Ordinary people

So perhaps you've heard the new John Legend song, 'All of Me' - his biggest hit, in an interesting career that's now a decade old. Or, that is, perhaps you've heard one of the two versions of 'All of Me,' for the song is actually circulating in multiple forms. There's the spare original version: a love song, co-written with Kanye West, in which Legend accompanies himself on piano. And then there's a lively remix that features a prominent percussive part and a club feel, and that was released by the Dutch producer Tiesto . If you're listening to, say, an adult contemporary station, you'll likely hear the former. But if you're listening to a Top 40 satellite radio station, you'll just as likely hear the latter.

The basic idea of releasing multiple versions of a song, of course, is not new. Even the Beatles and the Stones did it occasionally, and it became something of a tendency in the 1980s, when the broad popularity of MTV's Unplugged had bands scrambling to record acoustic versions of well-known hits. And, at root, the tendency is an understandable one in several senses. The remixes keep the song and the artist in the news, may attract some new audiences - and, in a sense, correspond to a tendency that has long interested linguists.

That's the idea of an identifiable distinction between 'ordinary language' and other forms of linguistic communication. Wittgenstein is the central figure here, historically speaking; in some of his writings, he thought about a difference between ordinary language - the pragmatic forms of communication employed, say, by bricklayers on the job - and poetic language, which works in different ways, and toward less practical ends. That distinction then interested an entire generation of linguists; thinkers from J.L. Austin to Derrida, for instance, grappled with the terms, and Stanley Fish once wrote an essay entitled 'How Ordinary is Ordinary Language?'

Regardless of your position in relation to that debate, though, there's another linguistic distinction that characterizes our daily communication - and it's one that came up this morning, as we drove Cleo to school. She trotted out to the car in a summer dress and a little bracelet. Unthinkingly, I remarked that her bracelet looked fetching - which prompted her to ask what the word meant. Within a minute, we were playing an impromptu game of synonyms: if something tastes great, for example, how might we say that without using the word great? And, a minute later, we had arrived at one of the great truths of English: that it's such a wonderfully rich and diverse language precisely because of its very complex linguistic background. Are you weeping because of that weird smell? If so, you're relying on three words derived from Anglo-Saxon precedents. But you could also express the same thought in terms evolved from Norman speech: if so, you'd be crying because of that strange odor. And so on: perhaps the specific examples don't matter as much as the general observation: English is full of rich choices. Moreover, the choices aren't always flatly equivalent: often, the Norman derivatives still carry a more refined tone. A beverage sounds, quite simply, more sophisticated than a drink, even if the two mean more or less the same thing.

Well, then. You can decide for yourself, I suppose, if Legend's original is more refined than the club remix. But the very existence of the two, it seems, is far from surprising. It's merely a new example, a Norman might say, of what an Anglo-Saxon would call an old thing.