18 Where Do Words Come From?
domesticated only with the emergence of these experts and their explicit and conscious programs of breeding for certain traits. If language became domesticated only when it became technical, in some specifically modern sense involving systematic definitions and rehearsal, that would have been a recent and dramatic change in human biology, the beginning of a qualitatively different mutualistic association with language. Until then, as far as we were concerned, all our words would have been like rats or bedbugs. After this change, some of the words would have become, for some of us at least, like maize and cattle. Some of us would suddenly have become capable of using words, rather than being used by them. This, however, strikes me as seeing ourselves as too special. It appears to make the modern, highly educated person into a whole different type of creature from the rest of humanity, a creature who freely chooses to use domesticated words while all other human populations are just unavoidably infested by synanthropic ones. It seems to me that evolution, and not revolution, is a better theory of the origin of modern technical languages, because to me what Euclid did in the Elements doesn’t look completely different from what Socrates was doing in the dialogues, or from what we do when we explain how to play chess, or tie a bowline knot, or make a roux, or use the Levallois technique for knapping flint. It strikes me as an incremental modification of very common and ancient human practices, not a way of making our language into something entirely new and different. Dennett says that nobody owns words and nobody is responsible for them. It seems to me that I do own the words in my own personal idiolect, though I don’t own the whole species each of them belongs to, because I can freely dispose of them and have control of their fate. I did quite a lot of work to acquire them in their current forms. I also can’t help thinking that we actually are responsible for the words we use and for the senses we use them in, though perhaps not for their “welfare,” whatever that means for a word. We certainly are partly responsible for their Darwinian “fitness,” for how many opportunities they have to leave copies of themselves behind in other minds, and for whether or not they’re likely to succeed. We’re the only available suspects. Things don’t apply names to themselves. Saul Kripke (1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975) contended that people name things, which appears to make at least some of us responsible for