Little bit of revisionism there, huh? That was who you chose for a “legit working class” writer you respect. It seems pretty clear that you don’t respect the linguistic abilities of anyone with an actual working class identity.
I won’t characterize you, but your position could not be more classist if you tried.
That’s a fair observation. But the insulting nature of those accusations – that respect for the use of grammatical language constitutes classism – arises from the insidious implication that it’s invariably associated with categorical class distinctions that go far beyond language, and of which language is only a marker.
In some times and social contexts the idea of language as a marker of class distinction has carried an element of truth (see, for instance, the story line of My Fair Lady). But in general it is not, and certainly never justifies an implication of class superiority. The difference between someone who writes with care and attention to the basic and important conventions of language and dialect and someone who does not is that one communicates well and the other does not, with all that that implies, no more and no less.
That you paraphrase what I’m saying in this way is, ironically, a classist misrepresentation. It sucks that your response to having your classist views called out is to get super defensive, instead of interrogating those views and replacing them with less classist views; but I can’t do that work for you.
When derogatory prescriptivists treat speakers of dialects other than that of the hegemony as though their use of a different grammar is stupidity and ignorance, that is indeed the epitome of classism. Have you read the article that I linked in the OP about the appalling treatment of Rachael Jeantel for her use of AAVE when testifying at the Zimmerman trial?
On talk shows and social media sites, people castigated her “slurred speech,” bad grammar and Ebonics usage, or complained that, “Nobody can understand what she’s saying.”…
…a torrent of invidious commentary was quickly unleashed, masquerading under the cover of wit and presumably-shared linguistic prejudice.
Some of it was translation humor: “Love to hear her give a Shakespeare recital. ‘To beez or nots to beez, dats wat I’zz bee saying, jack’.”
But a lot more involved grotesquely racist, misogynistic and dehumanizing attacks on this young woman, devoid of any sensitivity to the fact that she was testifying about the murder of a friend she had known since elementary school, and that she was racked by guilt that she’d been been talking to him by cell phone moments before he died but couldn’t prevent his murder.
…Jeantel was compared to “a junkie,” an “animal,” and “the missing link between monkeys and humans.” One commentator opined that “You could swap her out for a three-toed sloth and get the same witness value and response.”
Another, eager to demonstrate that ignorance and viciousness were equal opportunity traits, fumed that: “She has to be the most, ignorant, ghetto, uneducated, lazy, fat, gross, arrogant, stupid, confrontation Black bitch I’ve ever seen in my fucking life. Yes, I said it . . . and I’m Black.”
Language Log » Rachel Jeantel’s language in the Zimmerman trial
This may be far more ugly and obviously racist and classist, but it’s part of exactly the same phenomenon - it is the ignorant derogatory elitist prescriptivism that you so enthusiastically endorse and rationalize as “love of language”. Purifying linguistic prescriptivism is a last bastion where supremacist values remain unexamined and defended as a virtue.
Let me ask you a question in turn. Have you read what I’ve actually said earlier in this thread that is pertinent to the insulting accusations you’ve just made? That’s a rhetorical question as you clearly have not. Let me help you out with a couple of direct quotes. I’ve bolded a couple of bits to further assist comprehension:
You apparently failed to comprehend any of this, and chose instead to level a hate-filled screed accusing me not only of classism, but now escalating the charge to the ugliest form of bigotry in existence, outright racism.
You cited the vicious racist attacks against Rachel Jeantel and then, completely ignoring the fact that I had at least twice defended the legitimacy of cultural dialects, insinuated that I was precisely like those racists and would happily have hurled racial epithets of my own at this young woman given half a chance.
You can make all the language arguments you want, Riemann, but these kinds of ugly and groundless accusations are insulting and beyond the pale and you should know better.
First of all, I’m certainly not accusing you of conscious and deliberate racism or classism. Obviously, you did not say or write the extreme commentary that’s described in that article.
But I’m pointing out an exceptionally ugly example because I think your approach to language is part of the same general phenomenon of purifying elitism. What I’m asking you to do is to examine the implicit and unsconcious assumptions that underlie your prescriptivism. That’s why I draw your attention to the persistent derogatory negativity in your commentary. You seem to devote far less energy to celebrating the language that you love than to denouncing the usage of others.
You dismissed my metaphor, and I grant it’s not perfect, but consider it seriously. What would you think of someone who claimed to be motivated by a love of music, but spent most of their time deploring the musical incompetence of the tone deaf, and perhaps placed genres of music they dislike in the same category as the tone deaf?
You previously used the sentence, “for all intensive purposes, I should of stayed home,” as an example of a “marginal literate” phrase that you find objectionable. And yet, there’s no part of that sentence whose meaning is unclear. You know precisely what “intensive purposes” and “should of” mean, so your claim that you’re only concerned about people who can’t communicate well rings more than a little hollow.
Contrast the clarity of that phrase with
The former phrase is much clearer. @wolfpup uses the word grammatical without clarifying which of multiple definitions he intends. As a reader, I can’t really tell his intention, or even tell if it’s equivocation.
If he means “grammatical” in the sense of “follows the linguistic rules of grammar,” then virtually all spoken language and most written language qualifies. It’s a bizarre thing to advertise respect for, almost like advertising “respect for the use of gravity.”
If he means “grammatical” in the sense of “follows the conventions of a particular dialect of language, and specifically the dialect that Wodehouse uses,” then it fits nicely with most of his other posts in the thread, and is super classist.
The only way it fits with all of his posts is if we’re intended to read “grammatical” as somewhere between the first and second meaning–but I’m not sure what that’d be. Unless it’s equivocation.
That phrase is exactly the sort of phrase that someone genuinely concerned about clarity in language would rail against. “For all intensive purposes” is the sort of phrase one rails against if language use is a class-based shibboleth.
I consider the phrase “for all intensive purposes, I should of stayed home” to be non-standard in orthography, but standard grammar. That is, when spoken, the phrase is grammatically standard, although perhaps with a non-prestigious pronunciation. The divergence is in the representation of that phrase in written form–so, orthography.
I was thinking something similar as I was writing that–maybe @wolfpup meant that he respects standard orthography in writing? I really don’t know.
One metric that might help is to consider whether, if a particular usage became standard, meaning would be lost. For example, when speaking, I might say, “I should’ve stayed home.” If that /uv/ sound becomes written as “of” instead of “'ve,” will we understand one another any less? I can’t imagine we will.
Of course, if I’m working with a student who writes, “I should of stayed home,” that’s definitely a bit of orthography I’ll work with them on. The word “bourgeonics” has never caught on the way I wish it would, but spelling things the bourgeois way can definitely be helpful to someone trying to accomplish things in the world of the bourgeoisie, and that’s something most of my students will want to do at some point in their lives. It’s a dialect with its own rules, neither better nor worse than any others, but it’s a dialect worth knowing for most people in modern English-speaking societies.
That’s yet another deceptive argument. The deception arises from the fact that “intensive purposes” and “should of” are simple two-word phrases that are both very short and very common solecisms, so we’re not consciously aware that these sorts of linguistic irregularities typically cause the literate brain to pause – even if ever so briefly – and have to perform a mental translation. But the effect becomes a significant impediment to comprehension when it infests an entire body of prose. As I said earlier,
Steven Pinker agrees. In the prologue to The Sense of Style, he gives the following as an important reason to strive to write well:
… it ensures that writers will get their messages across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous …
It’s not crystal-clear from context that “grammatical” is just shorthand for “grammatically correct”? 
Of course, we can argue til the cows come home about the deeper and more esoteric meaning of “grammatically correct”, which is more or less the perennial topic of these sorts of debates.
Or maybe, for all intensive purposes, I just can’t write worth a shit.
right back atcha. What’s clear as mud is what you mean by “grammatically correct.” You can’t clarify your meaning by swapping “grammatically correct” in: everything I wrote applies to that new phrase.
Well this has become an intensive discussion to some purposes I am sure.
I am sure you typically write well but I do have to opine that I understand easily what someone who uses “to all intensive purposes …” means, but “grammatical” is in the context of your posts a bit opaque. There have also been points that have mixed “literate” as meaning able to read, with the same word meaning well read.
I’d like to pull back some.
It is tautological to note that venues dominated by an educated subgroup of the majority culture will communicate predominantly with the usage of the educated subgroup of the dominant culture. Anyone wishing to be effective within those venues should be able to communicate in that manner, whether that came to them by way of being raised as part of that culture or having to learn it later in life.
That’s just the way it is.
It is also true that such obviously favors those who were raised within that environment, of that class. That is structural classism. Just the way it is.
