Does descriptive linguistics mean "anything goes"?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Just because something does not have a consciously designed purpose, does not mean it does not have a purpose. Mutation is random, but natural selection certainly is not. It is perfectly correct to say that the purpose of eyes is to see - a consequence of seeing is greater fitness, and this what led to the evolution of eyes by natural selection. There is constructive and creative cause and effect here, not just chance.

So unless you are suggesting that language did not arise by natural selection (because of the obvious consequent fitness advantage through improved communication), and that it is genuinely a Gouldian spandrel, then of course the principal purpose of language is to communicate. This is the vocabulary used by evolutionary biologists, and there is really no technical or philosophical sense in which it is incorrect.

42

Hear, hear!

On the other hand: There’s language for effective communication, and then there’s language used as an art form. One of my grade school English texts, even stated a certain rule, then showed how Hemingway consistently violated it in his works - and stated it was OK, because, er, he was such a skilled writer.

43

Clear guidelines and rules are eminently useful for people learning to master a language, but if you are, or aspire to be, a Hemingway, Shakespeare, Joyce, or Pushkin then you are presumed to understand what you are doing. In fact, that textbook sounds useful in actually illustrating via examples when a supposed rule does and does not apply.

44

Everything you describe here is framed in negative terms of condemnation. And I see you so often in language threads behaving as a typical negative prescriptivist, denigrating perfectly cromulent language evolution such as the use of “literally” as an intensifier. This has absolutely nothing to do with the noble and positive aim of promoting literacy and elegant communication.

45

Some of that is slightly facetious as arguments about the appropriate use of “literally” are a long-lost cause, but there really is a serious element here. We are told that the use of “literally” as an intensifier is quite old and has been used for many years by celebrated writers. But the actual examples of that usage that I’ve seen can be characterized by the comment that @Bonum_Legatum just made about Hemingway: “it’s OK when a skilled writer does it”, which does contain an important truth. Skilled writers have used “literally” to intensify an appropriate metaphor, making it more vivid. I suspect that what happened was that the usage was then aped by incompetent writers to eventually become a generic all-purpose intensifier despite there being no meaningful metaphor to intensify. It has become the nonsensical equivalent of Kevin McCarthy’s now-infamous quip, “the electric cord of liberty still sparks in our hearts”.

The rules that are important are precisely those that reflect actual usage – not as defined by the Twitterverse or Reddit, but by the prevailing norms of standard English. And the two things are not “tangentially” related; knowledge of the norms of language is intimately related to literacy. The point I’m making, in the context of this thread, is about why adherence to the currently prevailing standards of language is important. It’s about why we should care about misuses instead of just dismissing them as mere ephemera of cultural etiquette.

I am not arguing that the English language should be frozen and static. It has always been evolving, and always will. It’s entirely pointless to try to debate whether the language is “decaying” or whether it’s improving or who should be the arbiter of that; the language is doing what it’s doing, for better or worse. That has nothing to do with my point about literacy.

There are a huge number of factors that drive changes in language. Among those many factors are outright mistakes in grammar and usage, a few of which are repeated so often that they eventually become entrenched and standardized. That is not, however, a justification for excusing such errors when they initially occur – when they really are mistakes, and detrimental to the language and to our ability to communicate. That was the point of my previous post: that illiteracy and semi-literacy are a major societal problem and an impediment to progress. We can still have a natural evolution of language without willfully descending into illiteracy.

46

I’m with the others who feel that this argument about poor usage of language is a different category than claiming that language itself is failing.

You couldn’t make a sensible argument like this about anything else. People can’t cook a proper meal so that means the food supply is failing. People don’t know how to drive cars so that means the auto industry is failing. Those would be nonsensical.

The vagueness of the argument also dooms it. We need to know exactly who these “people” are, where they are making these mistakes, what percentage of the users they are, whether they get pushback on the mistakes, and many other details.

