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Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'
Pikoro writes: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explains why the concept of a "proper" English isn't realistic. Quoting: "It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. ... As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. ... We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. ... That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
But it's damn certain there is Improper English.
That's unpossible.
Should be: Why They're Ain't Any Such Thing as "Proper English."
Your welcome.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Who woulda thunk it?
i dun get dis. some1 DTF?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
There are more people studying English in China than the entire population of England. The English language does NOT belong to the native speakers - it belongs to the world. It is the "lingua franca" of our age (and doesn't that phrase piss off the French!).
ah doesn't reckon yer thesis is necessarily co'reck, an' thet th' article is cornfusin' dialeck wif language.
I don't fink yor thesis is necessarily correct, right, and that the article is confusin' dialect wiv 'am sandwich.
Or maybe you reckon the above is "English"?
The article doesn't explain why there is no prescriptive body for the English Language; something that would be equivalent to the Acdemie fancaise. Instead it discusses how English lacks a prescriptive basis, and how it becomes incumbent upon the speaker to match their use of the language their audience and purpose for speaking.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions."
Some of us pedants are aware of how non-grammar the "grammar" rules are, and actually champion wider usage!
Double negatives are totally awesome, and there's no reason to think they're bad. Split infinitives are totally ok too, because the "to" is not actually part of the real English infinitive! And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do. Because it's not a preposition, it's a component of a complex verb.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The only people who claim that there is not a "proper English" are the ones who cannot properly use the language - or to put it in their vernacular, "Y'all be fucking stupid bunch of shitheads, ain't ya?".
Rike wot th queen does.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I think there right!
Given the copious amounts of written language-related pedantry found here (search for "begs/begging the question" and related discussion), this is a surprisingly relevant topic. I wonder if programmers and other tech types tend to get overly hung up on language rules because of their profession. When it comes to computer languages, after all, if you're not borderline pedantic, you're likely to write sloppy or buggy code.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Difference is the American English is taking over the British English. American culture is invading everywhere through movies and dramas, news etc... Why not just accept once and for all that English is, from now on, American English?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
... between "terror" and "terrible", "fuhrer" and "furor", "suffering" and "suffrage", you're ripe for being fooled and robbed by politicians at every step. And not just politicians. EULAs can use fancy words, knowing that average Joe is barely literate, and put them in various forms of electronic bondage. Credit card applications... you name it. Everything around you will take advantage of you.
Having strong grasp of language is VITAL for a society's survival. This is axiomic. There shouldn't be articles about it. It's not a controversial issue, or rather, it only becomes one when average IQ dipped low enough to warrant creating excuses for not learning the language.
However, it has nothing to do with purity. English is famously a language which mugs other languages for their vocabulary. But just because it is impure and inconsistent doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
the Brits have the final word on what is true and "proper" English
The "traditional" view was that proper English is the grammar, pronunciation and maybe even the dialect used by BBC newsreaders. This doesn't really stand anymore, as there are many more regional (british english) dialects on national TV than were encouraged in the past.
However I can see the confusion as the word for "American" in the american language is "English". That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
unloyal dahlia cloud blacklegged gwyniad timorously. Denoting cobb browser emulsifier kearney underthroating flowage drysdale. Outsprue antipolitics handwrought palatable phosphatized preliberated fico overheadiness. Or maybe not.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
A language that evolves is one thing, but a generation that does not follow basic rules of grammar and proper English puts at risk a means of universal communication. Proper grammar gives meaning and relevance to writing, and without what is written can offer a confusing message.
...is no Language.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Latin turned into Italian (and Spanish and French etc.), modern English grew out of Old English which is incomprehensible to everyone except linguists today, and yes, even modern English will be a dead language someday. Languages drift, film at 11.
One manager was really bothered by "my bad", which used to be "my mistake". He called it "gang slang". "My bad" has slipped into common usage it seems to me. I'll avoid it around him, but he came across as a fuddy-duddy. He should be thankful people admit their mistakes, something uncommon around here.
Table-ized A.I.
There may not be such a thing as proper English, but yours is still bad!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
your and you're would be synonyms by now. That is problem with such an absolute. Yes languages change natural with use because much of what makes up a language is arbitrary. But much also is not arbitrary, it is a certain way because otherwise it would be impossible to communicate effectively. It does not matter how many millions of people regularly confuse your for you're it will never become correct because it is necessary for the language to have those words remain distinct.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
people shouldn't say "For all intensive purposes" or "should/could/would of"?
Born to Play
Yipppppppeeeeeee!!!!! is now official English!
Yippppeeeeeee!!!!!!
Luuk, eye em yur Fother!
(Hey, it's another galaxy, diff rules there)
Table-ized A.I.
Yes it's a frightening fact, our language is alive and if we blink we will be left behind. But it's a wonderful thing to see when our eyes are open. English is by far the biggest language and, lamentably, the most difficult for others to learn but that is exactly the reason to learn it. Many concepts in science, technology, engineering, obscenities, medicine etc cannot be adequately expressed in other languages.
English has always stolen from other languages (and the other way too) and it has always been a hodge podge of them all. Even mighty Shakespere took liberties, among them spelling his own name in a variety of ways.
The British Empire and later Hollywood and the internet age have reinforced English as the language of business and entertainment. While language diversity is an interesting thing, and many are struggling to preserve it, English is what you need for most activities.
And how do you pin English down? It's like nailing jelly to the wall- we have many languages loosely referred to as English: Liverpool, Edinburgh, Dallas, Boston, Sydney, N'arleans, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Hong Kong, (sorry, there is no Canadian city with an interesting variation) ... We are a family of languages that are sometimes intelligible to each other.
No doubt there are some topics best explored in other languages- music, art, religion, anthropology perhaps. But for modern living we got it goin' on!
...omphaloskepsis often...
It begs the question why proper English isn't standardized.
However I can see the confusion as the word for "American" in the american language is "English". That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
It has long been accepted that American English and British English are 2 decidedly different variants of the same language. But they ARE different enough that there is "proper" American English, and "proper" British English, and they are NOT the same things.
There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.
Proper English can be seen as the documented agreed upon style. "Safe" is an adjective, and not an adverb, in the agreed styles. Therefore "Drive Safe" is improper English, because everyone agrees that "safe" is not an adjective, and you need to say "Drive Safely" because "safely" is an adverb, and everyone agrees on that too. /shrug
The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yes, a language is a dynamic thing. The rules are constantly changing, and what was 'unacceptable' to purists is okay for casual use, and what was casual use only ten years ago might be perfectly acceptable even in rigorous settings today.
Further, English is a very agglomerative language; it's turned out to be astonishingly tolerant of loan words, adoptions, etc from other languages freely. Thus, at least in American English particularly, there's a tolerance (largely, I suspect, due to our immigrant past) for odd phrasings, word orders, or odd usage that eventually may become common parlance.
