All languages exhibit habits of expression that can be reckoned to be cultural facts because they are “fixed,” which is to say that they are idiomatic and not routinely subject to variation. However, even such “fixed” ways of expressing oneself can change over time. When they do, we can abduce that something in the culture has changed, not just in the language. Language is part of culture by definition, there being no dichotomy between the two spheres.

Sitting at my Stammtisch for my regular Sunday morning breakfast at the Manchester Center restaurant Up for Breakfast, I overheard another customer order an item from the menu by saying to the server, “I’ll do the bacon and eggs.” Now, the use of the verb do in this utterly quotidian milieu is actually a fairly recent innovation in American English, the older norm being have or take.

The difference between have or take and do in this particular context may seem simply to be a matter of free variation. However, as my old teacher Roman Jakobson used to insist, there’s no such thing as free variation, just as there’s no such thing as free love. Each use of a particular verb to mean the same thing has a different value associated with it, even though the meaning of the sentence amounts to the same thing.

When one says “I’ll do sweetbreads” rather than the older “I’ll have sweetbreads,” one is silently asserting some sense of control over the order, i. e., an active part in deciding one what will get to eat from the menu. The verbs “have/take” here connote––also silently, to be sure––that one will eat what is given to them as the result of the transactional relationship between diner and server.

There is, therefore, a subtle shift of value in the difference between the two verbs “do” and “have/take” that is ultimately a fact of contemporary American culture as it pertains to the attitude betrayed ex silentio in the shift of linguistic habit associated with this mundane situation of everyday life.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO