John McWhorter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Every society has status markers. Clothes are one, speech is another. Is it a problem, how much speech has become a status marker? Should we somehow try to cut back on that? I don’t know, Tyler. I think speech expresses our full range of humanity, and to the extent that any society — unless there are only three people — has some sort of status marking, some sense of hierarchy, at least the sense of what’s formal and what’s not. Speech has to reflect it, and it can seem as if all of the way we do that with language is an add-on to basic grammatical things, like whether the moon is a girl and a boat is a boy, or whether something’s in the past or the future. But the formality is key. I kind of like that part. We need to think of it as grammar rather than as some sort of frill. But say you’re hiring people for a for-profit enterprise, and you want talent. Can you do better, in essence, by at the margin, disregarding how they talk and hiring the ones who will be more talented, but they’re overlooked by the rest of the market? In which direction is the bias?…

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