The other day, I texted my youngest a reminder to take out the trash. In response I received, “sit down theodore.”
I was, to say the least, confused.
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It turns out that “sit down theodore” had evolved as a complicated joke with a friend about the word “noted.” First it became “no ted.” That transformed into “stop it, teddy” then into “enough, teddy.” That morphed into “sit teddy” and finally “sit down theodore.” The joke became so ingrained in their texting conversations that they set the autocorrect feature on their phones to transform the word “noted” into “sit down theodore” whenever they typed it.
All of this explained the text I received, but it also got me thinking about one of the most important aspects of a liberal society—spontaneous order.
Spontaneous order, which is the idea that order can and does arise from the aggregation of many small human interactions without a grand plan or design to direct it, is not a new concept. 250 years ago, Adam Smith described spontaneous order when he wrote of the way trade can improve the human condition “by an invisible hand…without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” But Smith was by no means the first or only person to describe a spontaneous order or to see its value. The philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote that, “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”
Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, Smith, Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek—nearly all the greatest names of the liberal tradition have described spontaneous order, and it’s a key concept to explain how a liberal order is supposed to function when the imposed order of government is kept out of the way. But spontaneous orders can be very difficult to explain to people who aren’t already inclined to be suspicious of the efficacy of top-down planning.
Some of the most commonly used examples of spontaneous orders, like money and the common law, seem too closely tied in our minds to government authority. They don’t convey effectively the way spontaneous orders evolve from small choices made by individual humans. Money surely arose as the result of spontaneous order, but it’s fairly hard to look at today’s modern systems of finance and banking and see any spontaneity left. And anything involving a law court is likely to make people think about systematic injustices and instantiated hierarchical structures rather than spontaneous, grassroots evolution. Even the otherwise excellent example of the way that colleges often wait to decide where to put paved footpaths until students have worn trackways into the grass of the college lawn ends with someone making a top-down decision about where and when to lay the pavement.
So, when I want to talk about spontaneous orders with a group that isn’t familiar with them, my favorite example to use is language, especially slang. Language has space for dynamism and creativity—allowing teenagers to transform “noted” into “Sit down, Theodore.” It has a long evolutionary history that lets us watch changes occur over centuries—“a napron” morphs into “an apron,” for example. It also provides some excellent contrasts to more formal or organized attempts to control language. The two work together to produce a really good discussion of spontaneous order that is largely untethered from hierarchies, authorities, and governments.
Untethered from authority? How can I say that? When I start making claims about language as a space for free play and creativity and spontaneous order, the first thing that generally happens is that I hear from someone suffering PTSD from their middle school grammar assignments. Language, they’ll tell me, is full of rules that they have been forced to memorize. How is that spontaneous?
The first thing to do, then, is to separate the rules of formal speech and writing from the way we use language day to day. There are rules for formal language use, and there are people who enforce them. After I finish this piece, I’ll send it to my editor. He’ll catch all my misplaced commas, and we’ll argue a bit about whether splitting infinitives and starting a sentence with “and” are venial or mortal sins. (He will win.) When I taught college writing, I made my students follow the rules of standard formal English in their assignments.
Informal language is very different. It’s like the Wild West. We use informal language in informal settings, to talk with family and friends, to describe our day to day lives, and to create bonds and emphasize closeness or exclusivity. As a result, informal language is as varied as our individual human experiences. It capitalizes on in-jokes, like “sit down theodore,” or shared cultures and concerns to create rich and creative slang vocabularies. My family has used the word “schmitchik” for four generations now to mean “doodad.” I always thought it was a real Yiddish word, because it certainly sounds like one. But it turns out to have been nonsense coinage by my grandfather, who was probably playing around by combining the word “thingamajig” with a Yiddish pronunciation. Now his great-grandchildren use it, and I expect my great-grandchildren will as well.
That familial sense of closeness is what top-down language purists are trying to create when they insist that small local languages give way to standardized speech and writing. Surely we would all be one big happy human family if we could just all sound the same. But you can’t build a community or create a sense of closeness with a sledgehammer, and you really can’t do it by forcing already existing communities to give way in favor of the majority or the elite.
