I stopped searching after the 40s because too many people were temporarily climbing on the sf bandwagon, so I wasn’t familiar with it.
A bit of Googling found “My Best Friends Are Martians” in the March 1950 Writer’s Digest, albeit by Mack Reynolds rather than Brown. It was followed by a one-pager from Heinlein titled “Bet on the Future and Win,” reprinted from the February 1950 Bookshop News. At the back of the issue was “Science Fiction Magazine Markets” by Reynold’s agent, listing eight titles. A brief heyday for the magazines.
There was also an anonymous article on a fan convention that was as snide as anything John Simon might have written, down to slagging the beauty of the women.
There are two people in my department who share an office, get along with each other swimmingly, have been good friends for years but who disagree strongly on the purpose of teaching students how to write good English, which is what both of them do. One is a descriptivist and trained in linguistics and the other is a prescriptivist trained in journalism and copy-editing. The former copy-editor maintains that there absolutely is a right way and a wrong way to write things, with some gray area depending on whether you’re using the Chicago Manual of Style or the Modern Language Association guidebook, but otherwise, there are strict rules in a practical sense and he wants his students to learn those rules and put them into practice, and the one trained in linguistics feels just as strongly that we are there to teach students how to think about language, and not to drill them into following “rules” that lack any real authority. (I may be paraphrasing their arguments imprecisely—I’m in neither camp.) And these are the two most senior people in the “writing” portion of the department, so there is quite a bit of space between their positions when we’re discussing such issues as which textbooks to order for our composition classes, which exercises and prompts are useful or pointless for the students to do, what a writing class is supposed to prioritize and so on. I imagine this issue is unresolved at many other departments across the country and the world, for that matter. Unresolvable, perhaps.
No, I don’t think that. I think LHoD is probably an outstanding educator, but I also think he’s unnecessarily contemptuous of those who prefer a more formal approach to language.
They may think that, but it’s apparent from the statistics I cited earlier that the overall educational system is failing to promote an adequate level of literary competency. And it’s not helpful when opinionated linguists like McWhorter appear to be promoting a kind of linguistic permissiveness.
It’s a word I wouldn’t mind seeing dropped from the language. Whenever “prescriptivist” is used in a critical sense, it appears to refer to an outdated caricature of a super-strict grammarian with a knuckle-rapping ruler to be used on those who dare end a sentence with a preposition.
To all, I recommend reading “Tragic” by Hermann Hesse, a short story that is really short. It was published in English translation in the Hesse anthology Stories of Five Decades.
It’s about an old-fashioned prescriptivist who works on the editorial staff of a German newspaper. He complains that the papers use the word “tragedy” too facilely, when any old bad thing happens, and that its use should be restricted to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, with the hero’s tragic flaw, etc.
I won’t spoil the ending, but I’ll tell you it is perfectly ironic.
It’s great to see that they can work together. It sounds like they have complementary approaches and the students will benefit from both of them, learning about language from someone who loves it and learning about the current accepted practices from someone who knows them very well.
I would hope that any good linguist, whatever their personal predilections, understands that there is not one English language but many overlapping English languages stemming from a variety of sources and needs.
When we see pejorative terms applied to usages that the writer disfavors, while favored usages are given praise, the label “prescriptivist” seems to fit nicely:
The word “prescriptivist” fits this kind of post perfectly.
For some definitions of “perfectly”. There’s a very good reason that linguists write their defenses of illogical colloquialisms in faultless standard English.
Again with the use of judgemental terms when describing different usages. It makes it impossible to interpret your posts as anything but subjective rants unfounded by scientific facts.
No, linguists do not defend usages. Please do not conflate scientists with critics.
I’m not conflating anything. Linguists are also people, and people can be opinionated. Steven Pinker, Geoff Pullum, Mark Lieberman, and especially John McWhorter most certainly are individuals who delight in expressing subjective opinions. Their opinion pieces are not science, but they’re influential and they leverage their academic reputations.
Linguists identify five registers - Intimate, Casual, Formal, Frozen, and Consultative - and four levels of formality - Formal, Neutral, Informal, and Vulgar. These have many components - slang, cant, and jargon are old; Internet, leet speak, text, and emojis are new.
Spoken English is not the same as Written English: you have four separate if overlapping vocabularies - Written English you use, Written English you can understand but don’t use, Spoken English you use, Spoken English you can understand but not use.
Variations on standard usage include creoles, pidgins, language switching like Spanglish - is Spanglish a creole or something else? - and ASL and BSL.
Dialects are also more than mere pronunciation. They can include different words, different grammar, and different patterns of emphasis. Is Indian English or Jamaican English a dialect or a Spanglish or a new language or something else? Worlds within worlds.
Note that prescriptivists don’t often venture outside of formal English. Hit them with Spanglish or text and watch their heads asplode. (Popularized by Strong Bad Email and pioneered by Desi Arnaz.)
@Johanna, could you layer some expertise on my gaps?
Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are very similar and often mutually intelligible, but they are generally considered different languages. There are hundreds of Chinese dialects (I mean of Chinese, not the unrelated languages of China). They are usually considered to be dialects of one of the languages of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka, and Yue. Some people break them up into more languages and some break them up into less. Swiss German and standard German are not mutually intelligible. There are other examples showing that it’s impossible to absolutely break up all the things spoken (or signaled by hands like sign languages) into languages and dialects.
I get your point. The issue at hand here isn’t about linguistics, it’s about the fact that people are complicated and play multiple roles. I refer you back to my very first post in this thread, about Richard Lindzen, a good scientist and celebrated professor (emeritus) at MIT, and simultaneously also an argumentative contrarian and disreputable crank.
What gaps? You covered the basics pretty well. The five registers and four levels you identified make me curious where you found that. I also like the four-level division of stuff you know crossed with stuff you either use or don’t use. That conforms to a familiar psychological model of the self in society.
You made me think… If a character gets a prescriptivist attitude in the use of a nonstandard lect, that could be played as a comedy trope.
The classic statement on dialectology that everyone loves to quote is Max Weinrich’s “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” In the original Yiddish, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot.
I knew what I wanted to say but didn’t have the proper terms so I Googled until I found those. There appeared to be multiple sources for them beyond the AI that jumped in.
Which raises a question from me. Will AI English become a separate form of the language? Early results note that certain words and terms are overrepresented and feedback loops from AIs gathering information from sites that used AI to generate the information create odd effects. Where it all ends knows God.