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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.
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
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."
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.
I heard that in 1761, already.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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
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...
There are rules. They are just changing.
Language is a tool for communication. As long as it's understood, it doesn't matter the grammar. English, as the defacto world language, is changing really rapidly durbto the influx of second language learners. Too lazy to look up the article now, but I once read an article about how Ebglish be so much more simplified in 100 years. Things like "he run", "I have drove ", and so on will be essentially standards becquse they are used frequently by ESL learners.
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.
All languages have changing rules
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.
Yipppppppeeeeeee!!!!! is now official English!
Yippppeeeeeee!!!!!!
You misspelled it the second time.
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
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.
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.
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
If there were rules set fast in stone 500 years ago, then every single one of us who speaks English would be breaking most of them. Even if rules were carved out 100 years ago most of us including English professors would be breaking them. It's like trying to follow a map when old roads vanish and new ones are being built.
Proper english is whatever the people in charge say it is.
All languages have changing rules
What about PDP11 Assembly Language?
A dead language, no?
Circumcision is child abuse.
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"
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.
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
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.
That's why formal languages are so much less evolutionarily fit than natural languages.
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.
British people fond of Oxford English looks down on American English and to some extent Australian English. American English people looks down on everyone using English as second language and the twists of the English language that appears there; German English, Indian English, East Asian English (Engrish), Latin English (Spanglish)...
Add to it local accents as well that twists the language; Cockney, Afro-American accent etc.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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 could care less.
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?
Yes, but the ultimate goal is communication, and to that end some change is useful, some is harmful - and almost any change will have the effect of making older texts less readable.
Think of descriptivists as scientists and prescriptivists as engineers (albeit, it must be said, not always very good ones). I think there is a role for both.
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.
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.
Maybe he misspelled it the first time.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Postel's Law.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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
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.
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.
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.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Losen up. Your begging the question.
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
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
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
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.
spoken but retards? Do you think your empirical language rule inferer would reject that sentence?
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.
how the hell do you pronounce "thrythswyth"?!
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The story didn't say no rules, but no fixed ruled.
I just can't say "gurety nop phlanipifpa" and expect people to know what I am saying. Also there are important stuctured such as the object is described before the qualifier. "The dog is hot" vs "The hot is dog"
However we come up with new words and replace old ones. Some words we make to have a double meaning based on the context.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It requires less brainpower to remember the difference between the two when writing, so it's an evolutionary advantage to those who just spew drivel all over the internet, because nobody reads most of their shit anyway.
"So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme."
Motes and beams, people!
If you're going to moan about "improper" English, it's best not to make lots of errors yourself:
- you started your sentence with "So". The word you ought to have used was "Thus".
- you missed out the comma that should have followed the "So"
- the expression is "in the extreme", not "to the extreme"
- even had you used "in the extreme", it would still have made for an awkward and inelegant sentence, compared to the obvious alternate of "... is extremely impolite."
I personally don't think any of this matters much; however, given that you claim to care about correct English usage, it surely behooves you to check, double-check and triple-check your own writing before posting.
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!
Its a mute point. Your begging the question, "Y"?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Oh bugger off.
unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme
I see... It's impolite, is it? I'll certainly keep that in mind. We wouldn't want to be impolite now, would we?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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
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!
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
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.
All languages follow rules. Its just not the rules you probably think they are.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet. For instance "between you and I" is the result of some mistaken political correctness, that you can never say "and me". It's horrible, it's ungrammatical and it must stop now. "Then/than" and "your/you're" problems aren't confined to non-natives either. PS: I am not a native speaker of English
-- Make America hate again!
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.
The GP did not say American English was wrong. He (or she) said Americans were lazy and uneducated. "Their", "there" and "they're" are identical both sides of the pond.
I'm not saying I agree with him because I see a lot of the same sloppy writing on UK-only forums.
By the way would you mind providing a link to the recordings of 17th century English you based your remarks on.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
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.
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?...
I went to Cambridge, so while I will use an Oxford comma, I only do so where it helps avoid ambiguity, which was not the case here.
In any event, did you miss the first part of my sentence? I don't care. But the OP said that they did.
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.
And proscriptivists are antiquarians?
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
"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.
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
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones.
