Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at some of the odder Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. This week: telework or telecommute?
subscribe | unsubscribe | comments | twitter | about
I love catching language change in action; as English speakers, we tend to take a special delight in how gleefully chaotic our language can be. We boast that it is ever-evolving and borrows so much from other languages that it is simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult second languages to speak. And so, watching (or bitching about) the language changing is damn near a universal hobby. Which is where this week’s column comes from.
Last week, one student’s homework contained the sentence, “Today, I teleworked.”
If only my work-from-home setup were so photogenic. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Like English, Japanese loves to grab words from other languages. And, like English, sometimes, in the rush to grab these new, shiny words, the meaning gets altered. Recently, the Japanese government’s hesitation to move to full lockdown was centered around the word “overshoot.” Twitter was immediately full of confused ex-pats trying to figure out what the hell they meant. Eventually, consensus was reached: by “overshoot,” the government was trying to say that they were not going to declare emergency until the number of patients threatened to overwhelm the number of hospital beds available. (And, thus the gentle request for Tokyo-ites to stay at home rather than a demand.)
But, back to the more positive and less polarizing “telework.” In my student’s case, the sentence isn’t wrong. All the words are in the right order and the verb is changed to the past tense. Only, is “telework” a verb? Not according to the dictionary.
Now, some of you are rolling your eyes and sighing out loud as you mutter, “anything can be a verb,” or maybe even, “but dictionaries are just a record of how the language is used, not a rulebook.” And you’d be right in both cases. But that’s where the gleeful joy of language change butts up against the realities of teaching a global lingua franca.
Alas, a far more realistic picture of my teleworkspace. Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash
Because here’s the thing: although there is nothing wrong with my student’s sentence grammatically, it just sounds wrong to my ears. To me, it feels more natural to say that you are telecommuting or working from home. And yet, telework and teleworking are all over the internet. This is observable language change happening in real-time; I still had to make a ruling in the moment on whether or not my student’s sentence was correct - and, correct, in this case, meant whether he could use it in business email with native English speakers from several different countries.
Ultimately, there were three points that over-ruled my gut feeling:
telework is in the dictionary as a noun
as stated, in English, any noun can be used as a verb (a process called nominalization by linguists and antimeria by poets)
there are already a substantial number of blog posts and web articles doing exactly that
And that’s that. I learned a new word, nevermind that it still sounds odd to me and that I’ll probably continue to say telecommute or work from home instead. That’s just the way the language works.
Still, and one thing I feel I should make clear, is that this essay is far, far longer than the actual decision process. I’ve spent over 500 words describing an event that took less than 30 seconds. I read the sentence, googled it, and told my student that it was fine. It’s the post-mortem that I’ve been trying to conduct here, mainly because I wonder if it will last.
Language in general, and English in particular, is like water - it will find the easiest way to flow downhill. Maybe not the fastest, and maybe not the most direct, but the easiest. Which is why we are constantly shortening words and phrases into ever more compact forms. Why use a dozen words when everyone already knows what you’re trying to say? A sentence becomes a phrase becomes a word becomes an abbreviation becomes an exhalation and an eye roll.
Part of the reason I’m so fascinated by this small example of the language changing is because I got it wrong. If I had had to bet on which piece of language would become the dominant word for doing remote work, I would have chosen a different synonym that I’ve seen popping up everywhere: WFH (the abbreviated form of Work From Home). Telework never even occurred to me.
subscribe | unsubscribe | comments | twitter | about
Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel