I doubt E.B. White used “hopefully” or “begs the question” in the manner of a moron.
And, as Fowler tells us:
Alliteration is not much affected by modern prose writers of any experience; it is a novice’s toy.
Practically nothing in the universe is scientifically provable. Science is a methodology, a way of thinking, not a conclusive set of proven facts. Proof is for alcoholics and mathematicians, as the saying goes. And the scientific methodology can be applied to human behavior, including human linguistic behavior. And this has been done. We make observations about language, then develop hypotheses based on those observations. And then responsible thinkers test the hypotheses with more real empirical observations.
I will say it again: Grammatical and semantic correctness depends on usage. It is based on the real lingual acts of real native speakers in real contexts every single day. To repeat it, since you have chosen to ignore this point: if we are to employ any other method of correctness, then we are left with the fuckwitted conclusion that English speakers can’t speak English. And that begs the question: what the hell are they speaking?
Their speech follows rules. These rules are incredibly subtle, complex, and difficult to understand. But even so, a trained eye can recognize patterns in this apparant morass. As an example, I have in front of me The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which was written by people who literally spend their lives trying to resolve these problems. This baby weighs more than five pounds and has more than 1,800 pages in order to comprehensively describe the grammar of our standard language. The syntactic and morphological structures of English, excluding most dialectical and regional variations, are complex enough that they require a fairly hefty book to be covered in their entirety. And the Cambridge writers’ notion of correctness in English is as well informed as is possible.
Your notion of correctness, in contrast, comes from your ego.
This does not mean that you are a bad writer. It also does not mean that your opinions on the aesthetics of English are worthless. Everyone has a right to explain what pleases them or bothers them in language. But you have no cause to offer up opinions on correctness and act as if they have any value outside of your own narrow subjective views. Further, you have no cause to criticize the objectively supported determinations of linguists just because you dislike their conclusions.
You, like so many before you, have fallen into the etymological fallacy because you have had a substandard language education, which allows you to feel confident in offering opinions that have no support of anything beyond your own shallow personal preference. If we are forced to follow your spurious reasoning, then I could argue that “December” is a misusage because it should be the tenth month of the year, or that a “caption” isn’t actually a caption unless it comes above a picture instead of below, or that “agenda” can’t be singular.
I could go on and on and on with this etymological nonsense, and it all leads to the same place: not a single English speaker actually speaks English. And that’s total bullshit.
Our speech follows beautifully sophisticated patterns, as demonstrated by the hard work from lexicographers and other linguists. We need a name for these patterns, something that describes what the sum of them, combined, actually is. That name is English. But if our grandchildren don’t speak exactly the way they do, if those whippersnappers invent terms that make our own ears burn, then that’s our problem. Our grandchildren will be speaking English, too.
English itself will have moved on from our notions, and it won’t be our descendants’ responsibility to keep up with obsolescent rules of right and wrong, just as we don’t let Shakespearean forms tyrannize today’s language.
Yes, you do seem the type of person who would look at a form that has been used constantly for a thousand years and decide that your own personal judgment is more important than a millennium of evidence to the contrary. Obviously, they were all wrong that whole time. We know this, because you said so.
Hopefully, it’s become clear to other readers why I referred to the relationship to Creationism earlier in this thread. There really are striking similarities.
Frylock has already pointed out your inability to distinguish separate usages of less/fewer, so I want to hit a broader topic. This happens to be another Whack-a-Mole issue that I covered a bare two weeks ago in General Questions. And here it is: writing conventions are different from semantics and grammar.
The spoken aspects of language (including grammar, semantics, and phonology) are a part of our biological development, as previously stated in the thread. You have objected, repeatedly, to your own ill-considered conception of “thoughtlessness” as it changes our language. You seemed to miss my response to you in post 46: thoughtlessness is precisely how we are biologically designed to learn words. Kids especially are like black holes for vocabulary. Their rate of word absorption is staggering, and almost all of it is done with the very thoughtlessness that you seem to detest. It is simply how we’re designed.
A healthy human being will, without any real effort, mimic the vocabulary and grammatical structures of their peers. It is natural and inevitable that their language will be a shockingly precise reproduction of the language around them. Written conventions, however, are entirely different. Year after tedious year of rigid instruction on punctuation and spelling will not necessarily produce a student who can write worth a damn. The written language is an artificial construct that requires enormous effort on the part of the learner, and so notions of correctness for written conventions tend to be rather strict and stringently enforced. The meaning of words is different: it naturally changes with the changing needs of speakers.
To repeat: I am not saying that this is a great thing. I don’t think it’s necessarily beneficial that some ignorant mistakes eventually become standard language. In the same sense, I also don’t think it’s great that teenagers have sex with each other when so many of them are too immature to take adequate precautions to avoid STDs and pregnancy. But the issue here is how the language is, not any aesthetic or moral notion of how it should be. And so I must face up to the fact that sometimes a lingual blunder will catch like wildfire and become proper English, just as I also must accept that those horny teens will fuck like rabbits, with or without protection.
