YouSaid · the spoken record

John McWhorter

lines on the record: 91
first: 2020-03-11
most recent: 2020-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it can have no real effect on the system at all because they didn't really talk to the population. But the fact is Chinese has existed in relationship to many Mongolian speaking people up in the north for a long time. So a lot of the things that make Chinese hard are because it's mixed with Mongolian and you end up having this sort of hybrid system. So that's the Mongolian.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a whole story Mongolian languages are cool in that if one were going to learn a language, one would rather learn one of the Mongolian languages than say French or Spanish because they have a way of keeping their meanings nicely separate. This suffix means that, this suffix means that, this suffix means that. And so they're elegant in that way. Mongolian gets fun in that there are hybrid languages spoken. And again, they can for John. Thank you. Some dialect of Mandarin, some dialect of Tibetan, and Tibetan is really like 30 different languages. And then some Mongolian language all have a train wreck and they create this mixture language that nobody's ever heard of outside of the village. That has happened a lot. If by any chance you were Mongolian, this happens with, for example, the Baalan variety. And so there's that. You can be a Mongolian speaker and run China for a long time.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like that. Sounds like a do op group. Yes, sign languages are studied. I was just in Israel working with a group on that just actually a few weeks ago. Yes, they are new languages and so they grow up just like pigeons and creoles. Like first you have a pigeon one and then it”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's becoming a fuddy duddy thing. I mean, there are people who actually, you know, Glenn Burn, et cetera, but I want the one where I was 10. I was 10 and as unsentimental as I am now, saw that production, mom dragged me by the hair, and at the end of it I was sobbing like a baby, which is not what I do because I was so touched. So I want the recording of that for arbitrary sentimental reasons.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well Myles Davis is a great artist in a way of distilling into a single statement great and sometimes needless complexity. I love what he did with Porgian Best, but with Porgi and Bess, I like the original better just because it's a god. But still, it's a wonderful thing one plays it. It's part of one's life you can play it while you're making dinner. You can play it while you're making a lot of things. So it's nice. But I always go to the full thing when it comes to porgi and bets. Miles Davis in general, yes, he's represented about seven times in the life.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This guy knows thousands of these things, so it's amazing what people can do, but you don't want to overdo it and have Korean written in Chinese. That was, frankly, if I may insult your country, but it was 600 years ago. That was barbaric. But it's amazing what people can make do with.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record because nobody can write. But even there, it's surprising in that the Chinese writing system, and the Korean came up, you know, King Seijong came up with this perfect writing system that now is the envy of the world. The Chinese writing system, I say as a great lover of Mandarin Chinese, I've been working for the past five years on this, and it's at the point that I can walk by a sign and get most of it and pat myself on the back because I decided I'm going to learn that shit because I can tell that they don't want me to learn it. That is why. But the Chinese writing system is an utter hair-raising, ridiculous, indefensible nightmare. Utter nightmare, created basically for scribes to use among themselves. It's all like this running joke. And yet, what's interesting is that ordinary people do use it. It's amazing what toddlers can take in. It's amazing what a populace of people can do. You're at a Chinese restaurant and the waiter's doing.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. I'll just say very quickly exerting control on language from the top is hard and it almost never works in a real way with the exception of. But for example, in terms of Blackboard grammar rules, the only one in English that has really ever worked is the one that says say Billy and I went to the store rather than Billy and me. Almost everybody in this room probably has mastered saying Billy and I except when you're, you know, drunk or something like that. And that's because that's become this matter of shame. But otherwise, all those rules that we learn are things that everybody breaks all the time and it never really changes. Now, Korea is interesting. If you're talking about having an utterly opaque writing system that doesn't fit the language's structure meaningfully at all, that's going to exert a certain downward pressure on the ability of the masses to express themselves in writing, and therefore you're not going to have creativity from down below that anybody is going to”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old person with a certain responsibility, but I think I'm right. And I guess that means that I'm arrogant. But then again, I think that in that sense, most black people were arrogant in about 1950. Be like old people.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, I'm better than the person who said that. That's the way I always felt, and somewhere past thirty I realized, oh, that's supposed to make me cry. And so I inculcate that in anybody I know because it's the way I always felt. And to be honest with the way both of my daughters act, they're going to hear this one day. The way both of them act, I can tell that I'm not even going to have to teach them. The idea is if anybody gives you any of that, well, that they messed up. And you have a lot to live for and life is never perfect. And think about the good dinner we're having tonight. And that's not a bromide. Be a little snobbish. Don't let people tell you that you're supposed to bend yourself down to the insults that other people lob at you, especially when they're subtle and abstract. You're better. You're just better. And I know that that's not what I'm supposed to be saying to you as a fifty-four year old.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the same way, if you're thinking of being black as a burden, and I don't know what your personal circumstances are, but often you're taught that you're working against all of this flack from the outside because people are leveling microaggressions at you, etc. And, you know, they are. But as far as I'm concerned, and I think this is the way someone thought before about fifty or sixty years ago, talk about the culture wars and how you can forget that you're making assumptions rather than dealing with truth, is that if somebody throws a little something like that at you, you look down on it. And if anybody tells you that that makes you arrogant, well then frankly, I guess it does. But keep being arrogant because I have never understood. The idea that some person calls me nigger, and I'm supposed to fall down crying and run to the diversity coordinator because that hurt me, when frankly it didn't.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny my older daughter the other day said very innocently she's eight. Because of school activity, she said, I'm getting tired of Martin Luther King So I took her aside and I said, Do you actually know what he did? And they had actually taught her pretty well, but I could tell that to her that was like listening to something about the French and Indian wars 400 years ago. This is my real answer People talk about singing. Well, no, people don't always talk about this, but they should. If you're trying to hit a high note, one way that you hit the high note is you look up at it and you go, ah, and you think of it as an effort. If you have a really high note, what a good singer does is imagine themselves looking down on it. That's how you hit a high note. Like that.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hope not, but terminology, yeah, you can move things along, but you have to realize that you're going to have to keep on renewing the terms. It's thought that you have to change, not the language.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terminology can help move a debate along, but the problem is just that if there were negative associations that you were trying to wave away by changing the terminology, the negative associations are just like gnats, and they will settle back down on whatever new term you come up with. And so, you know, pro-life, pro choice. Those are very clever terms. And, you know, we've gotten a beat on them. We know, we know what they mean. That's what's always going to happen. And so language effects thought in sweet little ways that you can tease out by hooking wires up to somebody's head and showing that they have some tiny distinction. Russian has two words for blue, and one of them means light blue, and one of them doesn't. And you can do an experiment that shows that Russians are infinitesimally more sensitive to noticing when the blue shades from one blue to another. Is that a worldview?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really popular. Somebody made up an artificial language that was hard. And so, why would you bother? Esperanto is great, but the international language, unfortunately, is the English lingvo, and I think we're just kind of stuck with it.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Archaic. Esperanto's cute. Esperanto is Italian dumb down. And Mi Parolas Esperanto and Lingvon. Any language nerd, you know, curled up with it before they could date. But Esperanto is not easy to somebody from China. And so Zamenhoff had the blinkered worldview that he had because that's the view that someone like him had to have at the time. But Esperanto is just Italian made easy with some other stuff thrown in. Esperanto verbs, if you grow up really almost anywhere else on Earth, are a nightmare, like Zamenhoff is assuming that a language has to have things like he had seen the book when he went to the store. Languages often leave that nuance to context. So Esperanto is a fun toy of all of the artificial languages. It is the handiest, meaning Volapuk, for example,”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see what you mean, especially since their aspects of that in my own life yeah, it can get old when you don't talk the way people expect you to talk. Yes, that's definitely true.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way you talk is not ancient. It's just different. And so there was this, and then something went this way, and then another tributary went that way. So to have that kind of accent, there's nothing ancient about it. It's just alternate from, for example, however I'm talking right now. And to tell you the truth, it's funny, don't take this wrong, but you're asking that question as if it was 50 years ago, the idea that you might want to take elocution lessons. To be honest, it's part of these culture wars. To be honest, the way that you speak today is a plus. It makes you distinctive. There is for better or for worse a cult of authenticity, which can be good and bad, but people will listen to you more, and I think you would elicit more sympathy with the accent that you have. And your facial expression suggests that you're really surprised to hear this from me.