Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

produce every phoneme as a separate, distinct element (as a simple computer modem would), our speech system starts preparing sound number two while it's still working on sound number one. Thus, before I start uttering the h in happy, my tongue is already scrambling into position in anticipation of the a. When I'm working on a, my lips are already getting ready for the pp, and when I'm on pp, I'm moving my tongue in preparation for the y

This dance keeps the speed up, but it requires a lot of practice and can complicate the interpretation of the message.* What's good for muscle control isn't necessarily good for a listener. If you should mishear John Fogerty's 'There's a bad moon on the rise' as 'There's a bathroom on the right,'f so be it. From the perspective of evolution, the speech system, which works most of the time, is good enough, and that's all that matters.

Curmudgeons of every generation think that their children and grandchildren don't speak properly. Ogden Nash put it this way in 1962, in 'Laments for a Dying Language':

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;

We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,

A slovenliness provides its own excuse age,

Where usage overnight condones misusage.

Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,

Once English, now a vile orangutanguage.

Words in computer languages are fixed in meaning, but words in human languages change constantly; one generation's bad means

^Co-articulation did not evolve exclusively for use in speech; we see the same principle at work in skilled pianists (who prepare for thumb-played notes about two notes before they play them), skilled typists, and major league baseball pitchers (who prepare the release of the ball well before it occurs).

fOr Jimi Hendrix's 'Excuse me while I kiss the sky' for 'Excuse me while I kiss this guy.' If you, like me, get a kick out of these examples, Google for the term Mondegreen and find oodles more.

'bad,' and the next generation's bad means 'good.' Why is it that languages can change so quickly over time?

Part of the answer stems from how our prelinguistic ancestors evolved to think about the world: not as philosophers or mathematicians, brimming with precision, but as animals perpetually in a hurry, frequently settling for solutions that are 'good enough' rather than definitive.

Take, for example, what might happen if you were walking through the Redwood Forest and saw a tree trunk; odds are, you would conclude that you were looking at a tree, even if that trunk happened to be so tall that you couldn't make out any leaves above. This habit of making snap judgments based on incomplete evidence (no leaves, no roots, just a trunk, and still we conclude we've seen a tree) is something we might call a logic of 'partial matching.'

The logical antithesis, of course, would be to wait until we'd seen the whole thing; call that a logic of 'full matching.' As you can imagine, he who waits until he's seen the whole tree would never be wrong, but also risks missing a lot of bona fide foliage. Evolution rewarded those who were swift to decide, not those who were too persnickety to act.

For better or worse, language inherited this system wholesale. You might think of a chair, for instance, as something with four legs, a back, and a horizontal surface for sitting. But as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) realized, few concepts are really defined with such precision. Beanbag chairs, for example, are still considered chairs, even though they have neither an articulated back nor any sort of legs.

I call my cup of water a glass even though it's made of plastic; I call my boss the chair of my department even though so far as I can tell she merely sits in one. A linguist or phylogenist uses the word tree to refer to a diagram on a page simply because it has branching structures, not because it grows, reproduces, or photosynthesizes. A head is the topside of a penny, the tail the bottom, even though the top has no more than a picture of a head, the bottom not a fiber of a wagging tail. Even the slightest fiber of connection suffices, precisely because words are governed by an inherited, ancestral logic of partial matches.*

Another idiosyncrasy of language, considerably more subtle, has to do with words like some, every, and most, known to linguists as 'quantifiers' because they quantify, answering questions like 'How much?' and 'How many?': some water, every boy, most ideas, several movies.

The peculiar thing is that in addition to quantifiers, we have another whole system that does something similar. This second system traffics in what linguists call 'generics,' somewhat vague, generally accurate statements, such as Dogs have four legs or Paperbacks are cheaper than hardcovers. A perfect language might stick only to the first system, using explicit quantifiers rather than generics. An explicitly quantified sentence such as Every dog has four legs makes a nice, strong, clear statement, promising no exceptions. We know how to figure out whether it is true. Either all the dogs in the world have four legs, in which case the sentence is true, or at least one dog lacks four legs, in which case the sentence is false — end of story. Even a quantifier like some is fairly clear in its application; some has to mean more than one, and (pragmatically) ought not to mean every.

Generics are a whole different ball game, in many ways much less precise than quantifiers. It's just not clear how many dogs have to have four legs before the statement Dogs have four legs can be considered true, and how many dogs would have to exhibit three legs before we'd decide that the statement is false. As for Paperbacks are cheaper than hardcovers, most of us would accept the sentence as true as a general rule of thumb, even if we knew that lots of individual paperbacks (say, imports) are more expensive than many individual hardcovers (such as discounted bestsellers printed in large quantities). We agree with the statement Mosquitoes carry the West Nile vi

*Is that good or bad? That depends on your point of view. The logic of partial matches is what makes languages sloppy, and, for better or worse, keeps poets, stand-up comedians, and linguistic curmudgeons gainfully employed. ('Didja ever notice that a near-miss isn't a miss at all?')

rus, even if only (say) 1 percent of mosquitoes carry the virus, yet we wouldn't accept the statement Dogs have spots even if all the dalmatians in the world did.