During the brief window between the end of the COVID-19-spring semester, and the upheaval sparked by the brutal killing of George Floyd, quarantined philosophers embraced the one-syllable challenge: Can you summarize your life’s work, your PhD dissertation, or, say, Plato’s Republic, using only one-syllable words? My social-media newsfeeds filled with concise, usually witty, summaries of Great (and not-so-great) Books—each constrained by the vocabulary that every native-English speaker learns before kindergarten.
It was the ideal pretext for procrastination: a skill-testing game we could play while pretending to work. Yet, the results of this game—the actual summaries produced—were revealing.
Consider Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’ famous social-contract argument sought to ground the legitimacy of the modern state, and of morality itself, in enlightened self-interest. A few monosyllabic sentences (adapted from two different summaries by colleagues on Facebook, Colin Macleod and Jason Brennan) suffice to explain why rational people would prefer to have a powerful ruler enforcing laws on everyone than to live in a state of nature where life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In a land with no state, there would be no right or wrong. You would scare the hell out of me, as I would you. This kind of life would suck, big time; and be short. So, we would all make a deal to have a strong king who would put an end to all this fear and pain. He gets to say what is right or wrong, and then to make those rules stick. He would want to be nice to us, since this helps get him our love and gold. But if he tries to kill you, you will still have the right to fight back.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous riposte to Hobbes, written a century later, got this pithy monosyllabic gloss by philosopher Liz McKinnell:
Man was born free, but we are all now in chains. … To be free once more, we need a world where each votes for the will of all. And if you do not do that, we will force you to be free. We need to change lots of things, for sure. But first, we need to change us. Boys should be taught out in the wild, and play in the woods. That way they can grow up smart, strong, and free. Girls? No, they are not the same. Shut up.
The best of these haiku-like abstracts seem to channel some nerdy Dr. Seuss exposing what is most profound, or most profoundly idiotic, in the history of thought. Colleagues begged to borrow them when they return to the (Zoom) classroom, and even to lay the one-syllable challenge on their students. An early selection of some of this spring’s one-syllable gems, including a longer version of McKinnell’s, can be found on The Philosophers’ Cocoon blog.
Why are we instantly enchanted by naïve-sounding, but strangely accurate, renderings of very complex theories and arguments? Perhaps because these things playfully exemplify philosophers’ most noble aspiration: to explain and solve the deepest and most abstract problems in a way that anybody can understand and appreciate. We yearn to make scales fall from our students’ and readers’ eyes. Sure, we usually fail. So, we admire those one-syllable abstracts that show just how far we can get with such a limited toolkit. But this is not the only feature of the abstracts that piqued my curiosity after reading a few dozen of them, produced within a couple of days of the meme’s appearance.
As Sherlock Holmes would advise, consider the dogs that didn’t bark when the challenge-takers brightened our newsfeeds. Why didn’t this craze seem to cross linguistic frontiers to distract quarantined colleagues writing in French, German, Italian, or Spanish? There is no need to revive “Anglo-American” philosophers’ dated caricatures of so-called “continental” philosophy—e.g., that it aims to obscure more than clarify—to explain this silence.
English-speakers are primed for this challenge by the singularly quirky evolution of what the comparative linguist John McWhorter called “our magnificent bastard tongue.” Perhaps the most striking feature of monosyllabic prose is not that it reverts inevitably to the language of toddlers; but that it throws us back to the primordial roots of the language itself. The précis are inevitably packed with words derived from the thoroughly Germanic language we call Old English—the lingua franca that emerged among the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Vikings who, in the first millennium, invaded and settled on an island already home to speakers of Celtic languages.
When we English speakers forego multisyllabic words, we lose tens of thousands of French, Latin, and Greek words that arrived during the first three centuries of colonization by the Norman French, beginning in 1066. That includes the technical jargon of every disciple, from law and sociology to math and medicine: all our beloved –ologies, –isms, –alities, and –ations. In my two-sentence set-up for Hobbes, above, there are 32 multisyllabic words, 30 (94 percent) of which are non-Germanic. Of the 200 words in the monosyllabic summaries of Hobbes and Rousseau, only 10 (5 percent) are non-Germanic.
Though striking, the fact that successful monosyllabic writing throws us back to Old English may be a red herring. For one thing, a monosyllabic summary of Aristotle could simply not have been written in English, circa 1065; and not merely because the Anglo Saxons wouldn’t have heard of the Greek philosopher. As soon as you start to use one-syllable words in proper Old-English sentences, most of them sprout extra syllables.
Nor is there any reason to suppose that English enjoys a significantly better stock of monosyllabic words than its cousin languages in Europe and South Asia. The great majority of the most common 100 words in English, German, and French are monosyllabic. These kinds of words in any language – I, have, a, small, home, and, so, on – tend to have ancient roots because they are less prone to being dislodged when words are borrowed from other languages or invented for novel things and activities. This is why the one-syllable challenge throws us back to words with roots in Beowulf. But it does not explain why English facilitates such uniquely viable summaries of complicated ideas.
The real trick of meaningful monosyllabic prose is turned by English grammar, not vocabulary. The illiterate progeny of Celtic slaves and Viking bachelors grew tired of adding sounds and syllables to the beginnings and endings of words in order to accommodate the rules for three genders, four cases, pluralization, and multiple tenses we find in the surviving Old-English documents penned by elite scribes. Even before the Norman conquest of England, common folk were stripping away these fussy elements until simple words could be left alone. English speakers were finding alternative ways to perform all of the necessary syntactical work by placing uninflected words in a certain order among other words. Later Germanic and Romance languages would do some of this, but English went nuts.
So, if a verb has one syllable in the infinitive—say, to go—English usually doesn’t add any syllables when it is used with different pronouns or subjects (I, her, we), or different tenses—past, present, future, or conditional. Tense is usually indicated with one-syllable Germanic helper verbs, like did, would, could, might, will: I go now, and she did go (or went) yesterday, they will go soon, and so on. This increases the concentration of Old-English content in monosyllabic writing, even when a particular one-syllable verb comes from French. The disappearance of grammatical gender and cases (with a handful of exceptions) has similarly spared English nouns, adjectives, and pronouns from inflexions. Even the syllable-adding plural “en” (which survives in a few irregulars like children or oxen) was replaced with “s” by the time Old English gave way to the Gallicized Middle English of Chaucer.
None of this makes English a better language, or even a better language for clear thinking, of course. It is still an open question among linguistic historians why exactly all this happened. Nobody set out to make a language that could do more with one-syllable words. That’s just an accidental party trick we might never have been aware of if we hadn’t given ourselves this arbitrary little challenge.
Philosophers may have been sucked into the one-syllable game for the same reason that Curtis Roach’s song “Bored in the House” became a viral soundtrack in countless homemade TikTok videos in the spring of 2020. And again, it helped that philosophers have a natural affinity for the object of this game: to explain complicated ideas in simple terms. But they took to the game because it was fun. What makes it fun?
Every game designer knows something that stumped Ludwig Wittgenstein: the fun of any game is generated by its rules forbidding the most efficient ways of achieving its goal. People love soccer because of, not in spite of, what happens when players cannot handle the ball. (The gurus of game design routinely name-check the late philosopher Bernard Suits, who defended a similar necessary condition for playing a game in his 1978 dialogue The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.) Yet no game is fun when its internal obstacles are either too easy or too hard to overcome. In some languages of the world, the one-syllable challenge would present no challenge at all, and therefore offer no respite from boredom. In most Indo-European languages—English’s cousins and ancestors—the one-syllable obstacle will be frustratingly insurmountable. (Readers are encouraged to prove me wrong!)
But in our tongue, while the game is tough, its one rule will not, in the end, stump those who find it fun to strive to say deep things with short words.
Wayne Norman
Wayne Norman is a political philosopher at Duke University. He is currently writing a book called The Ethical Adversary: How to Play Fair When You’re Playing to Win in Sports, Business, Politics, Law, and Love. In August 2020 he is launching the website waynesvinylmuseum.com, featuring exhibits exploring the banality of racism and misogyny in post-war America, as refracted through LP cover art.