Interestingly, in the USA the dialect of English spoken in the rural Appalachians is often claimed to be the closest thing you will find to Elizabethan English in the modern world. It is simultaneously probably the single least prestigious dialect of English in North America.
(Note: "Prestige" is how linguists talk about dialects being perceived as wrong or bad by other speakers. IOW: Most people will tell you someone speaking this dialect has "bad English". Irony.)
Autocorrect seems to make their there's worse. They're not always at fault.
For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping)
If that were true then American English would be non-rhotic too. It was immigration from the West Country - Corrrnwall, Dorrrset, Somerrrset (et al) - that brought the rhotic r to the colonies.
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.
Parent posts offensive impertinence, up with which I will not put.
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.
For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping)
Not it's not. There is no such thing as "British English" pronunciation. English as spoken in Britain varies a great deal in pronunciation. You are comparing just one variation with American English.
Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English
Scottish English is a sub-set of British English, they are not distinct.
something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )
What, even the Scottish Brits?
More important is people differentiating between...
Than & Then
Father & Feather
Aunt & Ant
Whales & Wales
and so on
Possibly another good thing would be to make sure to pronounce the letter T as that and not as a D.
Bidder & Bitter
Shutter and Shudder
and so on
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
But that's the point. It's the linguistic equivalent of relative morality. If there not a single morality, then there is no morality. If there are no fixed and unchanging rules, then there may as well be no rules. A common frame of reference is required.
How would a physics work if the rules of physics changed at the whim of the physicist? How could programmers work if they were able to change the syntax on a whim? When they do, they call it a new language.
If you don't follow the rules, then you can't order chicken or fish
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Interesting article and some good URLs at the bottom.
I always thought the idea that "ebonics" was a separate language was a bogus excuse for not learning "proper" English. I didn't know I was implicitly subscribing to "prescriptivism". If language is defined by "how people use it", then descriptivism would suggest that it really is a separate language. You couldn't possibly take an ebonics speaker and a typical New England yankee and, for the purpose of descriptivism, identify them both as "native speakers" of English.
Oh bugger off.
Tisk tisk. Cannot end a sentence with a preposition
Oh bugger off, jerk. There, FTFY.
From the z in apologize I'd think we're dealing with an American troll.
Your's,
The Grammar Nasi
Don't believe them. They don't write proper English.
Garry Knight
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
Most British writing style guides advise against the Oxford comma.
"Thus" and "so" both work in his sentence as they are both being used as synonyms for "therefore" and meaning "as a result".
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.
"So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme."
Motes and beams, people! If you're going to moan about "improper" English, it's best not to make lots of errors yourself: - you started your sentence with "So". The word you ought to have used was "Thus". - you missed out the comma that should have followed the "So" - the expression is "in the extreme", not "to the extreme" - even had you used "in the extreme", it would still have made for an awkward and inelegant sentence, compared to the obvious alternate of "... is extremely impolite."
Do you have a credible source for any of these so-called rules? In particular:
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You don't need recordings of 17th Century English to use. Analyzing poetry, for instance, is one method of working that out, as it was meant to be read in a way where sounds and word pronunciations would matter. There are likely other textual methods based on how speech was recorded.
Linguistics is a real science, and there are some pretty smart people doing it.
Even now we're suffering from the conflicting between modern society and historical rules of English grammar. For example, there is no gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun. This is no problem for English users before the mid-20th century, of course. They just used "he" for everything, because fuck women. But with changing mores of gender-equality, now we're stuck with the awkward "he or she." So English is likely to change again on this. Either "they" will become an accepted singular pronoun, or "it" will become acceptable for people, or some new pronoun will be created.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Who said anything about rules? That's the whole point, it's a question of taste. I'm not the one venerating Strunk & White et al here, I'm the one calling out the hypocrisy of doing so while not sticking to their standards.
However, I can promise you that professional writers will not start a written sentence in this context with "So" in place of "Thus".
On "in the extreme", you've got yourself muddled. As you say, "in the extreme" is a perfectly valid phrase; "to the extreme", which is what the OP used, is not. There is the phrase, "to take X to extremes", but this is not the sense intended by the OP.
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.
but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father"
You make some interesting points, but you clearly have some very strange ideas about British pronunciation :) For example, the vowel in "cat" (in "standard" British English - what, for example, most announcers would use on the BBC) is nothing like the vowel in "father". And many British accents are rhotic, too!
