1/ Why do we keep getting our knickers in a twist and our logic in a knot over the nature of language? We do we want to control it so badly, and why will that never work? In fact, what do we really talk about when we talk about language? And why did even Orwell get it wrong? 
2/ When we're wrong about how language works, we tend to repeat those mistakes elsewhere. Sensible and well-meaning people doggedly persist with muddled thinking. This is a problem not just for linguistics but for society in general. Tribalism, rumor, fake news...
3/TALK ON THE WILD SIDE is out all over the place now. It’s about the deep nature of language: unruly, illogical, changeable, and untameable. It’s a bit like a wild animal because it is the behavior of an animal: homo sapiens.
4/ @sapinker, @jmcwhorter, @neilhimself and others have said incredibly kind things. Kirkus, Booklist, the Spectator and others have given great reviews. What’s it all about?
5/While language can be partly domesticated, its wild nature can never be totally bred or trained out of it. It’s ambiguous, redundant, unstable, variable across place and time, and more. And yet it is also the robust and extraordinary vehicle of human culture.
6/What does this mean for the world? Inventors have sought to make better, perfect languages. They have always failed. People want real languages, with all their mess. I’ll tell you why.
7/ Language is not logic. Some folks think that if you just master the beautiful and orderly rules, it’s really quite easy. They’re wrong. They’re wrong on their dud rules (eg that singular “they” is an abomination) and they’re wrong about how rules work.
8/If language is logical, machines should crush it. But programmers tried to teach them the rules. They were much more successful when they flipped the script and let machines teach themselves from masses of messy but real language.
9/ How does random change, which is constant, not wreck language? Because language, incredibly, responds, by changing further so that it is always equipped to do what speakers need. Amazingly, no one manages this process. It's a genius system--with no genius.
10/ Wouldn’t it be neat if every country just had one variety of one dominant national language? Never gonna happen, at least not without incredibly coercive awful policies that you shouldn’t be in favor of.
11/Shouldn’t people use their “best” language always? Not if you mean buttoned-up formal. Variation by occasion and audience is part of language’s versatility. It’s a feature—a fantastic one—not a bug. This has lots of implications for how we teach kids from minority groups
12/ Orwell made the greatest statement about “Politics and the English Language” ever, right? No; the great one’s analysis failed to predict populism, in which plain language became a dangerous weapon. There is no easy fix to politics through language. politico.com/magazine/story…
13/Intrigued? If you liked the tweet version, you’ll like the book version a lot more. Disagree? Check it out and tell me why. Let’s have a great big conversation. Please RT, reply, push back and provoke here. Do @ me, bro!
Got so excited, I forgot this.
amazon.com/Talk-Wild-Side…
amazon.com/Talk-Wild-Side…
And it's available in audio, for those inclined, narrated by me (in the US). Audio coming to the UK soon, where I narrate it in a terrible British accent. audible.com/pd/Talk-on-the…
No book goes anywhere without the shoulders of giants. The invented language chapter is indebted to @arikaokrent.
The language-as-logic chapter owes a lot to the terribleness of prescriptivists like Nevile Gwynne, but also the much better prescriptivism of @MerriamWebster, @sapinker and @BryanAGarner.
The chapter on variation, register and dialect draws on everyone from Geoff Pullum to @KeeganMKey and @JordanPeele.
@leraboroditsky and @GeorgeLakoff feature crucially in the chapter on political language; where I disagree with Lakoff, I'm still indebted to his contributions, without which we can't even think about some of this stuff properly. (Not in a Whorfian way, mind you...)
Thanks again to @gwennosaunders for the fascinating story of becoming one of the first native Cornish-speakers in two centuries
And finally, the irony of this long thread's first tweet containing a typo is not lost on me. But the fact that everyone is human is just one more reason to be curious and questing rather than arrogant and hectoring.
