Slashdot Mirror
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.
people shouldn't say "For all intensive purposes" or "should/could/would of"?
Born to Play
Well... the loss in grammar actually loses meaning too.
In 'proper' English:
If I were rich...
and
If I was rich....
have different meanings. 'were' implies a hypothetical situation. 'was' implies it might have actually been true in the past.
Common English uses 'was' for both situations.
All languages have changing rules
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Um, that is the nature of mapmaking, reflecting the changing landscape due to, say, old roads being bulldozed and new roads being built. At a faster rate than linguistic change, I might add.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Oh bugger off. I can see from a mile whether some unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American or by someone who is learning the language. Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
However, since there are indeed many people on the internet whose first language isn't English, you should realize that using improper English makes it a lot harder for these people to understand you, and in the worst case they learn improper English from you. So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme.
Sounds like flawed assumptions. You can have very proper English that makes you think harder than the equivalent in slang. That's why txting is so popular, because it's easier to understand. But an oldster might be at a loss.
Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.
Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
There is something exquisitely irritating about a post that says "Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White" when the article explicitly discusses Strunk and White. FFS, Jane Q Public, would it really have troubled you that much to have read the article you've chosen to criticise, at least to save yourself from looking like a complete and utter tit?