What I said, specifically, was that the usage in question was "counterproductive and undesirable ". These are words whose meanings should not be in much contention.
Why do you have “hypotheses” in quotes? I gave you a concise but fairly thorough discussion of the different meanings the word can have, one of which was precisely the sense in which I used it. You seem to swing wildly between the permissive descriptivist and the exceptionally pedantic prescriptivist as the occasion suits, except that when you try to play the pedant, you often seem to get it wrong. The way I used the word was literally correct, by which, incidentally, I don’t mean “metaphorically”.
Let’s give a moment’s thought to the matter of “simplest and most likely explanation” for an apparently contradictory usage. The language today is indisputably rife with misunderstandings of what words actually mean, terrible grammatical constructions, bad syntax, and no end of other issues. Please don’t try to deny that the average IQ is 100, many people lack many basic rudiments of knowledge including being able to find their own country on a map, and the plain and simple fact that people make mistakes. Is it more likely that this increasingly widespread usage is the result of people making mistakes, or that it’s the result of a deliberate contrivance, perhaps by some evil genius?
I know the feeling. I’ve noticed in various discussion venues that certain individuals with whom people have argued about climate change (the reality and anthropogenic nature thereof) have subsequently vowed to make sure that on Earth Day they turn on all possible lights and electrical appliances, and at the first opportunity buy the largest, least fuel-efficient vehicle possible. That’ll teach those arrogant academic bastards not to lecture them about how to run their lives!
Your model seems to be that language was, at some time in the (recent?) past, in a more perfect state than it is today; and that it is now deteriorating badly.
Can you explain, then, what exactly was the mechanism by which language attained that historic pinnacle? Were literacy rates higher in the past? Was there once some committee of erudite mavens such as yourself that actually had some authority over the population of fools to make them speak proper? Or perhaps the average IQ was once above 100, and people’s understanding of global geography was better?
Or could it be that your model for how language arises and evolves is just completely wrong? Do you realize that almost every sentence in modern English would be considered rife with “mistakes” for an educated English speaker 200 years ago? That being so, how do you imagine we got from there to here? And how do you imagine that language will ever change in the future, except by spontaneous changes that are initially regarded as non-standard? Do you plan to oppose all spontaneous non-standard usages that arise as ignorant “mistakes”? Do you think you will succeed in convincing people to speak in ways that you, personally, find “productive” and “desirable”?
There’s a better analogy for this discussion. It’s a discussion of human origins between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist.
There’s so much overlap among those accusations that it’s easier to address it all at once.
My model for language evolution is no different from yours, all of your condemnations notwithstanding. I have no illusions that the English language is perfect today, as you once accused me of believing – I actually believe it’s a mess that’s difficult to learn and use well (which is why so many people don’t), but it manages to be wonderfully functional and expressive anyway – not because of that fact, but in spite of it. It’s not an excuse for throwing formalisms out the window.
But now you’ve created the opposite straw man, and accuse me of believing that English was so much better in bygone days. No, it wasn’t. People had less education and even less respect for the rules of language than today, so much so that at various times there were calls for formal authorities to step in. Around the time of Shakespeare, common words like “where” had at least half a dozen different spellings, and the man himself had six known variants of his own name, though out in his larger world more than 80 different spellings have been found. You can just imagine what the rules of language were like.
Your hypothetical time-traveling English speaker from 200 years ago would not have as hard a time as you make think (consider some of the key documents from early American history). But go back to the time of Chaucer in the 14th century, or better still, to the time of the Norman Conquest, and such a person would indeed find our rules of grammar, usage, and spelling perplexing, as well as the phonetics of the modern language. He’d have a correspondingly hard time even understanding most of the things we were saying. You know what? That’s why we have rules of language.
You ask how language can ever evolve if we don’t accept “non-standard” usage. That’s a red herring (though not literally a red herring, because it’s a misleading fallacy and not a fish!). I have never suggested that we condemn non-standard usage. “Non-standard” is a very broad term that encompasses legitimately needed new words and creative expression, and lumps it all in with ignorant mistakes that do no favors either to the language or to anyone using it. For example we speak today about “streaming” as a way of watching movies, a word that just a few decades ago referred only to a way of grouping students in an educational system or to a process in cell biology. Its new additional meaning is a logical and purposeful addition to the language.
Where we differ is where we stand on the continuum of respect for established norms, which I regard as important to clarity of communication a good deal more than apparently you or the LHoD. Conformance with rules promotes clarity and reduces ambiguity. As the late poet and etymologist John Ciardi once noted, resistance to ignorant usage may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.
