Not seriously at all. The only post I’ve made here in earnest is #19, where I’ve described something, without subscribing to anything. I know better than to stand between the descriptivists and prescriptivists while they’re busy pissing at each other.
I re-read your question, which was actually “Would you mind…?” Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I meant to say that “No, I wouldn’t mind at all. Yes, absolutely, feel free to bookmark it.”
The problem I have with the descriptivist position is that it treats language usage as science instead of an art. Language usage, like writing, is an art form that cannot be judged by a survey of the numbers. Is The Da Vinci Code an example of a first-rate novel because if we surveyed people they would name as their favorite book and the type of book they would like to write if they wrote books? Do we look at the best seller lists and determine that cheap romance novels are better than what Shakespeare wrote? Or is the merit of art judged on something more the base opinions of the general public?
Strange, I would have said roughly the opposite. The prescriptivists are insisting there is one precisely formulable correct way to do things–which is antithetical to artistic pursuits–while descriptivists insist that users of language should (as a collective) be allowed to be creative with their tools.
-FrL-
The average user of language is an idiot. It is Saturday; go to Wal-Mart and listen to the average users of language. Now, go to the books/magazines section and read what the average writer is writing.
Language usage requires judgment.
I do not know of any person that claims there is only one way to express a thought correctly with language.
And many creative writers are/were prescriptivists (e.g., E.B. White).
Whatever you think, if people are misusing the expression, it has nothing to do with grammar.
You miss the point. Quite badly, too. Linguistics cares nothing for whether or not a usage is better or worse, only whether it is valid. Dan Brown writes like shit, but he’s still writing in English.
Nobody denies that there’s better or worse ways to use language. It’s only when someone tries to claim that a popular usage is not, in fact, ‘correct’ English that hackles raise.
Correct means “conforming to standards.” These standards are no more scientific than the standards of quality writing. I am not claiming that someone who is uses “effected” for “affected” is not speaking English; I am claiming they are not speaking correct English because it does not conform to the standards of usage.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005521.html
The above seems a fair response to your claims about descriptivism and the notion of a standard.
-FrL-
Yeah, that pretty much says it better than I ever could.
Yes, it’s true, descriptive linguists treat language scientifically and not aesthetically
This is more than half wrong.
First, language usage is not just like writing. Writing is one form of language use, and language usage issues encompass more than just writing. However, you are not wrong that language can be viewed aesthetically, and in fact, I have already addressed the aesthetics of language, as opposed to the science of language, in post 102. But I didn’t cover it in much depth, because I thought it was obvious that once we’ve finally entered the realm of aesthetics, your original statements make no sense.
When we’re talking about aesthetics, there is no such thing as “correct”.
I mean, shit, would you dare say that Cubism is an incorrect form of painting? That iambic hexameter is a misusage of verse? That rap is an incorrect form of music? That an RPG is an incorrect form of video-gaming? That a silent film is a misusage of movies?
I agree entirely that writing has an aesthetic dimension. But aesthetics are entirely subjective: there is no right or wrong outside of individual opinions. In this sense, yes, I can personally be extremely prescriptivist about how I think the language should be. The difference between us is that I recognize my opinions as opinions, whereas you and people like you wish that your opinions were the only ones that are accepted as “correct”, which is something that absolutely would not fly in any other artistic medium.
If you want to talk “correctness”, you have left the realm of aesthetics and entered into the realm of scientific verifiability. And the problem with most prescriptivists is that they’re so self-centered about matters of personal preference that they treat their opinions as matters of fact. Not only are they wrong to do so, they often haven’t even thought through the so-called rules that they most want to enforce. More on that very soon.
You’re not talking here about whether The Da Vinci Code is correct or incorrect, because that’s an objectively verifiable question. Most of the book is incorrect about most matters, as is amply demonstrated by the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the historical community. Your question is much different: whether The Da Vinci Code is good or bad. And that is entirely a matter of personal taste. It is totally subjective. You have absolutely no way of determining that the book is of a lower quality than Shakespeare without using your own individual taste. There is no high-tech scanning device that you can pass over the novel to get an objective read-out of its quality.
You hold the “base opinions” of the public at large in such disdain, it’s no surprise that you’ve convinced yourself that art is not a matter of opinion. You probably hang out with a group of people with similar interests, and since you and the chums you shoot the breeze with all happen to miraculously agree that Shakespeare is better, you’ve managed to convince yourself that your opinion has magically become correct.
It’s almost too delicious, but you have been engaging in… circular reasoning. Yes, you have begged the question, in the traditional sense.
No, we do not survey the New York Times bestseller list to find out “quality”. We do not ask a bunch of people what their favorite book is. We simply ask ourselves: Is this a good book? And if other people disagree, then they disagree, because there is no way to determine who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s “correct” and who’s “incorrect”, when we’re having a dispute about art. Everybody gets to make up their own mind.
It is equally delicious that you chose E.B. White as your standard-bearer of a prescriptivist writer, because E.B. White didn’t follow his own rules. Which is yet another beautiful illustration that the people who tend to be most prescriptivist also have some of the biggest misconceptions about language. They don’t even pay attention to their own writing. The rules are everything, and the living English language, which exists all around them, counts for nothing.
Arnold Zwicky says:
I agree that the standards are often - but not always- the result of social, cultural, and historical forces. But the same is true for our standards of any art form. There is no reason intrinsic to writing that makes Shakespeare a better writer than Dan Brown. We judge Shakespeare to be a better because of how we have been shaped by social, cultural, and historical forces. Why does it matter if our standards of usage are not intrinsic to language? Should we abandon our judgment that Shakespeare is a writer than Brown if we cannot find a reason intrinsic to writing?
Art is a matter of opinion, but then everything judgment an just opinion (outside of judgments on things like objective reality or mathematics/logic). But that does not mean that humans cannot create systems of judgment.
All morality is just a matter of opinion. There is nothing that makes raping, murdering, and eating a child intrinsically wrong. It is just a matter of opinion; however, most people feel comfortable saying that it is wrong even if there no objective standard.
Most of the time that we say anything is right or wrong we are begging the question. That does not mean we should not make these judgments. We all need and use axioms; we have to accept axioms to even say there are things like objective reality and mathematics/logic.
Not in the sciences.
Which is why I said most of the time and listed an exception for judgments on objective reality; however, I doubt you could prove the axioms of science.
From way back on page 1:
This is exactly how I’ve come to feel about the linguistics threads, and as a result, I find I often don’t really have the heart or motivation to even bother trying to fight the ignorance anymore. Thankfully, others, such as yourself, are still doing an excellent job.