NEVERTHELESS, as much as it's getting down into the weeds of linguistic OCD to insist (or not) on the Oxford comma, or avoiding prepositional endings, or on specific adjectival orders (there's a rabbit hole if you want to see grammarians duking it out), that doesn't mean that there aren't rules of usage that are common for understanding, or that "there are no real rules at all" as this article seems to claim.
Yes, it's very intellectual to assert there are no rules, but a normal person recognized that's stupid: of COURSE there are rules. Are they regularly ignored? Sure. Should they be? It depends on context; if you're talking with your friends "u" is probably a perfectly acceptable replacement for "you". If you're writing a business letter, it will simply make you look like a moron.
If someone points it out to you, Insisting with sophomoric sincerity that "well there really are no rules in English anyway" will simply certify their opinion.
-Styopa
A "news"paper from the country responsible for the greatest travesties to the english language, trying to explain away why there is no proper english, in an attempt to deflect criticism away from it's populations inability to grasp correct gramatical and spelling structures.
I blame Murdoch.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides. Still, following the rules in a major style guide will help you stay well within the rules for understanding.
....defining English spelling and grammar like the famous "Académie française" in France or the "Office québécois de la langue française" in Canada does for the French language. As such, the English language has changed at an enormous pace, and people would be amazed that the average English spoken in the USA circa 1900 can be quite different than the English spoken in the USA in 2015.
"This reads like a liberal's didactic epistle to instruct the hidebound linguists that the lazy, ignorant and uneducated are their equals, particularly the minority youth and valley girls who might invent or redefine words to describe something because they "zoned out" during that learning opportunity in school. We mustn't judge."
As for my own words... the article purposely mixes the subject of language evolution (which is understandable) and just abandoning all the rules altogether. It is something straight out of the film "Idiocracy", and the more people stupidly embrace the notions of this article, the scarier our current reality is.
Blame the amrikans
Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren't real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
These conventions are what make communication possible between the old and the young, the past and the present. The speeches of Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King resonate to this day, without translation.
So, basically, "proper English" doesn't exist because $standard_descriptivist_summary. All the prescriptivists are wrong.
I don't understand the value in publishing an article that presents the topic as it does. It's a standard descriptivist argument being presented by someone who—at least from the summary—seems to be blissfully unaware that they were not the first person to think of it and is under the misconception that simply presenting the idea will convince all of us of its merit. Never mind that prescriptivists and descriptivists have been arguing about language since before any of us were born. What next? Are they going to tell us to stop quibbling over what's right or wrong because relativism is a thing? Perhaps suggest everyone convert to Judaism as a means for achieving peace in the Middle East? Tell us that because OS X exists, malware isn't a problem? Toss in a postscript with a pick for vi while they're at it, just to rankle some more people for fun?
It's a waste of everyone's time to suggest that a matter is closed just because someone can trot out the standard lines espoused by one side.
This article is something I've talked to people about before. There isn't really a good definition of what is English. We have conventions, but they change over time. This is because English is alive. As soon as a language is written down in immutable rules, it dies. Language needs to be able to evolve with the society that uses it.
It will also help you succeed in society.
While everyday English may become less and less formal, you will still need to know formal English to succeed in academia and the workplace. While more people may speak ebonics or write textspeak or whatever and not be stagmatized so much by their peers or even society as a whole, these people will never get a job speaking or writing like that. Teaching formal English is more important than ever.
Edward Sapir "Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak."
That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
Actually, in Europe (at least where I live) we do study British English in schools. But then people learn American English because of America's cultural supremacy.
I agree and disagree with the writer of the article.
On the one hand, there are a lot of silly rules floating around. The reason you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition is because Latin doesn't. In fact Latin can't. The same goes for why you shouldn't split an infinitive. The infamous double negative used to be accepted English centuries ago, just as it still is acceptable in Spanish, French, and many other languages. I've come to think of it as a parity bit. Since one simple word flips around the meaning of the whole sentence, it's better to put it in twice.
But on the other hand, one of my favorite books is The Elements of Style. To its credit, it doesn't mess with chiding writers over ending a sentence with a preposition. It doesn't even advertise itself as a standard-bearer of "proper" English. It is mainly a collection of common-sense tips for improving your craft. It's most famous advice is "too omit needless words." It goes on to show you how to write clearly, rather than wishy washy. In short, how to serve the reader, and help him understand the information while wasting his time as much as possible.
Before a bunch of French speaking Vikings invaded in 1066, before Nordic speaking Vikings degraded the language.
THAT is proper English!
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Comparing French to English is completely nonsensical. The former has a department regulating the development of language and purity laws that preserve the language and its use. The latter is an all out clusterfuck where the abbreviations LOL, and WTF end up in the Oxford English dictionary simply because they are in "common use".
So if the primary dictionaries are based on common use, what then determines proper use?
Just try to listen to a 200 years old English recording, you wouldn't understand it. Languages evolve, and in a few 10's of years no American will understand the current British English.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
correct horse battery staple
Perl Programmer for hire
TFA is an opinion piece, "essay". Kamm can get fucked with his opinion of proper language constructs and the rest of what drivel he wrote. Kamm is a tosser and a complete opportunist full of shite. Another /vertisement for some wanker's crappy book.
Proper english is whatever the people in charge say it is.
http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/
Another age old argument in translation. Nothing new to see here, nor is English a special case of the argument.
Funny how often these articles come from the country that brought "sox", "labor", "dialog" and "liter" to the English-speaking world. ;-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Actually the entire quote is:
""The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is 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." --James D. Nicoll"
hmmmm
This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.
Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".
In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.
Jon Postel
In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.
There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.
In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.
The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.
Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?
I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.
Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.
For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.
I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concern
Goddammit, I read your comment out loud and Siri recognized my bank password and withdrew all my money. You're in big trouble now, bub.
Linguistics recognizes two forms of every language: 1) a spoken language standardized through a Speech Community ( small to large groups of people sharing a common spoken language following the lead of a "best" speaker and 2) written language which can be governed by language policy set by an institution as in th lAcademe in France. In England, the US and other English speaking countries Language Policy is set and maintained by educators in Primary, Secondary and Higher Education, standardized and agreed upon "rules" of spelling, grammar and punctuation. The speech in Speech Communities changes rapidly by infusions of cant, argot, slang, regional dialects and the pressure of status of idividuals and the "catchphrases" they use in public media. The Language Community's written code changes more slowly but it does change over time. Comparing newspaper articles from the Civil War Era and the texts from US magazines of the 30's and the texts of Books and Speechs in the 1990's it is easy to spot broad shifts in lexical choices but the use of grammar, punctuation and other structural units and methods remain relatively static. A good example is the use of contrafactual in modality (If. . .were . . .would) which has remained in usewith the same structure since the 1400's. It must have been a slow news day for the NYT.
As an earlier poster so ably illustrated, if you talk like a gangsta, you will be thought of as one.
Similarly, if you talk like an uneducated idiot, people will assume you are one.
While I quite agree that the English language is -- and should be -- a dynamic language that grows and develops, it has backwaters and dead ends.