Outside of those venues greater variety of usages intermix. New usages are born, some withering and some spreading. Some by mistake.
Agreed that far at least?
Wanna know someone with a legit working-class background? Me. My parents met when they worked in the same factory. We moved from the ghetto up to the working-class wrong side of the tracks.
I’ve presented academic papers and I’ve written several books. I’m proud to say that they were praised for their writing, clarity, and readability. A short story that was printed in the journal Nature was chosen for their “best of” anthology.
Saying that I’ve written books is a misnomer. It may be cliche but books are not written, they are rewritten, usually chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, line by line. Then they are subject to the corrections of proofreaders, copyeditors, and editors.
It is a category error to compare books - or any of their short forms like articles - with other forms of writing. My sentences here on the Dope may be grammatical and won’t contain what are considered to be solecisms unless I deliberately put them in, but they are first drafts. If I don’t expect perfect, polished, topic-sentenced prose from myself I certainly can’t presume to insist upon it from others.
@wolfpup, it is your absolute refusal to see that your entire argument is based on this false premise that ruins any other conclusions you draw from it. Of course, good writing is expected and appreciated and sought out. Of course, the American education system has failed many people and reforms are necessary, one of them being the destruction of classism and racism in society. And of course, nobody should ever, for any reason, argue that every person communicating in all the myriad ways of modern society be held to the standard of equaling the finest writers cherrypicked from all of humanity over the last century according to one’s personal tastes.
The base you are building on is made of quicksand. Your structure will not stand.
The “literate brain”? Really?
If it “infests an entire body of prose” the thing to do is to go, “huh, I guess this is standard now” and your brain will adapt. The only way it stays a significant impediment to comprehension is if you choose to double down on it being an “infestation” and impossible to deal with for a “literate brain”.
Being hyperaware of non-standard language is not a virtue, nor is it a necessary consequence of literacy.
I’ve got to push back a bit here.
Frequent errors, grammatical and otherwise, certainly CAN detract and distract. They can interfere with comprehension and result in misunderstanding.
The sorts of mistakes being made also end up communicating information as well, and probably not the intended message. Maybe accurate maybe not.
For example if I read someone seriously writing “for all intensive purposes” I would minimally suspect that this person is trying too hard to sound more erudite than they are. They have heard the real phrase said by others and are trying to emulate that speech … rather than communicating clearly and authentically. I react similarly when I hear octopi.
“Octopodes” is the rare instance where “technically correct” is the worst kind of correct.
Of course they can. As I said earlier, you gotta see if the author is achieving the desired effect with the intended audience. That’s a reasonable guideline. And as you say, frequent errors can detract from that. If I write a story but I don’t include a single punctuation mark in the story, and I expect you to enjoy it, my expectations will be disappointed.
However.
A couple of weeks ago I was working in a fifth grade classroom, and I asked students to write about something they didn’t do over the summer (a silly fiction prompt that avoids wealth disparity bullshit between kids who visited the great cathedrals of Spain over the summer and kids who took care of their baby brother while mom worked two jobs over the summer). Results were, predictably, all over the place, including one girl who wrote a story with zero punctuation marks. It didn’t work for me.
But the next day I checked her folder and found a piece of notebook paper where she’d continued writing the story. And then two other girls had pages where they’d continued writing their stories too. They’d met up in their afterschool program and written stories together and shared them. Did they give a crap about periods and capitals? They did not. It worked just fine for them, and honestly I was delighted.
If I’d come in with some gazing-down-the-nose sneer and told these half-literate children how bad their writing was, I would have been an asshole; but more importantly, I would have been objectively wrong. Their writing accomplished exactly what they intended in their intended audience.
Which is why I get so irked at this whole “grammatically correct” nonsense. It’s entirely the wrong metric to use.
I’m no longer in that classroom, but I’m trying to see if I can start a writing club for these girls, maybe during lunch one day a week. If I do that, I’ll ease them into some punctuation habits, because that’ll be good for them to know. But I sure won’t frame it in gross classist terms.
I don’t want to come at them incorrect.
Right. Formal writing is for formal situations. Other types of writing are fine for other types of situations.
That is the first and most basic rule about “language.” If you are trying to fit square writing into round holes, the holes are not wrong, you are.
The correct response to “octopodes” is “you got beat up on the playground a lot, didn’t you?”