I am impatient with declarations along the lines that “it doesn’t matter, I know what he meant”. It does matter, because it really does make communication, especially in its written form, harder to understand. I have sometimes had to read a badly written paragraph several times to try to understand it. And it sometimes really does lead to ambiguity. You know what, all you psychics out there who always know what the speaker means, no matter how badly he says it? Maybe you should just read his mind directly and dispense with language altogether!
When you announced that you were now motivated to use “literally” the wrong way, it reminded me exactly of those climate change deniers who use Earth Day’s “lights out” symbolic hour as an opportunity to turn on every possible light and appliance. Some of them even proudly announce that they never recycle, so offended are they by the promoters of environmentalism. You may not like my analogy, but it wasn’t contrived, it was the first thing that popped into my head.
I’ll repeat: my views on language evolution are not substantially different from yours, but we differ on where we stand on the continuum of respect for its rules and the benefits thereof. Your attempt to equate this position with “creationism” is absurd. And that leads me to this final observation:
According to this poll, 42% of Americans believe in creationism. But a further 31% believe that while evolution occurs, God had a “guiding hand” in it. Essentially 73% of Americans believe in some form of creationism that involves God up in the clouds doing stuff to make it happen, and just 19% accept natural biological evolution as the explanation for our origin.
And you know what else these geniuses are doing? They’re trying to speak and write English.
How well do you think they’re doing it? Serious question: Is there any point at which the use of language is so egregiously bad that even you descriptivist purists would feel it needs to be corrected? If it’s not a case of “anything goes”, as you assured us it was not, then what is that point?
On the contrary, you make clear every time that you discuss an ideology of imposing standards on speakers that your model for language acquisition and language evolution is completely wrong. The analogy with a debate between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist is apt. Like most creationists, you do not understand the consensus scientific understanding of the principles of linguistics. Your arguments betray the same kind of ignorance as the creationist trope if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
Like a creationist, you make a category error in claiming that this is a debate where one ideology opposes another ideology. It is not. My position is that as an empirical scientific matter reasoned ideology is largely irrelevant to how language arose, to how language is acquired by children, and to how language evolves. Your ideology of language is analogous to saying - Jeez, ginger hair is really unattractive, I wish there weren’t any ginger people. Let’s teach children not to be ginger. But young children acquire oral language in the same way that they acquire hair and hair color. It is in their nature to do so. You cannot change the way that children acquire the fundamental rules of language by ideology any more than you can change their hair color by ideology. All you can even hope to do by ideology is tweak things by insisting that they get a specific haircut that you happen to think is best. 99% of the fundamental rules of language are acquired instinctively and unconsciously by young children at an age when they cannot even articulate what the concept of a ‘general rule’ even means.
Consider these two sentences:
She gazed wistfully into the dusk as the nightingale sang.
Dusk the wistfully gazed she nightingale the sang as.
What proportion of English speakers can discern which of these sentences is a correct sentence in English, and how long would it take them? Obviously, all of them can, instantly and flawlessly, and it seems so easy that we take this for granted.
But what proportion of English speakers could then articulate in generalized form all of the fundamental rules for making valid sentences in their dialect that they just intuitively and unconsciously applied here? Again, quite obviously, none of them can. But consider how sophisticated these rules must be - although I gave only one example of an incorrect sentence, there are millions of incorrect arrangements of those words for any one arrangement that is permissible in English. Even for an expert linguist, it could take weeks of research to figure out all of the relevant structural rules and the correct generalizations for a particular dialect. And yet every speaker knows all of these rules unconsciously and applies them almost flawlessly in a second or two without any conscious effort.
As I described earlier:
And Left Hand of Dorkness provided a perfect example of this
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
My three-year-old has a hell of a time with gender pronouns. Used to be everyone was “she.” Now she realize thats “he” and “his” exist, but she seems to have some sort of rule that puts “she” in the nominative and “his” in the possessive, so she’ll say things like, “Joe was here, and she put his lunch in the refrigerator.”
I’m sure not trying to teach her correct placement of pronouns by explaining the nominative and possessive case to her. Instead, I often repeat things back: “Oh, he put his lunch in the refrigerator?” and she says, “Yeah.” I know she’ll get his pronouns straight eventually.