Newspapers -- and I assume that this includes the Wall Street Journal -- have a style manual that *is* rigidly followed, so there is nothing inherently wrong with rules -- at the very least they provide consistency. By teaching the rules of grammar to schoolchildren, they will at least have a chance of sounding like they know what they are talking about.
Inasmuch as a person has a choice they will choose the language style of the group that they identify with, regardless of how stupid they sound to everyone not of that particular group.
Peace
English is a language comprised of fragments of other languages and popular idioms, unlike French, which is controlled by a government agency that approves each word. Governance of English is democratic in the most basic sense, and not even a giraffe can change that, no matter how many wiki pages it edits.
As a non-native speaker using English daily with other non-native speakers, I must say that it is the ideal global lingua franca. First of all, it is very open-minded about "broken" pronounciation and minor grammatical errors ("Bad English" is actually a thing). In contrast to other big languages, it is not as obviously tied to a single nation or culture - so everyone can make it "theirs". (Other large languages expect perfection and a non-native speaker will be treated as intellectually inferior) I think one explanation for this could be that English itself stared off as a hybrid language (Germanic Saxon/Scandinavian mixed with Latin midevial French - and possibly some ancient Celtic in the mix).
As a coda to my post, consider this howler:
World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling
This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.
It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.
Because of the influx of the Indians to the UK and US, they brought with them 'indlish' which comes equipped with specially worded sentences like 'do the needful' plus their special accent (trust me, I tried very hard to emulate the 'indlish' accent, I just couldn't)
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible.
Which is pretty much the same state of affairs with English and American although there are quite a few words which are completely different: lift vs. elevator, car bonnet vs. car hood, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. egg plant, car boot vs. car trunk etc. and more confusing an English word can have a different meaning in American and vice versa often to embarrassing effect e.g. rubber, pants, suspenders, chips, fanny etc.
This is why it is helpful to give the two 'languages' different names: they may be mutually intelligible (for the most part) but it can be helpful to know whether the language is English or American so that words like 'chips' with different meanings can be correctly interpreted. Calling it 'English English' and 'American English' is just redundant and it typically gets shortened to just English and then you are left guessing based on spellings or context what is meant.
You'd be better of with Chaucer. He's surprisingly not too hard to parse with a little effort, mostly with spelling and some with vocabulary. You'd think the efficiencies derived from proper spelling would make the case for proper English.
There's no "proper" English, but there are many "improper" ones. If your P becomes so misshappen that it can be seen as a D, you aren't communicating anymore.
It's the same thing for words: u, m8, w8, pwn aren't proper per se but have a clear and unambiguous mapping to the proper word. Even when using misspellings like seperate or convinsable, you are still communicating clearly enough.
It's only when you use the spelling of a different word that you screw up. Errors such as board/bored, hoard/horde, straight/strait send a sentence straight into damnyouautocorrect, if not Alice's Wonderland. You cannot "evolve" a word by having treasure and army become a single concept, unless you want to speak Smurf. And even then, they can smurf which smurf means smurf.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
[quote]
Mr. Kamm is an editorial writer and columnist for the Times of London. His latest book is âoeAccidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage.â
[/quote]
Nevertheless, the author has also thought up some rules that he thinks will help you write clearly and would like to sell them to you.
-Dave
Typical American attitude: we can't do it, so nobody must be able to do it. Also: 'grammatical sentences' ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I'm not going to be schooled by US paper on the English language, even if the author of the article is a pom.
Regards,
An Australian
And the only language close to what English was back in the days of Beowulf's creation is today's Icelandic (of all things). This from a great writer and philologist, J.R.R. Tolkien!
between the grammatical rules observed empiraclly by linguists, and the barely incoherent gibberish spoken but retards. everyone isn't equal.
I saw on someone's sig ...
"The English language was invented by Norman soldiers to seduce Saxon barmaids."
You'd be better of with Chaucer. He's surprisingly not too hard to parse with a little effort, mostly with spelling and some with vocabulary. You'd think the efficiencies derived from proper spelling would make the case for proper English.
Although Chaucer's work is old, it is not written in Old English as Beowulf was. Chaucer was Middle English, if anything, after the Norman invasion and pre-Renaissance.
As someone who works with a lot of Indian engineers, I find "do the needful," to be an incredibly charming and delightful turn of phrase that makes me smile, every single time I hear / read it.
If this is what "Indlish" is going to bring us, I for one welcome our new Hindu overlords.
No matter how good the accent is, injecting the word "actually" several times in a sentence marks the speaker as an Indian.
Mind, you can identify a native New Yorker the same way, by the references to coitus and oedipal desires.
The problem with "bad English" is that it tends to be imprecise and ambiguous. Using a word "wrongly" might not be bad when talking to friends, but when placing a large order or designing an airplane, precise use of the language can really make a difference.
It is probably best to stop referring to the style guides as rules but rather as guidelines. One can reference guidelines and in some cases even require them but for the most part a guideline is not a requirement but a best practice which may have exceptions.
I wonder how many people got that joke.
Is it worth pasting the CDKX link?
The problem is a popular culture that celebrates stupidity. If you want to break grammatical rules, either do so after reading Strunk & White and learning how to write properly. Then it's an artistic decision. Or you can learn English from lolcats and rappers, in which case you are just flaunting ignorance. I remember a drawing anatomy teacher who bemoaned a young artist's work. He had talent but never learned how to draw the human form. It is hard. However there's a difference, even if you paint abstract. There may be talented and educated rappers, but just because you can text and rhyme doesn't make you a poet or a journalist.
If your document is not in clear, precise language, then it can and will be re-interpreted by everyone who reads it. This can be vital for fiction or poetry, where the purpose is to engage the reader's imagination and create a full, vivid world with as little text as possible. But if there is no "right", then the interpretations are usually destined to be "wrong" because of the ambiguities. This is part of every language, including spoken English, written English, contracts, legal text, programming, and mathematics. If you do not have a well defined structure, you cannot define or handle exceptions.
One classic version of such ambiguity is dates. When you write "01/02/03", to You mean January 2nd, 2003, as Americans do? Or Febuaryy first, as the UK and some European nations do? Or do you follow the German convention, and mean the year February 2nd of 2001?
This kind of confusion is why we have "formal" English, so people can write 2001-02-03 and make it unambiguous, and so that speakers separated by age, time, or local history can communicate consistently. It's quite vital to a worldwide economy and political ecology, and it is _critical_ in engineering and computer science.
For all intensive purposes, using grammers good ain't important. I dun get why all these people got to try and correct our speak. It really begs the question, why is people so upset about grammers?
Linguistics has two branches. One branch is descriptive linguistics which studies how language is used. The other is proscriptive, who describes how a language should be used. This divide is covered pretty often by language log (worth reading pretty often).
This article is just someone discovering descriptive linguistics for the first time and ecstatic that their prejudgments are backed up by a branch of something that sounds like a science. Congratulations. "Science" has "proved" that there are no standards for language and all those teachers that marked up your papers with red pens were just being mean.