The language is remade every single day - it’s always in a process of change. You are, of course, free to cling desperately to 1950s English if it upsets your dogmatic worldview too much to allow the movement of objects that you wish were stationary. But you’d be far better off, in my opinion, both learning more about the language to help you choose your battles, and also developing an aesthetic of evolution. There is, more often than not, a surprising suppleness to disfavored usages, as you’d learn if you would stop to study them before condemnation.
Descriptivists, does logical correctness also depend on usage?
Is it correct to say:
In '95, I was hired as an account specialist and became a manager in '97.
[dense]I’m not sure what you meant to be wrong about that sentence.[/dense]
-FrL-
Um hi. Just-ex-naive-prescriptivist checking in here, I’d like to thank Bossstone and Kendall Jackson for clearing up some of my misconceptions, but I’m still fuzzy on one point.
Someone arguing for the prescriptivist camp brought up the examples of ‘would of’, ‘should of’ and so on. The argument being, if we’re going to accept ‘begging the question’, why not accept ‘should of’?
I gathered that there are two differences that render these non-equivalent. One was the difference between ‘content words’ and ‘function words’ - the latter need to be more stable. The other difference was that ‘begging the question’ is a matter of usage, ‘should of’ is orthography.
What I don’t get is… so what? Why does that excuse one linguistic change but not the other? It also seems to me that the ‘should of’ change falls under the umbrella of ‘grammar’ and therefore is fair game for linguistic evolution.
ETA: also I’d dispute that ‘should of’ is purely a matter of misspelling a spoken word. Like others in this thread, I have heard plenty of people very clearly and unmistakably say ‘should OF’.
What exactly is the logic behind a descriptivist holding that ‘should of’ really is incorrect and not just a moment of linguistic evolution?
Because it really gets on my tits?
No, seriously. It was probably in this thread but may have been in another where I admitted that substituting of for have is teeth-grating to me, but is becoming more and more widespread and is becoming less and less wrong. I can acknowledge that and still dislike it.
OK, thanks for clarifying. It drives me up the wall too. However, I get the impression from what Kendall has said, that this reduces us to the intellectual level of creationists. :dubious:
I really appreciate this thread because I usually don’t get hung up on these sorts of things but since I’ve actually taken philosophy courses, the usage of ‘‘begs the question’’ drives me absolutely fucking nuts.
/drive-by
Nancarrow: I’m pretty sure the “should of” thing really is just an orthographic issue. I, for one, pronounce “should’ve” and “should of” the same.’’
You said
To quote:
In other words, spoken and written language really are different animals.
It does seem to me that if enough people really are thinking “should of” when they say the phrase in question, then, yes, eventually, this will become an established language change. This is an ‘if’, of course.
IANALinguist, but my personal understanding is that there are mistakes that people make, and that sometimes mistakes become change and are no longer mistakes. Kind of like a mutation in DNA? At first it is a mutation, but if it catches on, then eventually it becomes a change. However, there will be an in-between stage where it will be anomalous.
As for knowing where we are in the midst of a change…
In an earlier post, I called a poster dishonest for saying that only a few people were participating in some linguistic innovation he didn’t care for. My point was that if he personally noticed the phenomenon more that once or twice, then it is probably relatively widespread, and from the point of prescriptivists, “too late.”
As others have already noted, “should of” is a spelling error, not a grammatical error.
I said nothing of “intellectual level”.
Where I’m from, there’s lots of Creationists. Whole bunches of 'em, even at my uni. This is a fairly fundamentalist student body. I’ve studied with these people, lived near them, talked with them, and they are not stupid. Not all of them. Most have brains that perform perfectly well processing, storing, and retrieving information. And many (though not all) are capable of critical thought to a great degree.
It’s not that they can’t think - it’s that they don’t think. There are whole areas of their life where they prefer to trust their parents, preachers, and friends more than they trust the evidence presented by boring old professors. And I know, I just know, that if I had been brought up in such an environment, I would be one of them. I don’t flatter myself that my critical reasoning skills are so extraordinary that, put in their place, I would have been able to break from my worldview and come to conclusions so terribly foreign that they could’ve potentially ostracized me from the society of the only people I care about.
When dealing with language issues, there is a similar set of authorities that are unquestioningly trusted. No matter how much evidence is presented, no matter how methodical the reasoning, people want to believe that their high school English rules are true. This doesn’t make them bad people. Hell, it doesn’t even make them bad writers. For example, David Foster Wallace is an utterly extraordinary writer, but frankly, he knows jack about language.
For whatever reason (and I have some theories), talking about language switches off some people’s critical thinking skills just as fast as flicking a light-switch. Their parents, friends, and public school teachers can’t all be wrong, right? So it’s no use thinking about language critically. The result is that they have a favored usage “Bible”, and evidence be damned.
The comparison to Creationists is apposite, and so I will use it. But I will not conclude that a person is at a lower intellectual level just because they were miseducated about language.
I would still like to know what the descriptivists think about the correctness of the sentence I posted.
(If I missed your answers, I am sorry.)