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>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.
You don't need recordings. We know about linguistics based on poetry.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The ambiguity is nearly always resolved by the context.
You might stop and spend some brainpower correcting the usage in your head, but that's more a consequence of your having learned an arcane spelling, one that is no longer necessary.
It's a signal that "official" English spelling is getting further and further away from phonetics, and that is holding back the language's natural development .
That's my quick two-cents'-worth argument.
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet.
The errors that people for whom English is a second language mage cannot properly be characterized as 'all over'; they are almost invariably errors that result from adults, who lack the flexibility to learn new languages readily, running past the end of their knowledge of English and by reflex applying the grammar and lexicon rules of their own language to English. Where there have been populations that spoke another language that became integrated into the English-speaking population -- the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Vikings, among others -- aspects of grammar from their own languages got absorbed into English, cases where English grammar were overly complicated got elided. For example, Celtic languages have a 'meaningless do' -- where, in other Germanic languages you would say 'saw you him today?', in Welsh it would be 'did you see him today?'; similarly, nouns lost the forest of cases, genders, and plurals that other Germanic languages retained. And this ignores the vocabulary changes from words the speakers of other languages brought; for example, the perfectly good 'ingang' has long since been buried by the Norman French 'entrance', while other Anglo-Saxonisms got relegated to a 'lower-class' status by French and Latinate words by association with the social class that used them -- 'ask', 'question', and 'interrogate', for example, or 'quick' vs. 'rapid', 'look' vs. 'regard', 'daze' vs. 'stupefy', 'room' vs. 'chamber', 'learning' vs. 'erudition'.
"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
Apologize? Now, that's not how the Queen spells it, is it mate?
Hoser, or self-loathing American?
Also possibly a Canuck, they too forsake the Queen's spelling of apologise.
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.
I wonder how many people missed your meaning. The usual phrase is "I couldn't care less". As in I give no care at all. Saying "I could care less" is saying there is a level of care lower that my current level of care therefore I care. So many people get it wrong.
So could I!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
...is no Language.
On the contrary; the lack of (legally enforceable) rules is one of the major reasons that English has become the world's main language for most technical uses.
Some years back, I read a good explanation of this by a French researcher, who explained why he published all his papers in English rather than French, and why his group in France used English as their "working" language. His explanation was that, in French, l'Académie Française is the government body in Paris that has the power to set and enforce the standards for the French language. The problem is that in his specialty, as in any technical specialty, it's important that the specialty develop a body of precise technical terms that is clearly understood by the others in the specialty. The major way of doing this is normally to take terms in the general language, and restrict their meaning in the technical jargon. Secondarily, words may be borrowed from other language, or new terms just made up. However, in French the Académie has the legal power to override them, declare their papers to be nonstandard French, block their publication, etc. This potentially makes it difficult for the specialists to develop a precise, unambiguous terminology that they all understand. Government bureaucrats who don't understand the specialty have veto power of their technical terminology.
The English language, however, has no such legal body in any country. This gives English-using researchers, theoreticians, engineers, etc. to discuss issues amongst themselves, and develop their technical jargon as their subject requires. New discoveries can lead to changes in terminology without the permission of the bureaucrats. So, for effective communication among specialists in a technical field, English gives them the freedom to develop jargon that fits their needs, and revise their terminology as the need arises.
If English (most likely of the American variety ;-) were to establish an enforceable set of rules, it would end this technical usefulness, and would eventually push for a shift to a different language without such restrictions.
The followups to this explanation included a number of comments from people with lots of other native language, who all basically agreed with the writer, and said that their field did the same thing.
(OTOH, I had a math prof in college who learned Rumanian, because about half the people in his specialty were in Romania, and published their preliminary papers locally in their native language. They published their main papers in English, but he wanted to follow their local discussions. He already read French and Italian, so it wasn't difficult to pick up a new "degenerate Latin" language. There are a number of other subject areas that have similar situations. Others here can probably comment on other fields with a similar mix of English and one or more local languages.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You looser!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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
"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
I looked up "loathe to admir", It brought up something about Bosnian given names. Perhaps if I looked up loathe to admit... No, I am sure a flawless individual like yourself would never misspell a word in a post, nay, the very sentence, that attacks someone for using a highly similar homophone.