[/QUOTE]
**So 99% of the fundamental generalized rules for how to speak a language are learnt intuitively and unconsiously by children at an age when they don’t even understand the concept of a generalized rule, and from parents who themselves know the rules only unconsciously but cannot articulate them clearly! Given that, how can any ideology for what such rules should be possibly make a significant difference to the way language actually does work? ** Your can try to change trivial little things in the way people speak, such as the way they use literally, but these prescriptive obsessions are, in Pinker’s words,
[QUOTE=Steven Pinker]
…inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language that the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology
[/QUOTE]
Finally let me set aside a straw man, one which again betrays wolfpup’s muddled notion of the way language is acquired by children. In the midst of a discussion of language in general, wolfpup jumped on spelling as a “gotcha” example of why all the linguists must be wrong about dismissing prescriptivism.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
Around the time of Shakespeare, common words like “where” had at least half a dozen different spellings, and the man himself had six known variants of his own name, though out in his larger world more than 80 different spellings have been found. You can just imagine what the rules of language were like.
[/QUOTE]
As I have described above, oral language evolved (in both the biological and cultural senses of evolution) for many thousands of years before formal didactics and any written language ever existed, and oral language continues to be transmitted from generation to generation via the same fundamental unconscious mental machinery as our ancestors. We do not learn oral language from our schoolteachers.
But of course, reading and writing, is a completely different matter. We do learn to read and write from teachers at school by consciously and deliberately learning the symbols that society has agreed upon as an arbitrary representation of oral speech by marks on paper. Although writing conventions can and do to some extent evolve spontaneously, in the broad strokes it makes absolute sense to consciously agree upon consistent common standards for such things as spelling. And this makes sense pragmatically as well as ideologically, because we learn reading and writing in a completely different way to oral language - in reading and writing we consciously learn explicitly articulated rules.
A footnote: I’d never seriously hope to influence the views of a diehard prescriptivist any more than a diehard creationist. If someone has already read Pinker on language and dismissed him, I certainly can’t hope to do better. I join this kind of discussion more to show others who may not have encountered the debate before that there’s a far more interesting approach to understanding language than authoritarian prescriptivism. But at this point it’s becoming a little repetitive, so I think there’s probably not much to add for me.
Same here. Wolfpup is providing a master-class in how to engage in ineffective communication through poorly-chosen words: “shrill,” “hypothesis,” “explicit,” “diatribe,” and so forth. But when confronted with the ways in which his word choice actually muddles communication, he invariably doubles down on them, insisting that everything’s copacetic. Although I don’t doubt he’ll later call this thread a debacle for me, I’m not seeing much point in responding further to him here.
I’m confused, Riemann. Are you claiming that it is impossible to influence the prevalence of a specific usage in English or that it is possible but inconsequential and pointless? You seem to say both at once.
The former is clearly false. One person decided that sentences shouldn’t end with a proposition and was able to spread that pointless pseudo-rule throughout the land. It didn’t eliminate sentence-ending propositions, but it certainly reduced them.
Was promulgating this “rule” a good idea? I don’t think so either, but that’s not an objective fact. Saying that the position “Rules like * Don’t end a sentence with a preposition* are good and should be enforced” is as scientifically wrong as creationism is itself exactly the kind of prescriptivist pseudo-scientific claim you are arguing against.
If that’s not your point, then you’ve managed to confuse someone who has agreed with most off of your previous posts.
Phrases like “the incorrect meaning of literally” are either incoherent, incorrect, or incomplete. If you’re saying that it’s an objectively incorrect meaning, that’s incoherent, because there’s no coherent arbiter of correct language usage. If you’re saying it doesn’t use a commonly-understood meaning of “literally,” that’s incorrect, because even though people might struggle to define the meaning of “literally” in a phrase like “she literally glowed with pleasure,” most folk know what the phrase means. If you’re saying it’s incorrect in certain settings, that’s incomplete: in what settings is that considered incorrect usage? I know it’s incorrect usage in Zork Returns, for example, but you need to specify other settings in which it’s incorrect.
If you’re saying people are ignorant for using it, that’s an objectively testable hypothesis. However, there’s no evidence to support it; it looks like it was pulled out of someone’s butt. The likeliest explanation for any language use is that the speaker says what the speaker means to say. Errors are the exception rather than the norm, and to claim something is a true error (that is, the speaker intended a different word, or the speaker intended to communicate an idea to the audience through a wholly idiosyncratic word use), requires evidence.
