Eat your cake and have it

I once interviewed the writer Simon Fairlie, for the Sunday Times. He lived on a commune in Devon where he sold scythes and milked the only cow. He inherited robust prose from his father, the political journalist Henry Fairlie, and he knows a thing or two about livestock because he’s worked with animals since dropping out of Cambridge University and joining his first commune.

Among the books on his shelf, I was delighted to see a bound copy of the Unabomber Manifesto.

It made perfect sense. Of course Simon would have that. He’s the kind of person who finds something interesting in the most unlikely places, wants to hear voices from beyond the mainstream. That’s why I was there interviewing him. That’s who he is.

But the book also got me thinking about something else entirely.

One of the ways they found the Unabomber was by getting an expert to study the exact language he used in that manifesto. They found the idiosyncratic phrases and use of English that pinned him down remarkably quickly.

One of the clues, as I remember, was that the Unabomber rather fussily wrote about “eating your cake and having it” instead of using the phrase the other way round, as most people do. Of course, he was right that it’s only the eating and then having that seems unnecessarily greedy and unreasonable. But being fastidious with his use of language was what got him caught in the end.

That story has stayed with me because it says something about how deeply our language is etched into us. You can change your name, your appearance, your entire life. But your voice is harder to shake.

One thing that linguists have discovered is that your idiolect isn’t just about the words you choose – it’s also about the words you don’t choose. The phrases you actively avoid, the constructions that feel wrong to you even if they’re technically correct. The Unabomber didn’t just say “eating your cake and having it” because he preferred it that way; he said it because the common version actually offended his linguistic sensibilities. Your idiolect is as much about your pet hates as it is about things you like.

Idiolect is surprisingly stable over time. Researchers have found that the way you speak in your twenties tends to set like concrete. Sure, you’ll pick up new words and phrases, but the underlying patterns – your sentence rhythms, your preferred constructions, your little grammatical tics – they’re mostly locked in by thirty.

Which means the Unabomber, sitting in his cabin in Montana, was still talking like the academic he’d been twenty years earlier. He couldn’t help it.

A third thing, which I find both wonderful and strange: your idiolect is utterly unique. Not just in the obvious way, like fingerprints, but in ways that surprise even linguists. Studies have shown that if you took every person who speaks your language, every person who grew up in your town, every person who went to your school, even every person in your own family – none of them would put a sentence together exactly the way you do.

There are billions of people on this planet and every single one of us speaks differently. Your idiolect is yours alone.