I am prepared to believe the DoE statistics about poor literacy levels, but there was never a Golden Age in which those numbers were much higher. A hundred years ago, 5% of the population graduated college and fewer than 50% graduated high school. Those numbers didn’t rise until after WWII. Overall proficiency did not zoom up to match. What’s new was the default minimum for many jobs rose from a high school degree to a college degree. The number of people attending some form of post-secondary education rose by an order of magnitude, but most were there to get a marker, not an education.

The issue the rest of us are discussing is whether the English language is deteriorating, not whether the majority of speakers - I’ll limit it to American speakers because that’s what I know - are completely proficient in all aspects of it at all levels of speech. That’s never been remotely true at any time in history. Complaining that it also isn’t true today is a pile of fallacies too high to see over.

47

And once again I ask, what does this kind of vitriolic condemnation of a perfectly cromulent usage have to do with promoting literacy? The meaning is perfectly clear. What does it even have to do with promoting elegance or beauty in language? Even if I were to agree with your subjective opinion that this use of “literally” is inelegant (I do not), would you teach music appreciation to students by telling the students to get up on stage and perform for their classmates and then explaining how terrible their performance was, how pathetic they are compared to Mozart? Or would you play them Mozart?

48

And that’'s the thing. The natural selection of language, i.e. what survives and what thrives is, by definition, naturally selected for. If there were stewards of genetic natural selection, (and to put a positive spin on it) we might not have ended up with the trachea crossing the esophagus. That would’ve been a good thing. As for the negative consequences of a prescriptivist genetic steward’s choices… We don’t need opposable thumbs, when I was younger we survived just fine without them. I move that we limit their uses and seek to preserve thumbless gripping.

49

We also need to be skeptical of the motivation of prescrptivism. That might give as some insight who those people are. Recall this:

Although claims of linguistic decay might be nonsense, prescriptivists have also claimed that their underlying agenda is literacy and elegance of communication. And we can all agree that this aim is a noble cause. But is there any evidence that this is really what prescriptivists are doing? I think the crucial question is why prescriptivism is always framed in negative terms, often as vitriolic condemnation of how others are doing it wrong.

If prescriptivists love language, why is the prominent defining characteristic of a prescriptivist a hatred of diversity in language?

Why is everything about what “careless”, “ignorant” and “incompetent” people are doing wrong? How often do you hear a prescriptivist say: “I just heard a novel expression, it’s wonderful - let’s add it to the language!”

Prescriptivists always justify their proscriptions with rationalizations like “if we use literally in this way, we won’t be able to communicate clearly!”. But these claims are never supported by evidence of actual failure to communicate, just contrived examples of the same kind of potential ambiguity that exists throughout our language. The underlying theme is always to reject diversity in usage.

I’d express this in more robust terms than a comparison to Emily Post. In every other aspect of our culture, a rejection of diversity is now seen as a feature of social supremacism. Yet a majority of people still see linguistic prescriptivism as something civilized and respectable. In fact, most prescriptivism is the ugly promotion of a monoculture in which what we do is right and proper.

50

Does this suboptimal design imply that the trachea and the esophagus have no purpose?

51

First, as an aside, I don’t consider myself a “prescriptivist” in the derogatory sense in which you appear to use the term. Just someone with a love of language with a conservative respect for tradition.

But to answer the question, I say that (to myself) all the time. Not so much “let’s add this to the language” but just admiration for a wonderful turn of phrase. As Steven Pinker said in The Sense of Style, in defense of good writing, “[it] adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures.”. I remark on this all the time when reading (for instance) P.G. Wodehouse, or Stephen Leacock, or even Stephen King or the casual humour of Dave Barry. And often, in fact, the wonderful literary craftsmanship of Steven Pinker himself, who can string words together in a way that makes them sing.

I’m not sure why you accuse me of some kind of relentless “contempt” for misuse of language, but to the extent that I have a problem with it, it’s precisely because I love language and hate to see it kicked around in the gutter.

52

What about to the illiterate bard, or the below-grade-level-reading musician, or the illiterate nomad–do they appreciate a witty turn of phrase any less?

There’s some interesting class assumption in the phrase “literate reader” and the implication that they’re the only ones who appreciate an arresting metaphor.