My grandfather’s coinage may have been the result of an intentional joke or a slip of the tongue, but the way his word has lasted for close to a century now is pure spontaneous order. The same thing may happen, in my family at least, to “sit down theodore.” We’ll have to wait and see. After all, back in 1993, The Simpsons joked about the insular and unsophisticated qualities of small town Springfield by giving the inhabitants a unique and folksy vocabulary that included the archaic “embiggen” and newly coined “cromulent.” Viewers used both the words in written and spoken language. Usage was so regular that today you can find both of them in Merriam-Webster and in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The smaller and more isolated a group, the more likely it is that unique slang and linguistic patterns of language will evolve. Yiddish is a classic example of this kind of evolved language. So is Polari, which was a slang used widely among the British gay community from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1970s. It is useful for outsiders to have ways to communicate that cannot be understood by authority figures. It can protect the in-group, and it helps to define them, making it possible to tell who is friend and who is foe.
This is one reason, I suspect, that teenagers are such endlessly creative sources of slang. Our time as teenagers is brief and intense and often filled with the kind of adventures and shenanigans that we would prefer not to disclose to parents, teachers, or other authority figures. That’s fertile ground for the creation of new slang. And because the minute we stop being teenagers we join the world of adults, that new slang needs to be created constantly and updated rapidly. That twenty-one-year-old student teacher may have been reasonably cool three years ago, but it is now incredibly important that they not understand the distinction between “I’m cooking” and “I’m cooked.”
The internet has produced an ever-faster life cycle for slang, and has sometimes even made it possible to track the original user of a new word, as with Kai Cenat’s coining of the word “rizz.” But while we can see and hear the linguistic changes happening, and sometimes even identify the point of origin, there is no way to determine or direct when slang will change, whether it will catch on, or when it will suddenly shift from cool to dead.
There are warning signs, of course. When slang terms catch on and persist, they often become part of standard, even formal, speech. Words like “jazz” or “hangry” are examples of this. Slang is one way our lexicon of acceptable words grows. And we’re guaranteed to keep transforming more words from slang to standard, because slang is funny and charming. The minute that anyone outside of high school uses a slang term, however, it’s probably already outdated and in need of replacement. Nothing groovy lasts forever. The supply of new slang and the destruction of old slang is endless.
The most important thing about slang, though, for thinking about spontaneous orders, is that despite the best efforts of Regina George, there is no grand arbiter of slang who gets to tell people, “Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!” There is merely an ever-shifting cultural sense of when a coinage or structure is worth repeating or not. “On fleek” died almost as quickly as it was born, but “snatched” appears likely to hang around for a while. That’s a key concept for spontaneous orders. Significant changes happen. But no one is making them happen. There’s no language czar.
At least not usually. English has been famously described as “about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” French, however, has invested heavily in the idea of linguistic purity. L’Académie française therefore makes a notable and instructive counterexample. Since the 17th century, the job of L’Académie has been to produce a dictionary that provides a single authoritative voice on what is and is not real French. Their work often involves trying to get newscasters and politicians to stop using words imported from other languages and to replace them with French instead.
This goal leads to a draconian oversight of the use of language that is often hilarious and horrifying at the same time. A few years ago, L’Académie insisted that broadcasters use "jeu vidéo de compétition" instead of "e-sports," and "joueur-animateur en direct" instead of “streamer.” For obvious reasons, this restriction is likely to be as successful as previous attempts to get people to stop saying “le weekend” and “le wifi.”
You can impose as much top-down order on a language as you like. The people who use it will still make it change and grow, just because they are using it. Indeed, despite L’Académie, there is popular and creative French slang. One form, known as “verlan” consists largely of inverting syllables in words and has existed since at least the nineteenth century. It continues to be used and innovated today in French rap music, on movie posters, and, of course, by teenagers.
Slang is creative, unpredictable, quick to change, and endlessly surprising. It arises from the aggregation of small human choices but without any grand design. It’s everything I like best about spontaneous orders. I had planned to finish this essay by using a few slang terms in praise of slang and spontaneous orders, but the young people in my house assure me that even if they gave me the most cutting edge slang, it would be out of date and “cringe” by the time this sees print.
Hayek would love that.