I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
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
"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?
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"One" has a very formal connotation. And it doesn't work as a substitute for he/she/him/her because it doesn't refer to a specific individual. Consider the following sentences. "Jim went down to the market. One bought some milk there."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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 wonder what kind of toxic assets he's negotiating about selling off of whose balance sheet?
Better example: "Someone goes down to the market. They buy? He buys? He/She buys? He or she buys? It buys?
I accept any of those. Call them in "free variation". Myself, I'd use "they" or "he".
It's impolite to the max! Yo!
I have to agree. In fact, it's astounding how many times I see a message from some non-native English speaker apologizing for his "bad English" when his message is perfectly comprehensible and almost entirely error-free, and certainly far better than many lazy Americans (I say that as an American, BTW) who are too stupid or lazy to use proper spelling, know the difference between they're/their/there, know the difference between it's and its, know how to use an apostrophe, etc. It's pathetic.
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
What's interesting here is that you've used two Britishisms ("bugger off" earlier, and "bloody" here), and then you spelled "apologize" in the American way...
This is exactly the problem: yes, living languages are subject to change, yes, prescriptivists will always look quaint when viewed later, but there is the point that language is syntax to convey meaning. If you don't have common, comprehensible syntax, you by definition cannot have comprehensible communication (try and read poor Engrish or some people's txt speak and tell me if you can get unambiguous meaning out of it). It's a bigger problem, I think, with written rather than spoken language, as you can always ask for clarification when having a conversation (not so with uni-directional speech such as speeches or television though). There is a reason that lawyers are pedantic with grammar in contracts: when errors in meaning have significant monetary impacts, you need a very tight definition.
As noted by the parent, programmers must be extremely precise with their syntax, because computers cannot "guess" (my exposure to software development is also one of the reasons why I tend to be a grammar pedant - especially with punctuation). If you need precision, you need clearly-defined rules; sure, "free-form" grammar and spelling are fine where meaning isn't important (social chatting for example), but not when meaning really matters (academic paper style guides enforce particular rules - it's arguable whether there are the "most correct" forms, but it gives a consistency that ensures clear communication of meaning).
As an aside, seeing as verbal communication with machines is on the rise, is verbal precision going to take on more importance just to get computers to understand us, or will computers be trained specifically to deal with our messy linguistic ambiguities?
Many of what we call "dead languages" didn't die at all, they became the languages we use today or influenced them in ways we don't even totally know.
And as for your PDP-11 joke, it isn't dead at all: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
You seriously ask, a college educated slashdotter such as yourself who knows the difference, vs. the ghetto moma with three children by three different men not making distinction? Who is education favoring, ye olde virgin?
Evolved, the VAX CISC instruction set was based on it
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'
FORTRAN is a counterexample. It has evolved, and it therefore must be fit. For something. I'm sure. I just can't remember what.
"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.
Mistakes around "then"/"than", "its"/"it's" and similar cases of homophones, are actually more common for native English speakers. That's because non-native speakers usually learn the language in a formal environment, where spelling is learned alongside pronunciation, so the difference is readily visible. Furthermore, such learning is usually done by establishing equivalents in one's native language, and they are usually not homophones. So when you speak English by first forming non-English sentences in your head, and then translating them (which, again, is a hallmark of formal language learning), the chances of making such a mistake are pretty low because the difference is prominent on the very first step.
OTOH, native speakers learn by listening, and only much later do they learn the spelling and the underlying structure.
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
"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!
"Between you and I" is gramatically correct. The "political correctness" that you speak of, I agree of course was innovated away in the language hundreds of years ago (but you can still see this in other indo european languages where "Between you and I" is the only sensible way to say it. But there's nothing ungrammatical about the statement you are pointing out.
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.
Unlike eurotrash, who use intelligent sounding sentences to reveal their vacuous minds having only addiction to fashion and "must be seen here" places as driving forces; though the females also have the anorexia hobby going.
There are many possible ways to explain "Reality". Einstein's is just one. The ether theories have not been disproved but simply disdained. Yves Couder's experiments can be taken as support for ether theory (he doesn't go that far, but Bohm does).
So current models are just whims. There are other possibilities that haven't caught on for purely social reasons. Similar to language rules...
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.