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was weaponized. The left won that war. I think that anybody who comes up now is immersed in a set of assumptions where if they're going to go against them, they're going against an orthodoxy to an extent that somebody thirty-five years ago would be less likely to feel. And so although there are always a diversity of opinions, I think that what was called the culture wars back then has been won by the left in terms of a certain orthodoxy, a certain set of ideas that you're considered to at least have to grapple with. And this is within the rarified world of the university and college town. I think that elsewhere there's particularly a pushback against it now, especially over the past 10 years. But in terms of what I sense as your world and the one that I have maybe six of my toes in, I think that it's not even a war at this point.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and so it got me attention for about five minutes which I hadn't expected. But to tell you the truth, to go out of my Bailiwick to the extent that people are beginning gradually to be allowed to read books for aesthetic pleasure again in literature departments and all those just a squeak from what I've heard, I'd say that that's a good thing. But no one ever asked me to toss my head in on that linguists study grammar rather than the literacy code. Is that the answer that you wanted or am I missing something?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very interesting question. You're going a little beyond what linguistics usually dwells on as opposed to philosophy of language. And so that was never anything that was going on within any department that I was part of. The abonis controversy was less about authorship than about an oppressed group of people making a claim about education and where your allegiance lay depending on your politics. And that was the beginning of me in the media. And that's beginning to seem so abstract that for me, the reason I'm sitting here is probably because I was on the wrong side of the Abonics debate because I said the reason that black kids are having trouble in school is because home lives and neighborhood problems and not the difference between isn't and ain't on the page. And I had no idea that anybody was going to consider that the wrong thing to say, but it was considered disloyal.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth is, what I put into that, given how quickly I throw together the episodes, it's not that I learn from it, it's me wanting to teach the audience the stuff that I like, because linguistics to me is toys. So it's a matter of what's fun this week. Let's do it. Like the last one I did, I had been thinking about jeans, not dungarees, but like DNA genes and language and what the two can say about one another. So I just thought, well, let's do the show about that. And so that's the one that's dropping the day after we are taping tonight. It's really just giving the audience my toys. Now, some of it is how do you get it across to an audience that doesn't want to be taken too far into the weeds and teaching in general helps you with that. But really for me, it's just here's my toy box. Let's just jump in.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Latin teacher She was British, and that was not common in my life at the time. I was in college, took Latin, because all my friends were taking Latin. And I didn't know I was that good at it. And she said, oh, John, it's your calling. It's your calling. You've got to do it. And I didn't really know. I didn't know what it was, but I thought, well, if she says it, and she's British, then I must be my calling, and so I went on. And so, yeah, it was them. It was them. Although actually there was a guy then later in college, I asked this linguist, his name was Tom. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He had to handle Bar mustache. You out there, Tom? And I said, I want to be a linguist. And he said, well, no, it's all been done. It's all been figured out. And that derailed me for about three years. God damn you, Tom. But British lady.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“variations on one another their allophone. So that distinction takes like three weeks to get through and some people never get it. To watch a student learn what a phoneme is, you see the light bulb go over their head. Then you think she's one of them. And so that's always nice. So phonemes, Russian and Chinese.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Linguists will think of me as shallow for this, but it's the ones who can enjoy both Russian and Chinese. I always tell them they're two kinds of languages. There's English, which is kind of in between and whatever. And then there's the kind with the obloas obla, but enough to give you a stroke, Russian. And then the tonal ones, which give you a stroke for a different reason, the ones that can do both are that. Then also the ones who, there's no time for this, but the question of the difference between a phoneme and an allophone. And so, for example, I can say bottle, or I can say bottl. Now, if I say bottle, you all think of it as a kind of a tea. So in American English is an allophone of tea of Tness. Whereas if I say bauble, that's a different word from bottle. So b and t in English are phonemes, real sounds.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jackson Heights is this wonderful kind of quietly kept secret. It is one of the most diverse spots on Earth. There are hundreds of languages spoken in Jackson Heights. You can get just about any food except good Korean fried chicken, and I'll bet that's coming 10 minutes from now. It is equally divided between people from all over the world, or at least most parts of the world, and then sort of NPR two kids over educated people such as me. So you've really got everything in the world, and there's a KFC and a Denny's. So you're talking about real diversity as opposed to just Tibetan food and stuff like that. So it is a wonderful, wonderful neighborhood. Isn't enough parking, but nothing's perfect. And you know, I can walk to LaGuardia on a clear day. I can walk to LaGuardia. It's a pleasure.