I do agree, Alan, that some rules of language use enter the lexicon. I teach such rules: I’ve explained to my students that many (NOT ALL) paragraphs have topic sentences, and that at their level of expository writing it’s a pretty good idea to include a topic sentence. I’ve explained the value of correct spelling. I’ve explained the value of patter when you’re performing a magic trick; I’ve taught my students to look me in the eye when I greet them in the morning and to respond, “Fine, thanks, how are you?” There are plenty of linguistic conventions that are well worth teaching and that can be taught.
Vocabulary is one of those sets of conventions. I teach it daily, whether teaching the difference between area and perimeter (WHY CAN THEY NOT REMEMBER THIS???) or teaching them what a mantis shrimp is (today’s lesson, just because they’re awesome). If I thought it valuable, I could teach them the different definitions of “literally.”
But if I taught them that only one definition was “correct,” I’d be incoherent, incorrect, or incomplete.
99% (99% being shorthand for “virtually all of the interesting and important stuff”) of the rules for building valid sentences are acquired unconsciously as children by listening to those around us and (unconsciously) inferring the rules. They are held in our brains unconsciously; nobody other than expert linguists can even articulate the rules, yet we use them instinctively and almost flawlessly all the time. It’s clear that changing these fundamental rules of language by decree just makes no sense.
Suppose I told you to change a rule - let’s say something apparently trivial and easy like You must now put ‘the’ after a noun rather than before it. You could have a go at trying to remember to do that, but I think you can imagine that it would be incredibly difficult to do it fluently and consistently. And how could you ever get a child to do something like that when * learning* a language? A young child doesn’t even consciously grasp the concept of an externally-imposed general rule like that. The only way to get a child to acquire that rule would be to immerse the young child in an environment where everyone around the child always used ‘the’ after the noun in their speech.
So none of our core fundamental oral language skills are acquired by the prescriptivist mechanism of “Articulate the rule explicitly and then consciously follow it.”
But there are obviously some important aspects of language that are consciously (or otherwise) malleable post-childhood, since language isn’t static. How do these changes come about?
Well, there is the 1% of grammar rules and perhaps a slightly higher percentage of usage rules that prescriptivists obsess over. Should we split infinitives? Should we keep the use of literally pure and unsullied by metaphor? That stuff is inconsequential and pointless. To what extent can oral language be pushed in one direction or other by decree? Well, that’s an empirical question, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “not much”. The Académie française is one of the most influential such institutions, but I don’t think anybody takes much notice of what they say in everyday spoken French - and, in any case, so far as the spoken language goes they only issue guidance on triviliates, not the core rules. As I’ve made clear, something like standardizing spelling is an entirely different matter and obviously valid.
I think a more powerful driver of linguistic change is the acquisition of new usages as social identifiers. For example, every generation of teenagers invents new usage to distinguish their identity from that of the old fogeys. Classically, the old fogeys initially decry these novel usages as “wrong”, debasing the language, etc. etc. Then the old fogeys lose energy, and the new usages become valid variants; then the old fogey die, and the newer usages become standard.
There’s a group of linguistic changes that I think you’re leaving out: those are the changes that little kids don’t know, that are difficult to pick up through osmosis, and that make sense. Expository structure, with its inclusion of an introduction and a conclusion, is one example: my students struggle to get it, but I’m not fighting against the tide, because the inclusion of an introduction and a conclusion in an essay or persuasive letter is highly reasonable, and kids at least understand why it’s reasonable.
The Academie francaise, on the other hand, fights the tide. They try to ban phrases not because the phrases obscure meaning, but because they don’t like them. Meanwhile, speakers recognize the value of the phrases to their own communication and roundly ignore the injunctions.
If I tried to ban my students from using the word “awesome,” they’d roll their eyes and just use it when I wasn’t around. It’s a useful word, communicates exactly what they intend to communicate.
Banning the intensifier meaning of “literally” is in that category of bans: it’s not a reasonable ban, so it has zero chance of success.
Yes, well said - and perhaps I should have added in my own response: we learn the fundamental rules for how to make sentences as young children as “firmware”. But of course we then expand our linguistic capabilities at school and through our entire lives in broader vocabulary, creative writing, aethetic appreciation of literature, etc. But the words “right” “wrong” “ignorant” and “stupid” should pretty much never be part of that expansion process, in my opinion. A good rule of thumb: if something has to be “drilled” in a prescriptivist fashion, it’s almost certainly trivial and unimportant.
