John McWhorter

Atheist

JOHN MCWHORTER is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He is a columnist for the Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley linguistics podcast. He earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. He was Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute from 2002 until 2010. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: Untold Stories in the History of English, What Language Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Could Be, The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, Words on the Move, and Talking Back, Talking Black. His academic linguistics books include The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages, Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars, and The Creole Debate. The Teaching Company released his 36-lecture audiovisual course The Story of Human Language in 2004, The Science of Language in 2008, Myths, Lies and Half-Truths of Language Usage in 2012, Language From A to Z in 2014 and Language Families of the World in 2019. He spoke at the TED conference in 2013 and 2016. Beyond his work in linguistics, he is the author of Losing the Race, an anthology of race writings and other books on race issues. He has written on race and cultural issues for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, and The American Interest. He has appeared on Meet the Press, The Colbert Report, Talk of the Nation, and Fresh Air. He has appeared regularly on Bloggingheads.TV, usually with Prof. Glenn Loury, since 2006.

Learning languages; music (especially classical, jazz, and musical theatre); enjoying and collecting recordings of musical theatre and sharing that music via performance as an accompanist; taking in old movies, TV and radio shows, and cartoons; charting how our past became our present; paleontology

A great deal about the way things are now is due to conditions that were vastly different in the past -- and more to the point, that which arose with a function in the past can have NO function here in the present. This is true about language, biology, history and much else, but is often missed, in favor of supposing that what is now present must serve a purpose related to immediate conditions. Call this the "male nipple" phenomenon; political scientists call it path dependence. On language, many have trouble with the concept.

History, Linguistics, Music

I did a TEDx in New York in 2012 on texting, and was pleased to be asked to do the talk in California the following year. Since then I have done a few TED-ED videos as well. I also did a talk in 2016.

Whistling