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wore those same sweaters, and he could play every musical instrument, and he taught me that. You know, I teach a music history class at Columbia to avoid boredom. And about every third thing, I find dad taught me that, kind of clinking his bourbon, he'd say, well, that's a pedal point. That's a Pickeredy third. You should be able to play a boogey wooey bottom with your left hand. Play it. Play it. Can't you play it? That sort of thing. So I learned that from him. But no, I didn't learn much about university administration from him as a child.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was complicated. Nothing as a university administrator except that now and then he knew this kid who would this kid he was probably 30 who would program loony tunes that you couldn't see on TV. His name was Todd. And that was the only way that you could see like black and white loony tunes, censored looney tunes with minstrel caricatures in them and things like that. And that stuck with me because now I've seen almost every loony tune. It's one of these ridiculous things that I collect and do like the jello. It is one of the joys of my life. My little girls are now watching them and learning the titles because that's what I am. That's part of my identity. Other than that, though, what dad taught me was music, really. He was it's hard to say this now. Imagine Bill Cosby before Cosby, as we knew him before. That was the demeanor. He was that same age.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that. Because what I am is I'm a cranky liberal. I am not a Republican. I have never been a conservative. But mom taught me quote unquote the right way to think. She taught me what that side was. I think that she was too pessimistic, but then again, she grew up in the Deep South in the 40s and 50s. I would have come out of that deeply pessimistic too. But yeah, I learned the left catechism from her. I can always hear it in my head. And almost all of it was correct, but my sense is where do you go from that? And that's easier for me to think of having grown up Jewish in the seventies as opposed to having participated in sit ins in the fifties and sixties.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh now there's one Not what most people would think my mother was I never heard her put it this way, but my mother was a leftist she was a social work teacher she taught a course which I sincerely believe was called racism one hundred one starting in the early seventies and I learned the deindustrialization hypothesis from her I learned how racism can be covert from her including how to watch out for it among those Jewish kids I went to school with whole nine yards you know I learned it all from Hertz part of why I try to put myself in the head of her equivalent today when thinking why do some black people disagree with me about this that and the other and I think well how would mom have put it it's time for me to stop saying this because I think it's gotten to the point that people do know 10 years ago I would say actually I'm a liberal and people would just throw pumpkins and watermelons now you know maybe I'll get one peach or something”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was hard, the homework was hard. It was a private school. It was rigorous. It made me Jewish because most of the kids there were Jewish That was really the impact, but it was hard. You had to work hard. So, why do I feel like there's something stuck in my throat on that? Because I'm not saying anything about Quakerism. Friends select school was a wonderful place. I'm sure some people from it will hear me saying this. But friend select school from nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty one. I learned some things about the nuclear freeze and about being a peaceful person, but frankly I was a hormonal teenager and what I learned was that geometry was hard and not what Rashana and Seder are. So yes, I became Jewish and I learned homework and I played the cello.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the person who drives me somewhere in a cab is black, they're often black American. Now that's probably not the greatest job in the world. It's not as good as that job in the tire plant 50 years ago. But there were things one could do. The issue is why so many people back then got lost. And so I take your point, but the result didn't have to be what happened starting roughly in the early 80s.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it would have to fall asymmetrically on some group, and you would assume that it would probably be the descendants of African slaves, but the question is is what happened starting in the late sixties the only way that it could have gone? And once social scientists started telling us that that's the way it was going to go starting in the late 60s, when the big keyword was automation, et cetera, unfortunately, just when people got really comfortable with, for example, the deindustrialization hypothesis, a massive influx of immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa started coming into American cities and not living glorious lives, but showing that there was something you could do, and that doesn't mean that black Americans are somehow worse that this was black Americans' fault. Once again, it was a series of cocktails, but if you've got, I mean, for example, here we are in Washington, DC, the person who drove me here was Ethiopian. I notice whenever I come to D.C.