There is no One True English, but there sure as hell is a Don't Sound Like a Moron English. Like it or not, people hear more than just what you say. They also hear how you say it, and they tend to figure out who you are, or at least, who you are similar to.
Same goes with clothes. People know who you are just by looking at you. They may be wrong occasionally, and you can feel smug for subverting their expectations, but it is a tool that is right most of the time, and it seems to be wired very deeply into us, so no one is going to stop doing it.
You can whine all you want about how unfair it is, but if you want your ideas heard, your best bet is to sound (and look) like someone worth listening to.
See that "Preview" button?
We can debate all we like about whether there is or is not an absolute standard or "owner" of the language.
But I will still use the ability to write and speak according to the refined rules of whatever standard is adopted, as a filter to figure out if the person I'm talking to has a certain level of qualifications and skill... and is able to understand and think clearly within rules and structures, whatever they may be.
Just because the owners of those may change doesn't mean that poor logic, thinking, and inability to write are suddenly excused.
Chaucer's English had completely different pronunciations for long vowels, because he wrote before the Great Vowel Shift. Were the spelling back then as regimented as it is today, and remained so, written English would be even less phonetic and require even more rote memorization. And much of what might be considered confusing spelling is related to the difference in pronunciation. See http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Anyhow, Chaucer wrote _after_ the Norman invasion.
For understandability amongst illiterate Marxists, also known as Slashdotters, shouldn't that be "loser than"?
Also, take note of one of the rare times "looser" is actually used appropriately. Nowadays, my brain makes a nearly audible 'tic' whenever it first spots that word anywhere on the internet, probably because of the tiny mental trauma inflicted on me each time someone misspells "loser".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Postel's Law.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
We should standardize that. Or maybe Adobe.
Before a bunch of French speaking Vikings invaded in 1066, before Nordic speaking Vikings degraded the language.
THAT is proper English!
Old English, but yeah. Technically, it's effed up Old Norse (via the pre-Denmark residents of southern Jutland) which is effed up ancient Germanic tribal language(s). But why be educative with this crowd. :p
For understandability amongst illiterate Marxists, also known as Slashdotters, shouldn't that be "loser than"?
"Loser then", if I'm not mistaken.
Not sure it's confined entirely to us 'illiterate Marxist Slashdotters' though. =)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
This is a silly blanket statement. It's true of some things, such as the split infinitive. Other things, such as correct comma placement, play an obvious role in understanding a sentence. I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution. Text speak is just lazy.
soylentnews.org
Yes, but Chaucer is middle (or maybe early modern) English, and well after the 1066 Norman Conquest, so it wouldn't really make his point as well. Or at all.
Psycholinguists could easily argue that reality says otherwise. If a person read incorrect English, his/her brain has more trouble reading it: reading times slow down, comprehension levels drop, brain activity increases. So it would be pretty fair to say that there is a shared basis for normal English that native and very competent 2nd language speakers expect.
Oliver Kamm, the author of the piece, on the other hand, just has an opinion, mainly based on his political views.
Like the recent meme "he's supersmart so he must be autistic".
Who gets hurt if you dangle a particle?
Though I guess the Supreme Court can affect millions in its ruling on the ACA use of "state".
My opinion: "state" is commonly used to refer to the Federal government. If I say "the state should pay for healthcare", I clearly mean the Federal government, not an individual state. But if the court takes a narrower view, then they are essentially enforcing a usage rule.
we need to follow WUSIWUG
Surely, if we want to define a Proper English, it should be English English[0], all 287 dialects of it http://sounds.bl.uk/accents-and-dialects/survey-of-english-dialects
English has always been a bastardised language, an amalgam of tribal languages specifically chosen to baffle the foreigner (read French courts of the middle ages) and then augmented with every interesting word in every language spoken in every port the Navy got to.
It's flexibility and adaptability is the foundation of it's strength, expecting it to remain static is just crazy.
[0] Yes this is a troll for all you usian mods.
foo
It would help if you'd start to adhere to a set of phonetic rules whatsoever. As it is now, English looks like an ideographic language that incidentally uses latin characters to compose ideograms. No wonder your younglings can't differentiate, e.g.,"your" and "you're": in the spoken language it is the same sound.
No ideal is realistic. That doesn't mean they aren't extant, or that they aren't things worthy to strive for.
Gotta love articles that are titled "Why Everything I'm Already Doing Is Correct And I Should Never Have To Learn Anything". Spoiler: they are always wrong.
Let's hope that their friends aren't so mean as to stagmatize them!
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Hear hear!
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
This is the same for any living language. However I think that the rules stay similar over a very long time.Words might change, but gramar stays largely the same.
Only when you start to look closer will you find difference. Not only over time, but also per region. These differnces will influence each other or not. e.g. with Dutch and Afrikaans, there is now a clear difference. When looking at Dutch and Flemish, you will notice that the difference is much smaller and mainly pronounciation and worduse.
No matter how much (some) liguists would like to treat language as a fixed thing, it isn't.
You can't determine speed and location at the same time and that is what they are trying to mdo.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Your example misses the point:
Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct.
They just had to come to that conclusion.
Of course there is a proper English. But what's spoken in the US (home of the Wall Street Journal) surely isn't it.
how the hell do you pronounce "thrythswyth"?!
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This is really an argument about values, isn't it? Quite a lot of people want "others" (and as your post implies by referring to ebonics, the other here is typically young black people) to value what they value -- a good job in academia or business. And want them to *de*-value, literally, the form of English they have grown up using, and see it as worthless to "getting ahead". This, despite the pretty obvious fact that if you used what you describe as "formal English" in the context in which many people live, it would be detrimental to your interests, just as using ebonics would be detrimental to your interests if used in a merchant bank. It's really about an underlying desire to not want alternative value systems to evolve, in which getting ahead may mean something other than getting a good job at a corporate or institution.
http://www.gizoogle.net/index.php?search=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F03%2F16%2F0228231%2Fwhy-there-is-no-such-thing-as-proper-english%3Futm_source%3Drss1.0moreanon%26utm_medium%3Dfeed&se=Gizoogle+Dis+Shiznit/
Muahahahahh
Ah its good to see the eth (ð) and i (æ) outside of my Icelandic studies. French did a lot of "damage" to languages all over Europe during the late middle ages, one of the reasons I'm enjoying Icelandic with no real outside influence beyond the Danish trying a little bit.
English and Old Norse were spoken along side each other for ages in Britain, especially back when we had Norse kingdoms (like Jórvik) and Danelaw. All in all, its a shame we lost some of those extra characters which as I understand it, started to happen when the printing press came out. The Dutch machines didn't have ð or so instead they'd use th, and thus began the end.
An anecdote I've come across (which might not be true) is the fact the "ye olde sweet shop" should in fact be "e olde" but because the machines didn't have the thorn () char, they just started using y at first before using th.
Ah languages, gotta love them. Oh, if you like languages and use Linux, google for the compose key!
