The Secret Life of Pronouns (4 page)

A very small number of stealth words account for most of the words we hear, read, and say. Over the last twenty years, my colleagues and I have amassed a very large collection of text files that includes thousands upon thousands of natural conversations, books, Internet blogs, music lyrics, Wikipedia entries, etc., representing billions of words. Although there are some variations in word use depending on what people are writing or saying, it is striking to see how common function words are in all types of text.

Spend a minute inspecting the word table on the next page. This is a list of the twenty most commonly used words in English based on our large language bank. Across both written and spoken text, for example, the word
I
accounts for 3.6 percent of all words that are used. If you consider these twenty words together, they represent almost 30 percent of all words that people use, read, and hear.

Notice that all of the words in the table are quite short and are made up exclusively of pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. If we extended the list to all of the common stealth or function words in English, the list would include around 450 words. Indeed, these 450 words account for over half (55 percent) of all the words we use.

To put this in perspective, the average English speaker has an impressive vocabulary of perhaps one hundred thousand words. This means that only a trivial percentage of the words we know are associated with linguistic style—about 0.04 percent of all words. The other 99.96 percent of our vocabulary is made up of content words. This split is comparable in other languages—German, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, and others we have studied. In all languages, a small number of function words are used at dizzying rates compared to a large number of content words that are used at very low rates.

Briefly consider the implications of these numbers. If you want to learn a new language such as German or Finnish, you can pick up almost half the language in an afternoon. Most anyone can master the top one hundred stealth words with minimal training. By early evening, you could sit down with any German newspaper or Finnish philosophy text and identify half of the words that were used. The only downside is that you would have absolutely no idea what you were reading.

FUNCTION WORDS: THEY’RE SHORT AND ALMOST INVISIBLE

Look back at the top twenty function words. You will notice that seventeen of the twenty words are three letters or fewer in length. The most common words in every language tend to be short and are usually a single, easy-to-pronounce syllable.

Not only are stealth words short, they are hard to perceive. One reason we have trouble spotting the high usage of function words in the Lincoln speech is that our brains naturally slide over them. We automatically focus on content-related words instead. The invisibility is also evident in the ways we remember words. Think, for example, of the last conversation you had with someone. Can you recall any specific words that the other person spoke? In all likelihood, you remember only the content words.

Perhaps the strongest test of invisibility is in actively trying to listen to people’s use of style versus content words. Sit by a television or radio or simply begin listening to people speaking around you. Consciously try to attend to style-related words. You will note that they are spoken extremely quickly—lingering, on average, for less than two-tenths of a second. In fact, this speed is often used in psychology experiments to present words or pictures that are just barely perceptible. Assuming you are able to pay attention to these words for a few minutes, you will find that you lose track of what the content of the conversation is. It is almost impossible to attend to function words on their own.

Another surprising aspect of stealth words is that they are very hard to master after about age twelve. Learning another language as an adult is usually quite difficult. However, most people can quickly learn the words for objects, numbers, and colors. They can also memorize the words
for
,
in
,
above
,
with
, and related words. But mastering the use of most common function words in an ongoing conversation is far more difficult. In fact, you can usually tell if someone is not a native English speaker by looking at their writing. Their errors will likely be in their use of style words rather than any nouns or regular verbs.

STYLE WORDS AND THE BRAIN

The distinction between style and content words can also be seen in people who suffer from brain damage. Occasionally, a person will have a stroke or other brain injury that affects a highly specific location on the left side of the brain. If it is in one area, the person can lose the ability to use content words but still retain the ability to use function words. Strokes in other areas can produce the opposite results.

The two brain areas of interest—Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area—are usually located on the outer surface of the left side of the brain, called the cerebral cortex.

Broca’s area, named after the nineteenth-century French surgeon Paul Broca, is located in the frontal lobe. In the 1860s, Broca published a series of articles reporting that damage to Broca’s area was often associated with patients speaking in a painfully slow and disconnected way. More striking, however, is that they often were unable to use function words effectively. As an example, if a Broca’s patient were asked to describe the picture at the beginning of the chapter, he or she might say, “Girl … ummm … woman … ahh … picture, uhhh … old. OK. Old woman.” Often, Broca patients are socially awkward and frustrated by their inability to communicate with others.

The discovery of Broca’s area became more significant several years later when Carl Wernicke published his observations about another brain area in the temporal lobe of the brain now called Wernicke’s area. Damage to this area resulted in a completely different set of symptoms. Specifically, Wernicke damage often results in people’s inability to use nouns and regular verbs while, at the same time, they freely use function words. A Wernicke patient who is asked to describe the same picture might say something like, “Well, right here is one of them and I think she’s next to that one. So if I see over there you’ll see her too. Let’s see. I’m thinking of her now. She’s over there.”

To say that Broca’s area controls style words and Wernicke’s controls content words is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, it points to the fact that the distinction between content and style words is occurring at a fairly basic level in the brain.

Particularly noteworthy is that Broca’s area—the region linked to function words—is in the frontal lobe of the brain. The frontal lobe controls a number of skills, many of them social. For example, dozens of studies have demonstrated how frontal areas are linked to abilities to express and conceal emotions. Other frontal areas are associated with the ability to read other people’s facial expressions. A number of promising studies now suggest that many of our abilities to control our emotions and to establish social relations with others are related to frontal lobe activity.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of frontal lobe damage and changes in social behavior and personality was the case of Phineas Gage. Gage was an explosives expert for a railroad in the mid-1800s. By all accounts, he was a careful, conscientious, and serious individual. One summer day, he was tamping down some blasting powder in preparation for an explosion to clear some rocks. He accidentally created a spark with his long tamping rod that ignited the powder, causing the rod to shoot upward, where it neatly tore a hole through his skull and destroyed much of his frontal lobe. To everyone’s amazement, Gage wasn’t killed and he returned to good health within a few weeks. That is, except for the hole in the front of his head. Over the next months, Phineas Gage’s personality changed dramatically. He went from reserved to loud, from conscientious to impulsive, from respectful to obscene, and from sober to, well, not sober. He was a completely different person and never returned to his old personality.

In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov noted the same thing in his research with dogs. Pavlov, who won one of the first Nobel Prizes, is best remembered for his experiments where a dog could be trained to salivate when a bell rang. In a failed attempt to find the location of classical conditioning in the brain, Pavlov surgically disrupted different parts of dogs’ brains. He reported that only damage to the frontal lobe affected the animal’s personality. Although the dogs with frontal lobe injury still remembered things from before the surgery, they were simply different dogs.

If the frontal lobe is closely linked to personality and social behaviors, it is not surprising that any language areas in the frontal lobe—such as Broca’s area—would also be related to personality and social behaviors.

FUNCTION WORDS ARE VERY VERY SOCIAL

Brain research points to the inescapable conclusion that function words are related to our social worlds. In fact, stealth words by their very nature are social.

Imagine you are walking down the street on a windy afternoon and a piece of paper lands on the ground in front of you. There is a handwritten note on the paper that says: