I just read McWhorter’s book, and do not agree with your representation of it. McWhorter notes that there are a few cases in which the same word has opposing meanings (such as “sanction”), and many cases in which words have potentially confusing alternate meanings (as in his example of talking to a nurse about a “discharge”), but that’s just making the general point that people are smart about figuring out what meaning is intended. Regarding “literally” his argument is that
1 The original meaning of “literally” refers to letters (or perhaps “words”), and that meaning is used quite rarely. When someone says “He was literally driving on the sidewalk” that is using “literally” in an extended fashion, already (“He literally told me to come back tomorrow” is closer to the original meaning).
2 It is natural for words that refer to truthfulness to become words that are intensifiers. “Very” comes from “verily”; “really” rarely is used to mean “in reality” (“He was in reality angry!”) etc.
3 New ways to signify factualness are also evolving all the time. “He was actually driving on the sidewalk,” “He was driving on the sidewalk,” (or less formally “He was, straight up, driving on the sidewalk” (among other options).
Oh god! I wasn’t defending the figurative use of “literally,” I was just pointing out that it is being used figuratively to mean something like “really,” not to actually mean “figuratively.” I think we’ve established the difference between those things.
But since we’ve gone there, I personally think there is room for both descriptivism and a form of prescriptivism. The problem with prescriptivism is that it takes stylistic choices and treats them like errors or factual mistakes. If I deny evolution or global warming I’ve made a factual error. I am wrong. If I put a shoe on my head and use it as a hat, there is a slight chance that I’ve made a factual error in my head about what the object is or about what it is for, but a much greater chance that I’ve made a stylistic choice related to some particular goal. Maybe I’m a clown (or trying to act like one); maybe I’m an avant garde fashion designer (or pretending to be one). There is an excellent chance that I’m a shitty clown or fashion designer and there is nothing wrong with pointing out that I’ve made a stupid choice that didn’t effectively achieve my goals (though maybe I did!) But I wasn’t wrong the way a climate skeptic or a losing player on Jeopardy is wrong.
But we were taught language mostly in the same way we were taught scientific and historical facts, and we think of them the same way. We want to criticize someone who uses “less” where our teacher said to use “fewer” because it shows that we paid attention in school and they didn’t. But our teachers weren’t giving us factual information there, they were giving us style advice (though usually not presented that way), and you internalize style advice from a teacher at your own risk, regardless of whether you are discussing writing or haute couture…
Since I’m on a roll now, I’ll give my beef with the other side. There is misguided prescritivism, but there is also false descriptivism. Much of what gets called descriptivism is nothing of the sort, but rather a very libertine prescriptivism that advocates going along with the latest linguistic trends. True descriptivism is scientific and merely notes the existence of various usages without making value judgments. But take the supposed bastion of descriptivism, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, and scower the usage notes in vain for such disinterest; instead you find judgments galore, but always in favor of the disputed usage. It’s just another form of prescriptivism, and it serves exactly the same purpose–to demonstrate that the author paid attention in school where others did not, only here it’s grad school instead of high school.
There is no ambiguity here. The “intensifier” usage would never occur in the answer to a question like that. The speaker is claiming that this is really the worst play that they have ever seen.
And apropos of that, do you have a similar problem with the word “really”?
We could say,
“That really was the worst play I have ever seen.”
And there’s ambiguity there - because the intensifier really is being used in exactly the same way as the intensifier literally. Are we saying “really” to indicate that this is the real state of affairs, or just as an intensifier?
No, that was somebody else. And yet, in the example you give above, the only way there could be any ambiguity would be if “literally” were used to mean “figuratively”, in the answer to the question “Did you mean that literally?” And it is not used that way.
You really can’t see the parallel? The point is that all of your arguments against this use of the word “literally” can be applied to the use of all metaphors. Metaphors are, at face value, lies. The only way that we can judge whether to read them literally or figuratively is from context. And yet, as you correctly say, they almost never cause actual ambiguity in communication. The same is true of the disputed use of the word literally.
If this were (say) technical scientific writing, where precise communication were all that matters, then you might have a valid point. But since when is obsessive avoidance of any hint at ambiguity an objective of normal communication? The whole reason that metaphors enhance communication is precisely because they are (taken at face value) false statements that conjure up a false but highly suggestive image.
You claim that you love the idea of saying something like:
“He was so angry his head exploded.”
And yet you claim this is beyond the pale?
“He was so angry his head literally exploded.”
It seems to me that the use of “literally” here is just doubling down on the “lie” of the metaphor. From my prior post on this:
I don’t know that I’d call Merriam-Webster a bastion of descriptivism.
The descriptivist mentality is obvious when you see how actual linguists talk about language - observation and curiosity. Most of Language Log, for example. The idea that a novel usage could be “annoying” makes about as much sense to a linguist as the idea that a newly described species of beetle could be “annoying” to a biologist, because it did not evolve correctly.
Actually, no, and Alan Smithee makes an interesting and valid point. A great deal of Language Log is taken up with ridiculing how people use language. Geoff Pullum seems to have a special disdain for sign writers. And though they enjoy condemning old-school prescriptivists, Pullum, like Steven Pinker, engage in it themselves, only it is (to use Alan Smithee’s term) grad school prescriptivism instead of grade school prescriptivism: it’s an acknowledgment that language should and does follow rules, but sometimes the rules we’ve been taught are all wrong. A good example is Pinker’s defense of the use of “me” instead of “I” inside conjunctions. He claims it’s correct, not because so many teenagers speak that way and we may as well accept it, but because the alleged wrongness is based on the false assumption that the grammatical case of pronouns inside a conjunction must agree with the case of the conjunction itself.
Furthermore, it’s not hard to find many other “actual linguists” who concur with well-founded prescriptive rules. This is from Introducing Sociolinguistics, Rajend Mesthrie, Edinburgh University Press:
… sociolinguists cannot pretend that prescriptive ideas do not or should not exist. On the contrary, ideas about good and bad language are very influential in society. The British linguist, Deborah Cameron (1995b), coined the term “verbal hygiene” for the practice born of the urge to improve or clean up the language. Just as hygiene is necessary for good health, verbal hygiene is felt to be necessary for everyday language use. She points to the need to pay attention to the role of journalists, writers, editors and broadcasters in promoting an awareness of acceptable public forms of language.
I’ll happily let y’all noun your verbs, verb your adjectives and conjunctions, and literally eat Christ on a cracker in a zillion threads, if you’ll just outlaw the use of ‘exponential’ to mean 'rapid.' I think I recently even saw this in a scientific paper!
Are you still persisting with the hackneyed nonsense that descriptivism means there are no rules to language, and that linguists are therefore hypocrites if they discuss rules?
The difference, as you well know, is that the true rules of a language are empirical rules, followed (usually unconsciously) by all native speakers of a language or dialect. Teasing out the precise empirical rules that native speakers follow is obviously something that linguists are interested in. (And none of these myriad true rules of language usually get any attention from prescriptivists - because they are universal, uncontroversial and followed intuitively by everyone.)
By contract, most prescriptivist “rules” are inventions. They only get any attention from prescriptivists because they are not actually rules that all native speakers follow consistently in actual speech. Pretty much by definition, a prescriptivist rule cannot be an actual rule, otherwise the prescriptivist wouldn’t care.
So no, linguists are not just more sophisticated prescriptivists as you seem to think. None of this is undermined by the fact that some linguists also may comment on good and bad writing style. Unlike you, linguists understand the difference between the rules of language (which are empirically derived and objectively true) and providing commentary on clear writing style and the quirks of real ambiguity that can arise in poor writing.
Yet another district heard from. From my 20 year old American Heritage Dictionary program:
" … dis·re·spect tr.v. dis·re·spect·ed, dis·re·spect·ing, dis·re·spects. To show a lack of respect for."
As to a website to send people to for basic dictionary purposes, there’s always the very hard to remember dictionary.com. Completely unnatural compared to the deeply meaningful word “google”.
They used it. You understood them. English is a wonderfully flexible language like that. However, how you seem to be using “alot” I think you mean “a lot.” See Gaudere’s Rule.
On the contrary, it is you who is not understanding that the concept of a “rule”, or more formally, of a grammar, means radically different things in the scientific context compared to what it means in the usual everyday sense, or at least you’re doing a great job of totally confusing and mucking up the distinction. It’s not that one is important and the other isn’t, it’s that they’re entirely different things and your entire argument is nonsensical. It may be that I haven’t expressed my point clearly enough and you’re just not getting it.
It’s pretty widely accepted and largely uncontroversial that we possess unconscious language skills that govern primitive rules about how we use language, leading to such hypotheses as the idea that all grammars derive from a universal grammar that is at some level innate and instinctive. But many of the actual theories arising from this view are controversial and, even if true, are only a small part of the truth. Which leads us to the following important distinction.
The word “grammar” here, in contexts like the “universal grammar” and “generative grammars” that are supposed to be associated with these insticts, refers to primitives that are far below the lexicon, ordinary grammar, and morphology of a modern language, all of which have to be learned and mastered in order to speak and write fluently and effectively. Descriptive grammar is a scientific view of the former; prescriptive grammar is a pragmatic literary view of the latter. Both are recognized as important by those capable of seeing the bigger picture as you apparently refuse to do. It’s notable that it’s sociolinguistic specialists who, perhaps more than other linguists, recognize the critical importance to speaker and listener alike, and to society as a whole, of speaking and writing with comprehensible clarity and not like an incoherent moron.
Hence the quotes from Rajend Mesthrie and Deborah Cameron that you’ve studiously ignored. Mesthrie is the author or editor of 15 books on linguistics including both the Oxford and Cambridge encyclopedias of sociolinguistics, and I assure you he’s a real linguist. Deborah Cameron, a distinguished professor of language and communication at Oxford and the author of more than a dozen books is also a real linguist. So is Pinker, who as much as he rails against the more pedantic forms of prescriptivism, engages in a great deal of often highly technical ex post facto rationalization that is nothing less than an advanced form of prescriptivism to guide our future judgments – rules that tell why, for instance (to use Pinker’s real-life example) Bill Clinton’s “give Al and I a chance to bring America back” is a hypercorrected solecism, why “me and Alice are going shopping” is actually grammatical, and why “between you and I” is just ridiculous. There is a “why” behind it, and not just because lots of people are or are not talking that way. As Pinker acknowledges himself, “What I am calling for is a more thoughtful discussion of language and how people use it, replacing bubbe-maises (old wives’ tales) with the best scientific knowledge available.”
Better still, with thanks to Greg Charles in #32, see this discussion of the fuzzy and friendly Alot:
The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.
Nonsense, this is absolutely not the distinction between descriptivism (aka the science of linguistics) and prescriptivism (which is at best stylistic opinion, at worst complete nonsense, and in either case not science at all). The science of linguistics describes all aspects of the grammatical and syntactical rules of language as it is actually empirically used (and including how it is learned).
Prescriptivism has no part in the science of linguistics, any more than your personal opinion on the merits of a particular beetle has any part in the science of evolutionary biology.
Who says? The articles ‘the’ ‘a’ and ‘an’ certainly modify nouns and fit the definition of an adjective. They are just a subset of articles. Many sites (and cites) on line say they are adjectives. English doesn’t have a central authority.
This would be like saying ‘very’ is not an adverb it is an intensifier in “a very big cat”.