A few comments make incorrect presumptions. First, Oliver Kamm, author of the WSJ essay, is British, and pretty solidly so as he write leaders for The Times. Second, he is a former prescriptivist who has seen the error of his ways, and has not just recently become anti-prescriptivist. Third, most of the arguments put here in favour of prescriptivism are demolished in his recent book "Accidence will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage" which I commend not only for its arguments, but also for its guide to usage. I have reviewed it in detail here. There I also suggest one reason for prescriptivism which no one has yet mentioned - the Mother Tongue and old, battered teddy bears. Enjoy!
For understandability amongst illiterate Marxists, also known as Slashdotters, shouldn't that be "loser than"?
"Loser then", if I'm not mistaken.
Not sure it's confined entirely to us 'illiterate Marxist Slashdotters' though. =)
If I had mod points I'd mod parent funny.
Its a mute point. Your begging the question, "Y"?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Chaucer's date is ~1400. His language is the English that was beginning to be spoken and written, some 300 years after English was dropped as the official language. The reason you can squint and sort of understand it is because it is an amalgam of Old English and Norman French, the precursor of all modern English.
As to Beowulf, reading the text closely discloses that Beowulf was from Sweden. There never was a primordial "pure English", since the invaders came from various areas of northwestern Europe and spoke differently.
It's not a dinosaur, and using it while editing is often the most gratifying part.
You can do it while tired, always learn something and finding the word you want is gratifying!
GO ENGIES!
Try teaching this "subjective grammar" to kids in school. Then watch them fall flat on their face when they get out in the real world. When Johnny's teacher says it's proper grammar to say "I ain't got nothin", he's going to end up saying that in a job interview. Then he won't be able to get a job and will have no idea why.
They tried this in the 90s with ebonics and guess what it got us, people who can't communicate! Now they recycle failed ideas AGAIN, but this time just generalize it.
When I'm speaking informally with friends and family, there's nothing wrong with using a local dialect. But speaking with professionals, we need a universal way to communicate. That's what proper grammar is.
While your comment about exclusion has some merits, most of the reason would actually be that in situations where formal english is "required" you will quite often be dealing with people who have english as a second language, and the language they learned in that case will not be slang based, so it would not be very wise in business, banking or teaching to be using a language that acts as a barrier to understanding.
Capice?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
It made me try much harder with spelling, and rely less on automatic spelling corrections, and also gave me a new insight into the Bible!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It doesn't help when those that study the language don't fully know and understand its rules, either.
Although its rules of applied syntactics are fairly well, (though not fully), recognised, its rules of applied semantics (content) are not.
In fact, I've run into many people who struggle to fully recognise these rules of content the English has, and some even try and deny their very existence, even though both grammar(syntactics) and content (semantics) must exist in relation to each other for language to function and therefore exist.
I'm in the middle of explaining the problems we have, and why they exist, in my blog, here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110311/6174/Contents_NEW.php
Though I feel I need to re-write part 3 - after some additional problems I've seen as demonstrated in the thread found here:
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/218922-Problems-with-Verbs-(Part-3of-my-blog)
(It eventually devolved into a climate-change denying thread instead, unfortunately...)
The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides.
This is particularly true for spoken English vs written English. In spoken English, intonation and body language contribute to communication, eg bad vs bad. You're expected to fill in missing/garbled words from context. Written English is an attempt to encode all of that information.
So, sure, sloppy spelling, poor grammar, and homophone substitution may be understandable to your close friends. That makes it more of a code language or private language, and there's plenty of times where we like to share private, insider conversations. If you actually want to communicate with everyone, you have to use the parent language - step back from the Southern drawl or the Scots brogue and speak Common.
You're missing my point. Anyone who's aspiring to a career in, say, banking is pretty likely to make an effort to learn some form of "standard" English. But this is really about trying to control the language spoken by people who could not give two shits about a career in banking, because they are living very different lives in which such an aspiration is not only absurd but potentially dangerously distracting too.
Strunk and white only applies to American English.
Still fascinating that no one can agree on the origin of the once slang 'OK'.
This is really an argument about values, isn't it? Quite a lot of people want "others" (and as your post implies by referring to ebonics, the other here is typically young black people) to value what they value -- a good job in academia or business. And want them to *de*-value, literally, the form of English they have grown up using, and see it as worthless to "getting ahead". This, despite the pretty obvious fact that if you used what you describe as "formal English" in the context in which many people live, it would be detrimental to your interests, just as using ebonics would be detrimental to your interests if used in a merchant bank. It's really about an underlying desire to not want alternative value systems to evolve, in which getting ahead may mean something other than getting a good job at a corporate or institution.
As the guy doing the hiring, you had fucking better share my "values" or at least be able to fake it.
It is my experience that those that don't want to speak reasonably correct English do so on purpose, and do to set themselves apart into a different (lower) class deliberately. Those speeking Thugeese and Dinduese do so as a way of fitting in with their group. I am more inclined to let the strategy work as I am never going to want to be around someone who's main negotiating ability is over who gets to sell crack on what corner.
Speak however you want. No loss, it makes it easier to pick out the gems from the garbage.
Shouldn't that be "one of them rare times"?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
... mambo dogface to the banana patch?
...that decided many, many perfectly good words needed respelling anyway.
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a set of opinions, not a set of rules. All the difference in the world. I can point you at numerous books and experts on grammar and writing that disagree with significant portions of that overused book.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are.
There is no single authoritative set of rules for the English language. There are rules in the sense that there are commonly agreed to informal "standards" which persist for a time based on culture and comprehensibility but it is quite correct to say that that there aren't any rules in the sense of rules laid down by an authoritative body.
Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
Quite simply not true. You merely have to go back far enough in time to get to a point where the language is no longer the same. Old English is for all practical purposes a completely different language than our modern version of English.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today.
Perhaps you haven't actually studied Shakespeare. Significant portions of his writing are quite inscrutable today without an explanation of the context, temporal usage and intent. That said, Shakespeare isn't so far removed from us that it is impossible to read - it's just a few hundred years and languages usually don't evolve that quickly. Go read Beowulf in the original Old English and tell me again that the rules of the language never change over time.
Yeh grammar nazi's your just sore looser's n u r ijuts lol i just ignore wat there saying
No, it just meant that it was harder for them to decipher the encoded messages.
In technology you have an RFC published by a body whose authority supported by consensus. Then when you implement that technology, you can choose to be as compliant with RFC as you want. English teachers tend to see things as right vs. wrong, while in technology it's compliant vs. noncompliant, strict vs. loose/flexible. Loose compliance is often beneficial - how many people you know actually type the trailing dot on all of their FQDN's (e.g. http://slashdot.org./story)? The RFC says you're supposed to, but people rarely except when editing DNS records. Do we say that everyone is "wrong", or just noncompliant with RFC?
I find the technology model far less judgmental.