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't, oh, certainly there's a problem with that now, but the question is, and this will be a question for you, how do other groups deal with it? And so is the idea that because the opportunities on that score so low right now that it creates a uniquely dire circumstance when other groups of people are somehow making the best, which is not good, of the worst? Or am I misunderstanding your question?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suppose it was I feel that black people are underestimated with, and I'm not saying that this is your claim, but with any implication that because of that perhaps actuarial fact, that's the reason that boys are shooting one another in the face in a schoolyard in the summer in Chicago, or that that is why when in New York you hear that there were three people stabbed in a certain neighborhood, you don't even have to wonder what color the people were. And you don't hear about that ever happening in certain other neighborhoods. It's more complicated. So yes, I can accept that, but I don't think that that's what we should think of when we try to figure out how to solve the problems. Because if we say that we want to get rid of the racism, it seems that we don't know how to do that. And so that would mean that nothing can happen at all.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Century after the death of Christ that particular time than going into the early twenty first century, that somehow conditions then made it uniquely impossible for a certain group, the descendants of several generations past of African slaves to succeed that their problems had to have been due to something that we call racism with the implication that its discrimination, with the idea being that if it wasn't discrimination, then just the fact that there was the discrepancy means that there was racism and if somebody puts it that way, you give them the National Book Award. I'm not quite sure what the justification for that view is. I know that the problems that Black America has are not Black America's fault, and I've tried to write about that. It's not that somebody's lazy. It's not that somebody's a poverty pimp. It's not somebody's lining their pockets. It's a complex cocktail.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because one, you have to think about what we mean by racism. And it seems that you can creep from it being about personal bias to being about societal discrepancies which could be traced to racism, but there's a difference between tracing it to personal biases and an assumption that the discrepancy means that the racism exists and leaving it abstract as to what we mean by the racism. And I worry that that latter version is what's often meant. And more to the point, Even if what you were saying were true, and I'm not saying that it's not, but let's say that that were true, the question is how decisive the effect is. And I would say that we tend to suppose, and I'm not sure what the answer to this is. I really am not sure what the answer to this is. We tend to suppose that conditions in a certain post-industrial society, starting in the late 20th.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, I don't know. And that is something I've talked about with my friend Coleman Hughes. I don't know why it's always guys. Sometimes you start ticking off a list. Glenn Lowry and I on blogging heads often tick off the list of people and everybody's a guy. There are some women and what's interesting about the women is that for a reason I don't know, they never wind up on the list as in they don't end up doing it for 25 years, for 30 years. They don't get fostered by the circuit. I can name some people. I'll name one of them who I enjoyed a lot 10, 15 years ago, Star Parker. She was there. She was around, but for some reason, I'm not sure what the reason is that a non male person is not on that list. It's a short list, but still I don't know.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to have the checks and maybe a few other things, and then we're going to admit that something happened. Then I'd get behind it because life isn't perfect and I'd come up with something to do with that check. I guess it would put one of my daughters through college or something. But I can't see that happening. And I would not wish to get behind extra reparations that would not be accepted as significant with people telling me that I was unsophisticated for thinking that it was. So that's my position about reparations.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing to say among our best and brightest black writers would be they'd better not think that they can just write us off with a check, and on t shirts it would be on t shirts that would be means going around and gifts going around saying reparations is just a beginning not an end. It wouldn't solve any problems. The people who are agitating for it now would be just as angry, just as indignant. And it's not because I'm saying that they line their pockets or that it's their career to be angry, but I think that it is a psychosocial position to feel that way about race that doesn't go away on the basis of anything in the real world having changed. among the black punditocracy and the yellowocracy and the twitterocracy that it was going to matter that we're going to do that.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would it do is my question. And I was going to say, I'm not against this if. There's an if. But if you were going to give, for example, these payments to anybody who counts as black. And there are people who have come up with a metric for figuring that out as messy a question as it is. And so you get some money in the bank. All evidence is that one, that would not change the lives of black America to any significant degree. And more to the point, once that happened, Tyler, this is the hardest thing. That could happen in two weeks. Those checks would go out. I get one, you know, and I'd probably give it to somebody else, but I'm black. Thank you for this money, for somebody who went through things who I never knew. Thank you. I don't really want that, but I know many black people would feel differently. But once that happened, I think that we're in an ideological place in our society where before the ink was dry on those checks.