Post 104 contains my reply.
-FrL-
But as other others, including myself, have already noted, the error is not confined to the written word, it often occurs in speech too. Is that still a spelling error? And more to the point, whether it is a spelling or grammatical error, should we say firmly that it is wrong, or simply accept it as an evolutionary change?
Thanks for the rest of your post. I think I get where you are coming from with it.
I see what you did there.
You’re looking at this as either:
[In '95, I was hired as an account specialist] and [became a manager in '97], which is wrong because the second clause lacks a subject, or:
In '95, [I was hired as an account specialist and became a manager in '97], which is logically inconsistent.
It sounds like extremely relaxed speech to me and does verge on rule-breaking, but it sounds okay to me in a very informal context. If I were to dig my linguistics education out of the dusty old closet, I’d say there’s an unspoken ‘I’ in the second clause, as in:
[In '95, I was hired as an account specialist] and [(I) became a manager in '97].
It’s that same elided subject that allows people to say “Made you breakfast” or “Got a good head on his shoulders, doesn’t he?”
By those rules, it is English. I will say that it is poorly constructed English, and were I to see it in a piece of writing I’d smack the author. (Properly constructed, it would be more like “I was hired as an account specialist in '95 and became a manager in '97” as just one of a few possibilities I can think of off-hand.) But speech is so much more spontaneous than writing that a fair amount of rules bending is allowed for. I don’t think any but the overly analytical would hear that sentence in an informal environment and be confused.
The structure of the sentence means that “In '95” applies to both clauses; however, that creates a paradox.
Your first question was a bit… strange.
“Logical correctness”? We were talking about semantics and grammar previously, not “logic”. If you’re talking about grammatical correctness, maybe I can help you out. Maybe. But let’s rephrase the question.
You’re wondering if a sentence with a coordination of two finite VPs, as opposed to a coordination of two clauses, can have two adjuncts of temporal location which refer to two different times, one for each finite VP.
And my answer is simply: I don’t know. I mean, it strikes me as a little funny, but I see no reason why it would be grammatically incorrect. But hell, maybe a second adjunct for temporal location just isn’t used in English if we coordinate two finite VPs. It might be incorrect. I can’t find any reference to such a case in the Cambridge Grammar, but that thing’s nearly 2,000 pages long. I haven’t (yet) read it cover to cover.
Stylistically, though, you might choose to clean up the sentence if it is absolutely imperative that you be grammatically correct. “In '95, I was hired as an account specialist, and I became a manager in '97.” That one is fine. As for your first sentence, I just can’t say. If it floats your boat to use the first, then more power to you, but I can’t answer your question. My (reasonably well educated) gut says that it’s probably fine for informal contexts, but I can’t say for sure.
Well, if there’s actually a pronunciation difference (really?), then it’s still a spelling error. The M-W doesn’t seem to have an entry for “should’ve” (shame), but check out interesting. There’s generally one way to spell the vast majority of English words (with some exceptions for the pond), but the way we say words is incredibly different. I mean, some people pronounce “merry”, “marry”, and “Mary” all differently. Weird. But standardized spelling is pretty rockin’, actually. Some people complain that English isn’t pronounced as it’s written, but there are English speakers all over the place, and the fact that we are pretty much write the same, even though we pronounce things differently, allows us to communicate with each other much more easily. If we were to standardize spelling, we’d have to ask ourselves: whose pronunciation do we use?
This is why correctness in spelling is much, much more stringent than in grammar or semantics. New spellings can theoretically become common and accepted, but not “should of”. No way. Not over the dead bodies of armies of copy-editors.
On preview, there’s more:
There is a clear coordination in that sentence. It is marked by “and”. One time is on one side of the coordination. The other time is on the other side. There is no paradox. There is no ambiguity.
I’m not saying it’s grammatical. It might not be. It wouldn’t faze me in speech, so I reckon it’s probably correct. But there is no logical problem with the sentence.
Sorry, I did not mean two clauses. I plead stupidity.
… ok, I lurk on here about 95% of the time, but I just wanted to say, Kendall Jackson? The post you made above (#102) is one of the best and most eloquent explanations of the descriptivist position I’ve seen in quite some time. Would you mind if I, er, possibly bookmarked it to link to next time I get into a prescriptivist “IT’S JUST WRONG BECAUSE IT JUST IS BECAUSE IT SAID SO IN A BOOK”-type argument? It’d be a lot easier than trying to type out entire chapters of The Language Instinct myself or something.
AndLuna
(who used to be a prescriptivist herself, until she actually studied linguistics)
Yes, absolutely. I never write my posts just for the people I’m literally responding to. Given the open nature of the boards, it’s always in the back of my mind that others might be interested in the topic.
And only 63 posts, when you’ve been here longer than me? Damn.
Just dropped in to say I’ve always been a bit of a fence sitter on this sort of debate, with prescriptivist leanings. Not anymore. Kendall Jackson FWIW you have crushed the prescriptivist inside me and cured a little of my ignorance. Great contributions to the board, tip 'o the hat to you.