Again, you're missing my point. Talking as though the only thing standing between a bright young guy from the projects and a job at Goldmans is their poor command of standard English is just absurd. They don't value what Goldmans offers. They can't afford to value it, because it's a dangerous distraction from the world they actually have to navigate, which poses rather more immediate and visceral challenges than doing well at interview. It reminds me of the slackjawed incomprehension I saw on the faces of young bright compassionate managers at a big 4 accountancy when they tried to run a program for disadvantaged teens here in the UK, and the teens weren't hugely interested: the managers were deep in Rumsfeldian not-knowing what they didn't know territory. They lacked the insight and lived understanding of what the teens had to go through every day, to see why what was on offer was just not that appealing.
They could have done with watching this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes, there IS such a thing as a stupid question and this is one of them.
It is correct that there is no such a thing as a stupid question. A question by definition cannot have intelligence and therefore it cannot be smart or stupid. The person asking the question CAN be smart or stupid or ignorant or informed. If someone asks a question they should either already know or be able to figure out the answer to, then that person is possibly a stupid person but the question is neither stupid nor smart. Someone else could ask the same question and it could be a reasonable inquiry. An English speaking adult ought to know that "A" is the first letter in the English alphabet whereas a young child would not necessarily know this and it would be unreasonable to expect them to know this fact. The question would be the same question therefore how could the question be stupid? Therefore the correct thing to say is that there is no such thing as a stupid question but there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot.
I'll say the French have the final word on what's truly French, the Spaniards have the final word on what's truly Spanish, and the Brits have the final word on what is true and "proper" English.
Going to call bullshit on that one. Just because that's where the language originated does not grant those countries any sort of authority over how or where the language is used outside their own borders, particularly after hundreds of years. American English did not evolve from modern British English any more than humans evolved from modern apes. They both come from a common ancestor and have evolved along separate paths ever since. The Brits have no more say over how English is used than the Americans or even Chinese do. Languages do not work like that. Spanish spoken in South America is every bit as legitimate as Spanish spoken in Spain.
Strunk and White must be rolling in their respective graves.
"It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books."
Me and him be disagreein'. It's a given that language is always going to be dynamic and evolving. We see the proliferation of neologisms and common misspellings of words and phrases(e.g. cancelled) become so common that they end up being acceptable. There must be some sort of foundation however.
"People should not be stigmatized for the way they speak..."
Wrong. I can understand getting over things like "comprised of" and "cancelled" as being too overwhelming to eradicate. I can't deal with improper use of they're, their and there, double negatives and improper verb conjugation. Those should definitely be stigmatized
"I can't get no satisfaction" is a bloody song, not a speech. It works because "I can't get any satisfaction" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so smoothly. That doesn't mean we should dispense with the conventional use. Completely discarding grammar would be a quantum leap backward in effective communication, which is already suffering in the electronic age,
Irregardless of what he think language should be comprised of, do he thinks we's be wanting too tolerating verbal chaos?
Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".
A distinction without a difference. Call it whatever you like and it will mean the same thing.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?
Do you even know that this does not necessarily matter? Just because it has been done a certain way does not mean it must continue to be done that way. I think lots of them know, they simply don't care and I think that is a reasonable viewpoint.
I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.
That does not imply that it is necessary or useful to others however. It's not actually required for comprehension, readability and while the extra effort is small it is not zero either. I don't think double spaces between sentences is a bad idea (I tend to do it too) but that doesn't mean it is a good idea either.
I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark.
I happen to very much agree with you on this. Never made much sense to me.
I know this is how language scholars in my country think as well, but it's idiotic. This approach is what warps language and creates misunderstandings, when you can no longer determine from spelling or pronounciation the etymology of a word. Artists also shouldn't adopt misheard lyrics as the correct way to perform their songs. Although that might be slightly interesting.
Picking the lowest common denominator is just plain sad when it comes to language.
As title - post title illustrates common bad gramatical usage but is not correct.
"Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct"
If they are going to use the word "loser" it's coming from a speaker that typically says "loser den"
"A speech delivered at a public event marking a great tragedy, for instance, demands a highly formal register; commentary on the Super Bowl needs a conversational tone."
What's the difference between formal and proper?
The strength of English is that it is able to adapt with the needs of it's users.
This ability requires a willingness to bend the rules to try new things.
This willingness does not mean that there are no rules defining what is in general use in specific groups of users.
One's choice of rule sets gives clues as to one's background and attitude towards the group one is speaking to.
One can choose to speak gheto to Wall street bankers, but such an in your face disregard for proper English may not help convivce them that you have something useful to say. On the other hand speaking proper English to a group of teenagers may have a similar effect. Perhaps the definition of proper is what works for the audience. In a melting pot country where everybody conforms to get ahead, one would expect a common, proper form of English. With folks striving to be different, one would expect the opposite. WSJ may be correct, but it seems more a comment on the deprecation of the melting pot than mearly a language thing.
Building a country where nobody works, and everybody is special and different is an interesting and scarry problem.
At least we have a language up to the task.
I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution.
Then you will be wrong. We don't know exactly how it will influence our language in the long run but you can be quite certain that it WILL influence it. You can already see abbreviations and texting conventions making their way into every day usage. You don't even have to look hard. We have entire generations growing up with texting as a key means of communication. Do you seriously think this will have no influence on their use of language? If you do then you are being intentionally naive.
I imagined a cluster of syllables, and there it is.
Putting an end to such a miasma of glyphs might be the only nice thing the French have ever done in their entire history.
Romans ruled the world with 23 letters, all caps. This is what I call a proper thing.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Because American English represents the lowest common denominator "modern pidgin" whereas British/International English represents the lingua franca of the educated.
English is an open, developing, evolving language. If you don't like it, speak Latin.
Many years ago, my parents moved from Central Scotland to that area of Northern Nigeria now in the news for all the wrong reasons.
At the age of 6, I was the only person in my school who was not Nigerian. English was at that time the common language and that was what was used in the school I was at.
Every now and again, I would be sent along to one of the older classes to help with pronunciation - "Look at the size of this boy. If he can pronounce it, so can you!" type lessons from the teacher.
So, the next time you see the town of Sokoto, just consider that here will be people there with highly differentiated vowels, glottal stops and rhotic pronunciation (rolling R's).
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
At the beginning of the ACA, they define a bunch of words as used in the Act. For ACA purposes, "The word "state" means one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia."
My head just exploded. Excellent troll.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I didn't rtfa but as an American I have always gotten a perverse joy out of telling people from the UK that "I'm gonna learn you to talk proper english yet" it usually cause there heads to implode.
Don't believe them. They don't write proper English.
Garry Knight
Saying that there is no such thing as "proper" English is quite similar to stating there is no such thing as a species "Homo Sapiens". While the original poster does seem to marginally comprehend that languages evolve, they appear blissfully ignorant of the complexity of this evolution or the fact that like Nature itself, languages "select" for valid expression while meaningless drivel goes extinct. So arguing that "that's knarly, Dude, gag me with a spoon" is linguistically equivalent to the grammatical constructs that have persisted in English for thousands of years, borrowing heavily from Greek, Latin, etc., is, well, simple-minded. The author should go back to tweeting about what they had for breakfast and leave academic matters to those better equipped.
