that literacy can’t arrest.

The Case of ‘Like’

To prove that change endures even today, McWhorter analyzes like. Once meaning “body” in Old English (lic), it evolved into “similar” and finally into the conversational “reinforcing” and “easing” likes—“There were like grandparents everywhere” or “It was, like, her!”. These usages express emphasis, surprise, and empathy. Far from lazy, they follow hidden grammatical patterns shared across languages (Xhosa uses ithi in the same way). The modern “like” is English creating new grammar on the fly.

Standards as Fashion

McWhorter doesn’t reject standards; he reframes them. Formal speech is a social costume, like wearing a tucked-in shirt to an interview. But scolding nonstandard English reveals class anxiety more than linguistic fact. The fury over “improper” grammar, he argues, may be “the last permissible form of classism.” Languages everywhere contain the same quirks that prescriptivists condemn—if “like” had appeared in Borneo’s Mualang language, linguists would marvel, not sneer. Context, not correctness, defines how we speak.

Embracing the Parade

For McWhorter, the beauty of English lies in motion. Words arise, drift, fuse, multiply, and fade. To love our language, we must see it not as a tableau vivant but as a parade. Static language is death; movement is life. As he writes, “Language lives, as we do.” Studying its mutations turns disgust into wonder. Once you grasp this, every “wrong” word becomes a glimpse of the next step in English’s long, magnificent dance.