Sorry, you’re right. I mean to say that there are indeed certain “rules.”
…I think…
Certainly members of any speech community are able to communicate with the language that they use. Commuinication is a necessity of human existence, so no social group is going to last very long if it can’t use speech to move a thought from one person’s mind to another.
I wonder, however, if all speech communities are created equal. I would state that if one dialect allows the users to communicate with greater breadth, depth, clarity and precision than another dialect, then the first dialect is superior to the second. By this standard, many of the alternate dialects that deviate from correct English are inferior. As an example, consider this sentence which I recently overheard:
“When we got to the concert ground, there was all kinds of shit all over the place.”
If the speaker were using correct English, that sentence would have one and only one meaning, albeit a fairly unlikely meaning: when we arrived at the concert ground, it was covered in feces.
However, today’s youth have widely adopted a variation of English in which the word “shit” can substitute for any noun. Consequently, the original sentence has a virtually infinite number of possible meanings. What covered the concert ground? Garbage? Equipment? Magnesium? Clarity and precision have suffered. The speaker failed to communicate, since his listeners still don’t know what covered the concert ground.
Do they care?
I think I agree with you, but I disagree with your particular example. I was under the impression that “dissing” is exactly the same as – and in fact merely an abbreviation for – “disrespecting” someone.
Probably not, but I care.
I think that’s a fair question.
“What kind ’ ’ do you mean, exactly?”
“Garbarge, or course, idiot. What else do you expect to find on the field after a concert?”
Still, besides computer languages, I think just about every language has words that certain people use like that. They say “shit” because it doesn’t really matter what the stuff was. That doesn’t mean they won’t be able to use more precise terms when they feel it’s necessary.
Well, it’s an interesting speculation, but it seems a little subjective to me.
If someone on TV is announced as a “pundit,” what exactly does that mean? There’s a lot of business English that people think has “greater breadth, depth, etc.” that’s just as vague.
That’s because you’re trying to make the sentence mean something it doesn’t. A language or dialect that cannot express ambiguity seems to me to be inferior to one that can. Suppose you had heard the sentence in so-called correct English: “When we got to the concert ground, there all sorts of activities everywhere.” You don’t know what sort of activities there were, but you wouldn’t say that the language is inferior to one that said, “When we got to the concert ground, it was ankle deep in steamy turds.”
Sorry, but this is a normal process in all human languages. “Shit” is a metaphor here, and natural languages are full of metaphors. If they had said:
“When we got to the concert ground, there were all kinds of undesirable things all over the place.”
the meaning would be basically the same, and no more precise, even if in more formal English, so what would be gained?
“When we got to the concert ground, there was all kinds of shit all over the place.”
If the speaker were using correct English, that sentence would have one and only one meaning, albeit a fairly unlikely meaning: when we arrived at the concert ground, it was covered in feces.
A mistake many people make is saying that a sentence can have one meaning without context. There is no way that sentence has one and only one meaning with no context given. Who is “we”? What concert ground? What do you mean by shit? What place?
The context would also include who the speakers were and what situation they were talking. Maybe the speaker was a hippie. Maybe the speaker was a zoo-keeper going to find animals that escaped from the zoo.
This sentence does not have one and only one meaning. It all depends on context.
I agree, but isn’t that a different issue? Weren’t we assuming that the people talking in this example pretty much knew the context?
More to the point, even when the context is clear between two speakers, in most languages/dialects an utterance–I would wager–can still carry more than one “meaning,” or “interpretation,” or “denotation.”
Even in “superior” ones.
Yes, context is paramount. I just don’t think that it can always specify meaning exactly.
Yes and no. It derives (obviously) from the abbreviation, but different speech communities don’t just do this to save time, IMHO. I think there’s a difference between “dis” and “disrespect.” The former is more aggressive and deliberate–kind of like a cross between “disrespect” and “insult.”