A variant on the classic English language debate brought on by the Weird Al song “Word Crimes.” Now, as argued in the sub links, it may certainly be USED in a discriminatory way, but I’m not sure I agree with some commenters that it’s inherently so.
Thoughts?
It’s pretty well impossible to use prescriptivist philosophy in a non-discriminatory fashion, at least when you’re talking to native speaker adults (that is, people who have passed the language acquisition stage).
Language is extremely closely tied to culture; when you say someone’s language is sub-par (and if it needs to be corrected, it is sub-par by definition) you’re striking at one of the roots of their culture, and putting your culture above theirs because, after all, you corrected them.
In practice, it’s discriminatory as Hell. Look at the massive debate that resulted from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, a.k.a. Ebonics) being used to teach school kids who had that as their primary language.
I’m confused as to whether you’re deliberately being overly generic here or not. Obviously, pointing out an error in grammar could be related to culture, or could be a mark of cultural superiority. But it might not be; not all errors of language are related to culture. They could be simple ignorance.
A British person criticizing an American for writing “color” instead of “colour” is making a cultural judgment. Criticizing someone for using the word “y’all” is a cultural judgment.
Saying a person is incorrect for writing “its” when they mean “it’s” is not cultural. “Its raining outside” and “The car blew it’s engine” are mistakes, not cultural markers. Using quotation marks for emphasis is wrong, not a cultural marker.
There are also simple matters of difference of opinion. The Weird Al video, for instance, presents the “less/fewer” distinction as a clear yes-or-no call, but it really is not, and in a lot of circumstances neither is obviously right or wrong. There’s nothing “discriminatory” about that, though.
SOMETIMES it’s discriminatory as hell. Sometimes it is not.
It comes down to a culture having an agreed-upon language used by people who are well-educated, such that any statement can be translated into a “correct” language whereby all educated speakers will agree on what the statement means (which is not the same as agreeing with the content). If expressions from an alt-culture are introduced, which deviate from the evolved standard, those expressions are no longer fully useful in transmitting information within the whole culture.
This is not about English, and it is not about Ebonics. It is a universal constant in the bedrock of Linguistics, which is, sadly, a discipline in which many very influential people are ignorant.
Only in the same way the police ‘discriminate’ against drunk or reckless drivers.
I’d argue that this is a matter of register or formality. Only the most puckered up pedant would fuss at an it’s/its error in a text message. Most people ignore it in a quick sticky note. Some of us are irritated when we see it a non-work email or temporary signage. Almost all of us would be outraged to find it in a formal wedding invitation or government proclamation. The more formal the writing, the more we demand accurate and standard grammar, spelling and usage.
“Correct” usage is a marker of education (and of the ability to use what one has learned). It is discriminatory in that it helps one distinguish between better- and worse-educated people (or between people who care and people who don’t care). This might be important in hiring, for example, depending on the job. It probably doesn’t matter much for a technical engineer, but it would probably matter a lot for a teacher or for anyone who has to write for public consumption.
And it’s always a matter of degree. One error (I actually typed “affect” instead of “effect” earlier today in a Word document; fortunately the program highlighted the error) would not condemn anyone to the lower depths, but consistent grammatical and spelling failures will make communications more difficult to understand.
As I’m sure everyone has said many times, communication requires understanding on both ends. If a spelling or grammatical error results in ambiguity, then communication has failed. Often it’s just an annoying mistake that doesn’t cloud the meaning, but consistently-applied rules do make communication more reliable in the long term.
Except that education, if it comes from a centralized on-high authority, is discriminatory against everyone who doesn’t get as much influence on that on-high authority as other groups do.
Communication breakdowns happen for a lot of reasons, though, and they can be fixed by asking for clarification without trying to “correct” someone else’s grammar.
True, but apparently not in a way you intended it to be.
Native speakers do make errors in their own languages, granted, but the entire context of “prescriptivism” is peeving on what you see as a persistent, repeated error which crops up again and again in a given context. Do you know what the word for such a thing is, in spoken language? Dialect.
You claim this is true, but it would be interesting to do a study to find out. At a base level, all language use is cultural, but it would be interesting to find out if those features map to given subcultures more than others.
Your post is largely correct, except for “accurate and standard grammar, spelling and usage” is better thought of as “grammar, spelling, and usage that adheres to the written version of the dominant sub-culture’s stated rules.”
But that’s the whole thing: Better educated according to who’s standards? The dominant sub-culture’s, of course, and if you’re not in the dominant sub-culture, prepare to have your language use “corrected” to within an inch of its life.
Depends on the public, of course, which is why advertisers, for example, study usages of the non-dominant sub-cultures they want to advertise to.
This is false and a red herring: False in that the rules people actually follow are written descriptively, not prescriptively, and a red herring in that communication breakdowns happen regardless of the dialect in use, and can be fixed without implying that someone’s use of language is sub-par: Dialect use is immaterial and peeving (the heart and soul of prescriptivism) is not helpful.
So do the rules of Baseball, or Musical notation, or Civil aviation. which come from on-high authority. The system only works if everyone is on the same page, and the on-high authority is the page everybody is on. Do you think you are being discriminated against if you try to do those things by your own rules, flying in the face of the standard? Do you object to on-high authority that discriminates against truck drivers who drive on the left side of the road?
So, tell me: Which on-high authority created English in the first place? Which on-high authority got English to the point where there can even be an on-high authority for English?
There are standards, like it or not. I know several people who speak one way at home, and speak and write another way at work. They make this effort for their jobs for a variety of reasons: they don’t want to be thought ignorant, they want to be eligible for promotion, they know this is the expected way of writing and speaking in the business world because that’s the way people there speak and write.
