"We focus upon pairs of words very often which are the same in some areas and different in other areas"
About this Quote
Labov is quietly describing a human habit that sounds trivial until you realize it underwrites everything from poetry to prejudice: we love near-matches. Pairing words that overlap but don’t quite align is how people test meaning in real time. Not by consulting dictionaries, but by holding language up against itself and noticing the seams.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost lab-notes flat, and that’s part of the move. “Focus upon” suggests attention as a method, not a mood. “Very often” keeps it empirical: this isn’t a grand theory of language, it’s an observation you can catch yourself doing while arguing, flirting, or scrolling. The key tension is in “same in some areas and different in other areas” - a lay description of what linguists formalize as minimal pairs, semantic contrast, and category boundaries. Labov’s subtext is that meaning lives in contrasts, and that social meaning especially is built on tiny distinctions.
Context matters because Labov’s work helped shift linguistics away from treating “standard” speech as the default and variation as error. When speakers compare near-identical forms - pin/pen, talking/talkin’, ask/aks - they’re not just parsing sounds. They’re navigating identity, class, region, and belonging. The “areas” of sameness and difference aren’t only phonetic; they’re cultural.
What makes the line work is its modesty. It smuggles a radical claim in everyday language: that ordinary speakers are analysts, constantly running micro-experiments on words to figure out where categories end, what counts as “correct,” and who gets to decide.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost lab-notes flat, and that’s part of the move. “Focus upon” suggests attention as a method, not a mood. “Very often” keeps it empirical: this isn’t a grand theory of language, it’s an observation you can catch yourself doing while arguing, flirting, or scrolling. The key tension is in “same in some areas and different in other areas” - a lay description of what linguists formalize as minimal pairs, semantic contrast, and category boundaries. Labov’s subtext is that meaning lives in contrasts, and that social meaning especially is built on tiny distinctions.
Context matters because Labov’s work helped shift linguistics away from treating “standard” speech as the default and variation as error. When speakers compare near-identical forms - pin/pen, talking/talkin’, ask/aks - they’re not just parsing sounds. They’re navigating identity, class, region, and belonging. The “areas” of sameness and difference aren’t only phonetic; they’re cultural.
What makes the line work is its modesty. It smuggles a radical claim in everyday language: that ordinary speakers are analysts, constantly running micro-experiments on words to figure out where categories end, what counts as “correct,” and who gets to decide.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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