Someone who really hates ambiguity in language will spend their time railing against pronouns that lack antecedents, or the word “biweekly,” or overuse of the word “thing.” These features of English lead to genuine misunderstandings in a way that the word “literally” almost never does; but they don’t allow for class distinctions and don’t function as shibboleths.

There’s a reason that for every prescriptivist rant against the word “thing,” there are thousands of rants against “literally” as an intensifier. It ain’t about ambiguity; it’s about protecting class lines.

53

Because that’s most of what I see from you. Your first post in this thread was typical: “…things that I just consider to be outright solecisms arising from either ignorance or just careless laziness. In my view these things are just a linguistic form of rudeness…”

I’m inclined to say quod erat demonstrandum with respect to my prior post, since this strikes me as bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the kind of phraseology that supremacists use when they explain that they just want the human race to be better.

54

Who Is Doing This? Name Names.

Steven Pinker, P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Stephen King and Dave Barry are in the top 1% of the top 1% of native English speakers and writers. How can anyone legitimately disparage the other 99.99% for failing to live up to those standards? Again, wouldn’t this complaint be better suited for a thread about education? It belongs nowhere in a thread about the English language.

People misuse numbers every single day and I would bet that includes the names you mention as good writers. I’ve written articles on how good writers display innumeracy. (One in Writer’s Digest, of all places.) Yet I’ve never in my life seen an argument that math itself was at fault.

55

I really love this metaphor. Particularly when one considers the way in which Mozart’s work is itself enshrined by the academy as a pinnacle (or one of them) of musical sophistication and correctness. It’s only in recent decades that universities and academics, in an effort to maintain their positions of authority over what art and culture is good and what is worthless, have expanded their definitions of good to include popular and folk musics and artists.

Well, as the article says, there’s a correlation here, which doesn’t at all imply that reading level itself is the cause of any of those outcomes. Also, unless one is inclined to think that culture and society exist mainly to serve economic outcomes, I’m not sure why this matters.

56

I always hesitate to just lazily use Mozart as the archetype, and wondered if it was a little hypocritical to do so when I’m also talking about supremacism. But if I had used another great musical talent (I considered Kanye) I felt it might have detracted from the primary point that I was trying to make in the analogy. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that sticking to the enshrined archetype kind of works on an ironic level.

57

Heh. I mean, I almost expanded on this, but it felt like more hijack/derailment than I wanted to provide, but what I loved about the metaphor is that I never thought about the relationship between the academy and how we talk about music as analogous to the relationship between the academy and how we talk about language. And, how the biases (not necessarily using that word with negative connotation) of the people who make it into the academy shape popular discourse and understanding and instill in us, for lack of a better phrase, moral imperatives to behave certain ways, or to appreciate certain art and reject others (or, in the case of this thread, dialects).

I mean, if I was to take an absolute position for the sake of argument, I’d put forth that all academic writing about art, language, and culture are in their essences opinion pieces about why the author thinks the subject is super cool, and more often than not why it’s more super cool than that thing you like. We’ve confused these people’s opinions for some sort of truth about what we should or should not do, say, or appreciate. The idea that the language (or art or whatever) that comes naturally to people should be avoided in favor of language or art that must follow rules governed by a select few is just how those few maintain a sense of control.

58

I think the music analogy is helpful in a number of respects in this language discussion.

(1) If we teach music appreciation, we teach it best by taking a positive approach: an appreciation of how and why Mozart is beautiful is not obtained or enhanced by slagging off people who are tone deaf. (This was the point I was making with the analogy above.) And conversely, if someone spends most of their time slagging of people who are tone deaf, I am skeptical that they are motivated by a genuine love of music.

(2) The rejection of diversity has no part in musical aesthetics. Someone may love Mozart and hate Kanye, or vice versa, or love both for different reasons. But the deprecation of one certainly does not enhance the value of the other. The disparagement of “modern” music or classist or racist musical supremacism are recurring cultural themes, but in music I think such attitudes are now generally ridiculed as ugly social phenomena rather than respected. I hope we old folk are usually now being ironic and self-deprecating when we repeat the trope that the noise young people listen to now is not music.