All ways of speaking and writing may be equally worthy for communication, but if you want to communicate in an environment where the dominant cultural rules are the norm, then you will speak and write according to those rules. In time, if different cultural norms become predominant, those rules will change. A prescriptivist may resist those changes; a descriptivist may welcome them. But to suppose that there should be no rules is not practical on any level.
I never said anything about sub-par. It is about what works in the context of the situation. If the dominant rules are in fact dominant, then it is probably folly to fight with them in an effort to have the legitimacy of your dialect recognized.
I expect one day that my life in California will get easier if I learn Spanish. Doesn’t mean I have to learn it, there is no force compelling it. But the context here is changing enough that it may well become advisable to improve my chances at being understood by others.
It evolved as a vernacular, with refinement being made where necessary by people who needed their language to be exact and unambiguous, such as for writing documents that would need to be understood by people in another time or place. Rules had to be codified, so new words added to the language would have consistent plurals and tenses, but some of the old irregulars remained out of inertia. That way, new things could be said with old forms, and in order to maximize comprehensibility, those rules had to be recognized as universal.
In short, people using English decided and agreed that communications worked better if there were conforming systems, and if everyone followed the pattern of those educated and literate users who were “on high”, because who else was there to follow? English is not unique. Every language spoken by man came about in the same way, and every one of them has a form that is imposed by the people who place the highest demand on the full richness and complexity of the language.
Absolutely nobody is saying there should be no rules. That is impossible, due to how human language works, and it’s a strawman argument in this case as well. I’m not going to engage someone who is going to argue a strawman.
Absolutely none of what you just said in this quoted passage is correct. English has never worked that way.
Just sliding in to say that most engineers have to write reports, memos, letters, specifications, etc. Some of us also write grant applications and public information pieces. The writing style will vary significantly depending on the audience. I think you both agree with that. Audiences matter.
On to Authority. When you’re an engineer, everything you write goes through QA/QC, otherwise known as being routed. It will be combed for bad logic, loopholes, and grammatical or spelling errors. When a small omission or misstatement on a specification can result in a big delay or a costly change order, you don’t let anything out the door that looks like it has an omission or error in it, down to checking commas. Little mistakes make the clients nervous.
So who is the authority? For specifications, Authority, thy name is Caltrans, thy name is FHWA, thy name is California Contract Code. Also the dictionary. You might get a style sheet, too. (Fun fact - in civil engineering speak, the word shall is a much stronger directive than the word will. Wills just say, ‘we’re expecting this.’ Shalls get wielded like clubs.)
Other engineers may have different authorities. Closer to home, every election there are new City Councilmembers who want to see different things in reports and memos. Audience, again. You shrug and shift. Or there’s a court judgement somewhere and all of a sudden none of the local contractors will sign insurance certificates with that sentence, that one right there, in it. That’s an Authority shift. If your Risk Analyst really likes that sentence (due to other judgements, no doubt), you may have many meetings in your future.
It’s a dance. When you write, you’re dancing with Authority and an Audience. Well, if you’re writing to your mom, they’re the same thing. If you can’t dance with both, you’ll have a hard time as an Engineer.
Yllaria: You’re bringing up a different topic. Constructed languages, such as formal legal language and Esperanto and Java, all have what amounts to a standards body which controls them. That’s not in dispute, but it’s also not quite what we’re talking about here. My point is, English as a whole neither has nor needs such a standards body, and that what some people see as such is merely the dominant sub-culture imposing its cultural norms on all of the non-dominant sub-cultures.
And one more note, to possibly head some things off at the pass: If you think the languages of non-dominant sub-cultures don’t have rules, you’re wrong. You’re wrong on a simple, factual level. Those rules may not be written down, or may be written down incompletely, but they exist.
The idea that certain uses of language should be valued over other is one thing.
The idea that the form that should be most valued just happens to be the one you speak…well, that’s something else.
Just be glad English does not have an Académie like French or Spanish, that the pedants will latch on to claim that if it’s not in the Academy’s dictionary then it’s not a word. (To their credit, the modern RAE does not claim that; it just tries to make sure everyone is on the same page as the language evolves so it remains a *common *language across the various lands and peoples.)
This is clearly not true, as everyone has never been on the same page in the history of the world. Even compilers have kinks, so GCC C is different from MS Visual C, etc. Engineers from the same company follow one standard in the US and another when designing for Europe, for example. English drive on the left, the rest of the world on the right. We can get along without overlords.
But I am irked by bad grammar, poor spelling, misused and missing punctuation more than most. But I’ll admit it’s simply a culture clash. It’s just that in this case it’s the literate versus the illiterate. 
No “on-high authority” standardized on capital letters and periods. Literate people the world over and throughout history decided over the years that they were important for readability, while semi-literate dropouts never progressed far enough to appreciate their use.
That’s a lot different than Ebonics and “y’all”. And I’ll admit, plenty of fully literate adults don’t mind slipping into teenage texting patterns in many situations. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and rarely look down on poor writing unless it’s a clear, persistent pattern and they seem incapable of understanding why gibberish I can’t make sense of might bother me.
I often think my life is easier because I come from such a specific subculture (hillbilly) of the dominant culture. I have linguistic areas that do and don’t conform to what prescriptivists demand (the lawn needs mowed. It just does!), which makes it really easy to see that I’m doing the same thing when I’m saying something prescriptivists would approve of as when I’m doing something that makes them shudder–using the dialect I grew up in.