Read The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (67 page)
Obviously,
evolved
does not behave like the passive voice of a verb; it behaves like an adjective. Safire was misled because adjectives can look like verbs in the passive voice and are clearly related to them, but they are not the same thing. This is the source of the running joke in the Bob Dylan song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”:
They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car.
They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar.
But I would not feel so all alone.
Everybody must get stoned.
This discovery steers us toward the real source of
evolved
. Since it is an adjective, not a verb in the passive voice, we no longer have to worry about the absence of the corresponding active voice sentence. To trace its roots, we must find a rule in English that creates adjectives from intransitive verbs. There is such a rule. It applies to the principle form of a certain class of intransitive verbs that refer to a change of state (what linguists call “unaccusative” verbs), and creates a corresponding adjective:
time that has elapsed
elapsed time
a leaf that has fallen
a man who has traveled widely
a testicle that has not descended into the scrotum
a Christ that has risen from the dead
a window that has stuck
the snow which has drifted
a Catholic who has lapsed
a lung that has collapsed
a writer who has failed
Take this rule and apply it to
a tennis player who has evolved
, and you get
an evolved player
. This solution also allows us to make sense of Streisand’s meaning. When a verb is converted from the active to the passive voice, the verb’s meaning is conserved.
Dog bites man = Man is bitten by dog
. But when a verb is converted to an adjective, the adjective can acquire idiosyncratic nuances. Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. We all evolved from a missing link, but not all of us are evolved in the sense of being more spiritually sophisticated than our contemporaries.
Safire then rebukes Steisand for
more than his linear years
. He says.
Linear
means “direct, uninterrupted”; it has gained a pejorative vogue sense of “unimaginative,” as in
linear thinking
, in contrast to insightful, inspired leaps of genius. I think what Ms. Streisand had in mind was “beyond his chronological years,” which is better expressed as simply “beyond his years.” You can see what she was getting at—the years lined up in an orderly fashion—but even in the anything-goes world of show-biz lingo, not everything goes. Strike the set on
linear
.
Like many language mavens, Safire underestimates the precision and aptness of slang, especially slang borrowed from technical fields. Streisand obviously is not using the sense of
linear
from Euclidean geometry, meaning “the shortest route between two points,” and the associated image of years lined up in an orderly fashion. She is using the sense taken from analytic geometry, meaning “proportional” or “additive.” If you take a piece of graph paper and plot the distance traveled at constant speed against the time that has elapsed, you get a straight line. This is called a linear relationship; for every hour that passes, you’ve traveled another 55 miles. In contrast, if you plot the amount of money in your compound-interest account, you get a nonlinear curve that swerves upward; as you leave your money in longer, the amount of interest you accrue in a year gets larger and larger. Streisand is implying that Agassi’s level of evolvedness is not proportional to his age: whereas most people fall on a straight line that assigns them X spiritual units of evolvedness for every year they have lived, this young man’s evolvedness has been compounding, and he floats above the line, with more units than his age would ordinarily entitle him to. Now, I cannot be sure that this is what Streisand had in mind (at the time of this writing, she has not replied to my inquiry), but this sense of
linear
is common in contemporary techno-pop cant (like
feedback, systems, holism, interface
, and
synergistic
), and it is unlikely that she blundered into a perfectly apt usage by accident, as Satire’s analysis would imply.