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I lament that within my lifetime, dictionaries will record the spelling 'loose' for what we now spell as 'lose'.
But it was of great comfort to be when I figured out that dictionaries do not define language, they describe it.
Language is pretty complicated. The culture among linguists today is summed up by this rule: "Keep it descriptive." While I agree that description is important and useful, I think that it's possible to throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying prescription *completely*. Yes, pedantry is awful, and so being overly prescriptive isn't helpful, but there has to be some possible argument at times for why prescription is beneficial.
Is the same in others linguages, like brazilian portuguese for example.
Sorry for horrible english and english grammar.
The Académie française doesn't "preserve the language and its use". People don't change their speech or writing to follow its dictates.
There is an argument that's been going for hundreds (or longer) of years. Is English prescriptive or descriptive. Does it follow rules or is the language just the way people use it?
I generally fall on the side of it being descriptive.
Things like the article's example: "I can't get no satisfaction." This can be considered in three ways:
1. It's improper to use double negatives. Conversation with most groups of friends, it's fine. A formal talk or a research paper, it's not.
2. Most native speakers of English know the intended meaning. (English is descriptive)
3. The "rules" of English would say the sentence means the opposite of the intended meaning.
I've been teaching English in a country where English is not the main language, or even the second most common language. When I ask myself whether English is prescriptive or descriptive in context of my career, I ask myself "What do I tell my students?" I can't just give them vocabulary, tell them to make sentences, and tell them if they've made sentences that I understand. I also need to give them rules. What is the difference between "I ate." and "I have eaten."
Sometimes there is disagreement about whether something is proper English. That can also mean there is a disagreement about the meaning.
This knot is looser than the other knots. All who fail to understand this are losers. Any who do understand this are not losers with regard to the game of looser knots. Best practice for all English speakers: Do not be a looser knot loser, for looser knots may come untied, loosing whatever the knot was binding, but tighter knots will not (though attempts to loose a too tight knot may be for nought).
It's just nuts, English is.
Hear hear!
I think you mean "Here, here."
Enigma
Although I most definitely agree with using style guides for various publications, enforcing a prescriptive notion of proper usage on the general English-speaking population is a futile endeavour. The English language has had major influences from other languages such as German and French in the past and is currently undergoing a revolutionary evolution due to modern communications. As one of the most human of all activities, learning language is what each of us does every day of our lives. If you hear a word you don't understand just once, the chances of you recalling it later are minimal. But if you start hearing that word very, very often in specific circumstances, it will only be a matter of time before you start using it yourself in just those circumstances. After all, you want to be understood by others and this is the way we do it. And English no longer belongs exclusively to native speakers nor is it always native speakers contributing to the language. This is typically referred to as Globish or World English. Just one example: Ever use the expression "Thanks in advance"? Up to about 20 years ago I had never heard or seen this used by native speakers, only by students of mine in English correspondence courses when attempting to write "Danke im Voraus", which back then was always "Thank you for your attention and I look forward to hearing from you soon." But Germans starting writing "Thanks in advance" on faxes and e-mails sent across the world and it was only a matter of time before it became a perfectly acceptable and widely used expression in English, also used by native speakers. IMHO, language is all about the frequency of occurrence and statistical probabilities in distinct contexts. If you want to be understood, you should always follow a descriptive - not a prescriptive - grammar.
Dimple monkey twice the pudding octopi for tango man. Very blender shoe, cellular. Scooter my daisy heads.
Diddley day.
"illiterate Marxists"
BAND NAME! Called it!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The English most of the world learns is called EFL. There is a profession called TOEFL, a subject called TEFL, translations intended for non-native speakers are often required to be in EFL.
EFL is neither EN_US nor EN_UK. It's "English as a foreign language". Listen to a teacher speaking EFL and you'll see what I mean.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Rather badly, I guess?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
doh - I don't know.
An addendum:
When a looser knot comes untied, loosing whatever the knot was binding, one might lose whatever that object was when the knot came loose. Do not use loose knots or you might lose whatever had been knotted up.
Next lesson: American politics.
The political situation in the USA can be described in simple terms of Left and Right. Those on the Left believe going to the right is wrong, and the left is right. Those on the Right know that going to the left is wrong, and after discarding all of that, what is left must be right. So it is all a muddle. This is particularly bad for USA politicians, since they each want to be right in the middle of it all, and not a one of them wants to be left out of the squabbles. Fortunately for us, English allows left and right to assume context-dependent overloadings, such that left may be right and right may be wrong, and whatever remains after an operation is completed is left, which may or may not be right in the grander scheme of things. So thanks to the versatility of English expression it is easy to understand American politics.
Once English becomes the universal language, the World will be in peace. Or maybe in pieces.
Looser losers. Flexible people who fail at life.
A dictionary is not a book about rules. It of course does have some rules of its own so that it can define ways to pronounce the words it describes. The entire point of a dictionary is to give meaning to the words in use by a society. If a dictionary does not define the words in common use, or some other historical time period, then what is its use?
A word may start as an abbreviation for something, LOL being a particularly interesting example. The purpose of LOL in online conversations started as a way to express a sense of amusement at something, and abbreviates the phrase Laughing Out Loud, which is probably an exageration most of the time anyways, but it worked. At some point though younger generations of people have started using the abbreviation as an actual word in regular conversation as a means of vocalising their sense of amusement at something at a threshold prior to actually laughing out loud about whatever it is that is being discussed. I often teach a class of teenagers from all different backgrounds and every one of them uses LOL as a word.
>Whatever is in general use in a language is for that reason grammatically correct.
THEN IF IT WASN'T IN GENERAL USE IT WAS FUCKING WRONG
"Incorrect", "Improper", whatever.
I'm also looking at you, UD.
Useless, pandering, fluff piece of crap. "People who read this are brilliant, sexy and have exceptional genitalia, unlike those with the minority viewpoint whom are safe to attack" said the WSJ, in nearly every article they've published in recent history.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all.
You can keep telling yourself that when you're sitting in a Nazi Grammar Prison.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When you're hanging out with your friends, in person or online, you can use the English language any way you want. Seriously, I don't care.
But if you want to write something that is meant to be professional, where you expect some respect, then English has a set of rules for you to follow. The rules are an arbitrary consequence of history, but exactly what the rules are doesn't matter. What matters is having SOME kind of standard for common communication. There's no reason red should mean "stop." We just accept that as a convention, and if you don't follow it, you're going to crash. By having these common language conventions, it aids in clear communication that reduces ambiguity, and clear commuication has self-evident value in in science, journalism, politics, diplomacy, and countless other areas.
Hear here.
Though such words do end up in the OED they are marked as colloquialisms or slang, as appropriate, which serves as a guide to their usage.
More of an issue is 'American English' where material misspellings and the horrible 'math' are considered correct and taught in schools.
Lol. There are some pretty dumb people that speak British English, just as there are some pretty smart people that speak American English.
Getting your knickers in a twist over it wont change facts.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
The only proper dictionary is ....the Scrabble Dictionary.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I am never going to want to be around someone who's main negotiating ability is over who gets to sell crack on what corner.
It's quite sickening that someone who rants about others refusing to use "relatively correct" English hasn't bothered to learn even such basics as the difference between "whose" and "who's."
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
"Who gives a f*ck about an Oxford comma", let alone a your/you're mistake. The single most beautiful thing about English is that when it is verified, everyone will know aliens exist. Probably through a Stephen Hawking tweet
If you want jafiwam to hire you, you better act like a white guy.
Old English writers used eths and thorns interchangeably, so it could be close to "dreadswith" in modern English.
I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
English == Bloatware
Just like it's spelled.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
English was actually degrading before the Norse and Norman invaders...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Hah, I'm the same way. It's so bad that my 'tic' went off on reading his post, even though it was correct. My brain just assumes it's been misspelled.
See also: Its/It's, your/you're
FLAME BAIT DEPLOYED!
FLAME ON!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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The most impressive thing about this post is that you got non-7bit-ASCII into a /. post... do we have proper unicode support yet?
Include a definition entry under 'lose' that refers to 'loose' as a variant spelling, and vice versa. Context usually makes it clear, because the misspelling is based on the spoken sound which doesn't need to be spelled to be understood.
I could care less as well, but what you fail to understand is that I find you, your argument, and the fact that you are wasting my oxygen to be utterly repulsive. However, I am a compassionate human being. I do have a minimal amount of care to give and to do anything to modify that default state requires energy. Energy which I have already determined isn't worth wasting on you. When I tell you that I could care less, that is a signal to you that you're about to be added to my ignore list because you're wasting my time. If I tell you that I couldn't care less, that really means I have zero opinion on the matter and don't give a shit one way or the other.
Help me out here, guy. I'm trying to comprehend what you're attempting to communicate, but I'm afraid you've used improper English. It's very confusing.
I've been hacking away at this statement for minutes now and I think I've figure out what you meant to say. See, that "indeed" is supposed to be delimited by commas on both ends of it because it is an emotional statement meant as an aside comment. Parsing the statement any other way sounds idiotic. I definitely have to agree with your aforementioned position regarding clarity. Since you are such an astute grammar aficionado, I thought I'd let you know that you made the same mistake a second time here:
Again, a comma was needed after "So". I really can't agree more with that statement. What I find more perplexing is why you find being so impolite to others to be a good thing. You obviously know what you're doing and even called out everyone else for practicing this manner of laziness while being just as fucking lazy and not caring about proper comma usage. The word we use in English to describe this phenomenon is "hypocrisy". Hypocrisy is bad, ok? Don't be a hypocrite. Also, stop being an unintelligible dick on the Internet. What did the commas ever do to you?
In America 'Doing the needful' means teaching your foreign replacements how to do your job incredibly wrongly. e.g. When the backup software asks for a second tape, just feed it the first one again.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"reasonably correct English": You're missing the point: there is no such thing as correct/ incorrect English (at least for native speakers). There is such a thing as standard English, but it is no more _correct_ than driving on the right-hand side of the road.
Chaucer's been blogging of late: http://houseoffame.blogspot.co...
"...what then determines proper use?" Who sayeth that there be such a thing? Of a truth, thou dost not speak it.
Most 'languages' are artificially bounded regions on a continuum. Or, to put it another way: you get to elevate your dialect to a language if you have national armed forces behind it.
Dutch as spoken on the German border is very, very similar to German spoken a few kilometers away.
In Europe, there are essentially 2 major languages: a North European language continuum, encompassing Dutch, German, the Scandinavian languages, Scots, and a South European language (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan). When national borders and national feelings are imposed on that continuum, each nation state consolidates towards its centre as being 'correct' German, French etc as an expression of the nation. This is also a self-reinforcing trend, as most European countries were originally defined more through linguistic commonality than anything else - physical features (rivers, seas, mountain ranges) being strongly influential in that.
If you visualise gravitational aggregation of a dust cloud into a planetary system, it's not dissimilar.
(To complete the picture, Basque, Finnish and Hungarian are very weird exceptions, and you have the Celtic language family on the Western fringe and Slavic languages pushing in from the East.)
English is very odd: it a layer cake of the 2 languages. The core mechanics and simple, everyday vocabulary are essentially North European (with vast simplification through usage not being held back by grammar snobs for 300 years - all the corners got knocked off). Most higher concepts and those related to higher levels of society are South European. So think about words for animals (cow, pig, sheep etc). Short, simple, germanic. Now think about the words for meat that comes from those same animals (beef, pork, mutton). More complex and pretty much universally direct lifts from Norman French (boef, porc, mouton).
Similarly, I can teach any English speaker several thousand French words almost instantly: All English words that end 'ation' are EXACTLY the same in French, with a small pronunciation variation. 2 exceptions: Expl*an*ation=>Expl*ic*ation and Tra*nsla*tion=>Tra*duc*tion.
This is why it's often easier for an English speaker to read complex texts (textes complexes) in French: all the HARD words are the same. It's the simple stuff that is more of a challenge: all the short wee words. Learning German has the opposite problem: simple, everyday words are easy: complex concepts seem very long, incomprehensible words.
Why would a white guy act any differently than a non-white guy?
Thugeese
Thug goose.
The US has distorted English so badly, that some US authors have to hire off-shore editors to insure legibility of understanding. Organizational flow of the text is fine, but sentence construction is the pits.
Do you write on a disk or do you write onto a disk? I stand on the floor and using my computer I write onto it's disk. Do I go in the house, or do I go into the house?
There are 4 cars from which to choose, or 4 chars to choose from?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Pygmalion or My Fair Lady anyone?
He could tell what street of London you were from based on a just a few words.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
British English is the one and only proper English.
"How would a physics work if the rules of physics changed at the whim of the physicist?"
Isn't that what happens? Newton's laws are changed by Einstein? Higgs creates his boson on a whim, and other physicists follow along, and eventually find some data they say supports that whim? Aren't there other whims that could also account for the observations? Why select Higgs's? Popularity? Social pressure?
No that isn't correct. When Einstein proposes a change to the observed laws of physics, there is an absolute truth to test it against. (Reality). The whim of the scientist is irrelevant, if it cannot be successfully tested it doesn't get added to the 'laws' of physics.Y can explain something any fashion you want to, but it has to pass the test.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Every improvement in grammar was initially "ungrammatical". (And don't get me started about "made up words".)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Spelling is illogical within English and spelling of the same word is different depending on the region in the world you happen to be. Comma rules are almost non-existent and the few that there are make no sense and are often very vague. Why are single words at the beginning of a sentence to be separated by a comma, but an infinitive structure within a sentence is not despite that making the sentence way more readable? And pronunciation? Makes no sense either! Why do "pipe" and "recipe" not rhyme? English in itself has substantial logical flaws that vary by region, so why get bent out of shape for not using "proper English"? As a matter of fairness, all other languages have their pointless oddities as well.