An important corollary to all this:
Our brains change in fundamental way around the age of 7. That’s why (for all but a few talented multi-lingual people with unusual skills) learning a second language when we are older is much much more difficult - precisely because a second language is learnt by the “articulate a rule then consciously follow it” procedure.
(1) 99% of the fundamental oral language rules that concern making sentences that can be described as correct or incorrect in our dialect are acquired instinctively as young children.
(2) We learn the agreed consistent conventions for writing.
(3) At school and throughout our subsequent lives, we then constant expand our language skills with wider vocabulary, creative writing skills, appreciation of great literature, etc.
I certainly do not mean to minimize the importance of (3). I just don’t think the words “right” “wrong” “stupid” or “ignorant” should generally be applied to what students or adult speakers do as part of (3). Even if they make a mistake on a new word, they should be encouraged to work it out for themselves from the corpus, to check how other people use the word.
Some errors that people like to harp on in these discussions are orthographic errors: “I would of gone to his house if he’d asked me” is really an orthographic error. The person hears the expression “Would’ve,” which is pronounced identically to “would of.” They don’t parse it as a contraction for “would have,” since that’s not necessary in order to understand the word’s meaning; rather they parse it as an idiom, “would of,” but use that phrase to indicate a meaning identical to the meaning of “would’ve.” The only way this normally shows up is when they write. It makes more sense to categorize it as a spelling error rather than a vocabulary error, IMO.
Over time, of course, the idiom “would of” to mean “would have” may become more common, which is either A Sign Of The Death Of True English, or completely fascinating and kind of awesome, depending on your perspective :).
WTF? That was a response to your absurd straw man wherein I supposedly thought language was far superior sometime in the past. It was just one little factoid to illustrate that it was not. Today with mass communications and better education most elements of language are a lot more consistent. And nowhere have I claimed that “all linguists must be wrong” about anything.
The innate nature of language is not in dispute, and I even mentioned there’s a specific gene that seems to be a factor for it in humans. How we learn language is a vastly important and intriguing basic research area in cognitive science, and there’s a lot we don’t know about it. But among the things that are generally accepted are that language skills are distinct from general cognitive skills, that children have innate abilities to understand abstract principles in language without needing to be explicitly taught those principles, and that those principles tend to be common among languages, which differ mainly in terms that can be characterized by what Chomsky called “parameters”, tweaks in structure and usage rules.
Yet spoken language is obviously learned, despite the fact that we have innate skills in it and pick up key concepts with amazing speed. Vocabulary must be learned, and our vocabulary (or lack of it) is common to both our written and spoken language skills. So are the myriad other language rules common to both spoken and written language that we acquire as we grow up, such as the morphology of different kinds of inflection. We learn not only systematic rules, but build mental dictionaries that inform not just how we select words for meaning, but when exceptions apply to different kinds of morphologies. The incompleteness of this mental dictionary is why children might say “drawed” instead of “drew” or “bringed” instead of “brought”, and adults can and do err in other ways. There is nothing innate about this, nor is there about vocabulary and many aspects of how we structure sentences. These things are acquired knowledge, and must be learned regardless of what the process might be.
You seem so obsessed by our differences in the relative importance of language formalisms that you seem to think I believe there’s no such thing as innate language skills, or that language must never change, and other such nonsense. The existence and importance of language formalisms neither preclude the former nor imply the latter.
Let me point out here something pertinent and important that Pinker said in his preface to The Language Instinct: “If my personal synthesis seems to embrace both sides of debates like ‘formalism versus functionalism’ … perhaps it is because there was never an issue there to begin with.” In linguistic terms it’s a question of whether there is such a thing as a grammar that is independent of the cognitive processes that seek to communicate meaning. An extreme functionalist would believe that because language arises naturally out of cognitive properties, all grammar can be derived from its semantics. The reality is that language is shaped both by our innate language skills (Chomsky calls this "the genetic endowment), which is what gives the world’s languages their commonalities, and by the acquired knowledge of formal constraints (principles not specific to the faculty of language), which is what gives them their differences. Perhaps you are a functionalist extremist on this issue, but Pinker and most linguists certainly are not.
We are seeing it in action. The thread “Words you Hate but have resigned yourself they are here to stay” has been getting a post every 4 minutes since this morning. It’s about the only thing that can generate as much bile as gorillacide at the moment.
Actually, when confronted with such criticism, Wolfpup refers you to a dictionary and demonstrates that those words have meanings of which you were apparently unaware.