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what would make it better? I mean, for example, there's affirmative action, and in most places, it's not going to go away completely. And so do we need more affirmative action when to overdo affirmative action has so many documented problems, or with welfare reform, do you want more of welfare or do you want welfare programs that concentrate more on helping usher people, and I mean in a real way, into work, which is not something anybody would call reparations?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so because I think there already were, and some of it worked and some of it. It wasn't called reparations, but what happened in the 1960s starting with what was called affirmative action, also a story never told about the expansion of welfare in the late 60s with especially black women in mind was reparations, the community reinvestment act of 1977 was reparations so much has been reparations. Some of it worked, some of it didn't, it already happened, but I hear that today those things somehow don't count, and you talk about how you have to move along in time that things evolve and I don't want to be a curmudgeon. I've said recently.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did when Tess Gardella was up on stage playing Queenie in 1927. I think we have to get there. And I can see it already in maybe the children of today's children. It'll start peeping through. Because we're not really past race until that can be. And I think we're in a strange place where there is a great love for blackness that coexists with a great hatred for other aspects of blackness. Now, it could be that it just stays that way forever. However, if it did, that would be the first time in human history that things were that static. I think that even when it comes to race in America, things can move, and so that would be one symptom of it.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I increasingly don't know because I think we're at a point where we're just beginning to see, and I know I'm ahead of time a little bit here, which is unusual for me, but the Browning of American culture since roughly 1995 is such that a lot of young white people today are more in touch with black culture, black speech, black ways of singing, black ways of moving than they would have been when, for example, I was a child, and I'm fully aware of the existence of racism fully. However, that does not belie what I just said. Such that it seems to me take it another couple of generations afterward, and to say that if there was an M&M, if there was an adele, if there were people of this kind, can we really not have a white person playing a black person with having a different meaning?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a few years ago. What do we think Hungary now is making of it? I would venture to say that I imagine there's an artistic community in Hungary who are quite separate from whatever developments are going on among certain people with their fists in the air electing the wrong people. Yes, it would be disturbing if we're talking about the equivalent of Nazi Germany. But I don't know that artistic terrain of Hungary enough to know exactly who it was who was doing this.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been done in Germany, actually, and before there were many people who said much about it. I remember thinking, I'm glad they're hearing this music and who were they going to get to sing the parts. And if anything in a certain day, that should be allowed. I don't know if I have the answer as to when that day would be. You mean Hungary now and what day?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personally, no. I know a lot of people would feel differently, and I think the better question would be if it was, say, an opera company in Utah or Massachusetts. Are we going to get to the point where there can be a white raisin in the sun?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Queenie was played by a white woman in blackface. It was a show of its time, so I love showboat, but Kern was Like Porter, he did what he did very well, but he was no Arlin. He was a Susan songwriter, that's what he did. So no, I like Porgian best better. Porgian Best to me is a human being. I mean, there are times when if life isn't going well, I will put on the Houston Opera production of Porginbess and lay down on a couch and just sit there and listen and lose myself in somebody having created something where you wonder where it came from. Showboat to me is not that.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to ask me these things. I don't think George Gershwin misfired on race and porky and best because he went down to Gulla Country. He went down to daughters, daughters of the dust, and he did what we would today call getting down with those people. And Gerswin was a genius. And the music that he wrote was some of the best music ever composed by another human being. And you feel guilty saying that because a black person didn't write it. He had more training than Duke Ellington, and so at the time he happened to be able to do it. Duke, who I adore, couldn't have pulled that off. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, they do showboat, showboat is towering as well. I know people on Facebook who are in tears about the nineteen eighty eight recording of showboat in the original orchestrations and I remember feeling the same way at the time. Showboat, though, is thinner art than Porgy and Bess. It's got wonderful things in it. But in the original showboat,”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source