(3) Notwithstanding the above, some music is just better than other music, even if it’s technically a subjective matter. Although we should look askance at anyone who claims that Mozart is objectively better than Kanye West, I don’t think any cultural bias is involved in an assertion that Mozart and Kanye are both greater musical talents than Salieri and Jessica Simpson. We don’t need to be so open minded about cultural relativism that our brains fall out. And by analogy, in language we can certainly value (and teach) elegance and beauty in speech and writing. A diversity of speech and writing.

59

I was around when rock music was still considered noise and sick and degenerate and for the benefit only of musical illiterates. The attitude was mostly classist but also racist, since I think adults had more awareness of the black roots of rock than most of the young white kids who were introduced to it by the Beatles. (Jazz had similar epithets thrown at it earlier.)

The period up to the apotheosis of the Beatles saw enormous battles among public intellectuals - a term that is almost forgotten today, along with the individuals - about the degeneracy of fine art by public art. Fine art was highbrow, folk art was lowbrow but allowed by some because of its “authenticity,” but middlebrow popular art was totally deprecated, as were all types of middlebrow novels (Book-of-the-Month club selections), Time magazine, and other sources of what we would today consider formal discourse. (Dwight Macdonald, the “high priest of cultural snobs” wrote “Masscult and Midcult” as late as 1965, just as other cultural critics were discovering Dylan. Macdonald would be a star on the Internet today as a conservative, despite his communist background.)

Somehow, the culture managed to stagger on. The various high intellectual pretenders got knocked off their thrones over the decades until there seem to be none left, although I’m sure a scouring of the net will find pockets of them continuing to talk to themselves.

Degeneracy doesn’t exist; change does. What any individual believes to be the epitome of elegance and beauty is the opinion of that individual and no more deserves to be the arbiter of the behavior of others than any other beliefs.

60

Well, I’m certainly in the descriptive camp, so I’ll just describe my experience with the evolution of the language smooshing me and me rolling over and loving it.

I’ve worked in tech support and administration most of my life. So, for the most part I’ve dealt with the linguistical limitations of myself and the other end a lot of the time. Sometime in the noughties, I had someone end a communication with “Please do the needful”. My brain immediately went into adolescent throes of “Oh yeah, if they need doing, I’m gong to do them!”, but I understood exactly what they meant. “The stuff that needs doing to accomplish this, please do it.” It pretty much implied “Unless that will cause a serious problem”, but you had to draw that from context. Sometimes the context implied “I don’t care if it kills you”.

That was my introduction to Indian English, which I soon learned was its own animal. As my “career” has progressed, I’ve gotten to the point where working with people who have English as their second or third language is the norm. Indian English is possibly their third or fourth language, and even that’s probably almost as varied as American/Canadian English when you get right down to it. Others come from different mother languages, and their English has its own inherited idiosyncrasies. “Do the needful” doesn’t even register at this point, other than to note that I don’t see it as often as I once did. It seems to have fallen out of fashion. I kind of miss it.

And in light of all of that, the question I’m most likely to be asked when I’m on a call with someone who speaks English just well enough to not need a translator is:“Where are you from? I haven’t heard your accent before.” I was born in Texas, but I watched too much British programming as a child, and my dad was from all over. So, I sound like a bizarre cartoon character. Some people like it, I used to have co workers call me up expressly to hear me talk, which would calm them down. Maybe it was just in contrast to the person they had on hold that was screaming at them, but a few people did this. That said, what I think of as “my accent” is disappearing. I’m ok with that, and I’m not sure everyone wields it in the same manner I do.

I dunno, people and language are weird, long before you even get into common phrases and accents. English is a weird crazy language that adopts from other languages easily, but truly changes slowly. I’d say it’s “anything goes, as long as you can get away with it”, If your go-to expression for that idea causes you to work hard to explain it, you’ll figure out another way of expressing it.