Which is still a form of “describing, not defending.” IIRC, Pinker et al. argue that even speakers of so-called nonstandard English instinctively follow certain deep-seated grammatical rules. (The usual argument goes something like: “You might hear ‘Me and Bob ain’t got no money,’ but you’ll never hear ‘Me Bob and money ain’t no got.’”)
Even there, the rules can be a lot laxer for poetry in its various forms. I could maybe see “Me Bob and Money Ain’t No Got” as a song lyric, for instance.
My favorite example of how grammar rules aren’t just what’s taught in class, and how native speakers use grammar reflexively, is order of adjectives. An English speaker, of any socioeconomic background, might refer to a “big red rubber ball”, but would never refer to a “rubber red big ball”.
I know the objections to it. The objections are almost mantric, and never change. I just don’t agree with them anymore than you agree with the opposite view.
I don’t understand your point. Of course I don’t use linguistic constructions that I don’t like. Is this surprising?
And my passion for language is genuine, but I’m not trying to convince anyone. I appreciate good writing and strive for it myself; whether I achieve it or not is another question. But that’s exactly why I generally dislike sloppy constructions and have a preference for precision, though I have no problem with playful metaphors in the right contexts. I also probably have a bias for precision because of my past involvement in technical writing.
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No, while the “language instinct” argument is absolutely true, that’s not what Pinker is talking about in “Grammar Puss”. Here he’s taking issue with how some rules of formal English grammar are applied.
To cite specific examples, Pinker spends some time analytically justifying double negatives (“I don’t got no money”), and then engages in an incredibly contrived justification for the infamous “I could care less”. He also defends – this time successfully – the use of “hopefully” to start a sentence, because it’s a sentence adverb that functions differently from a “verb phrase” adverb like “carefully”.
His most interesting analysis is the matter of pronoun case inside a conjunction, as in “Me and Alice are going to the movies”. This is supposed to be wrong based on the assumtion that if a conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But, Pinker claims, that is just false. One says “Bob and Alice are going to the movies”, and no one remarks that since both “Bob” and “Alice” are singular, then the conjunction must be singular. If there is no agreement on number, why should there be agreement on case?
The point is that in all these examples, Pinker doesn’t take issue with the written rules of formal grammar, but rather argues that some of them don’t apply the way we think they should.
No I do not. Not even for the low bar of “at least to some extent.” Your complaints are invariably regarding conversational usages, whether written or spoken, and perhaps the creep of conversational standards into venues that have traditionally not been their domain.
The use of “literally” as an intensifier, the shortening of the phrase “I couldn’t care less” into “I could care less”, an host of other conversational language usages that annoy you, are not related to literacy levels.
I am often hesitant to accept that which relies on being self-evident as its evidence or that requires me to imagine data.
I suspect it is true and it makes sense that it would be. It seems to me that most learn to write well by virtue of being well read, and that it is unlikely to be a skillful writer without being a reader.
It is however a completely different subject than your annoyance with changes in language usage, and with language chosen with an audience other than you as the primary target. And that seems to really be the essence here.
You’re right, and that’s a fascinating one. Native English speakers seem to have internalized a sort of priority order of adjectives that is usually something like the following – there are undoubtedly exceptions but it seems to work for examples that I can think of:
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Opinion (e.g., lovely, horrible, nice)
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Size (e.g., big, small, tall)
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Age (e.g., young, old, ancient)
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Shape (e.g., round, square, flat)
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Color (e.g., red, blue, pale)
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Origin (e.g., French, Canadian, Martian)
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Material (e.g., rubber, metal, silk)
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Purpose/Qualifier (e.g., sleeping [as in sleeping bag], racing [as in racing car])
I just wish we’d turn it around and put the noun before the adjectives. IOW “Army style”. So not a “big red rubber ball”, but rather a “ball rubber red big”. True Army style injects commas in there, but those are only needed because that word order isn’t English standard usage. But it sure ought to be.
In each case put the context-setter up close to the front and the things that modify the context after the context. Each successive adjective refines our image of the noun being modifed.
Just as Mark Twain famously derided German’s habit of throwing the verbs in at the end of a sentence leaving the whole thing incomprehensible until the last couple of words.
Is this just because the adjectives that are close to each other, relate to each other?
[big, red] is a description of the visual appearance
[red rubber] is a description of the material
[rubber ball] is a description of the type of object
Or am I just imposing arbitrary logic on something that isn’t logically rooted?
I’m, just thinking if we insert ‘bouncy’ into the mix, any of these are OK:
Big bouncy red rubber ball
Big red bouncy rubber ball
And these are not terrible:
Bouncy big red rubber ball
Big red rubber bouncy ball
That one reads as if it’s describing a particular type of bouncy ball.
Do you agree or disagree with the “natural order” of adjectives I just posted a couple of posts up? According to that reverse priority order, “bouncy” would be the last adjective, because it’s a qualifier, so “big red rubber bouncy ball”. Although “big red bouncy rubber ball” sounds OK to me. I think the idea of the qualifier coming last is because in most cases it’s the most important – if there were many kinds of rubber balls, some bouncy, some not, you would want to stress that this was a big red rubber bouncy-ball, as opposed to some other type of big red rubber ball.
No, I don’t disagree with it as a generalised rule, but (as is, and I think has pretty much always been my point), you can take rules too far.
Big bouncy red rubber ball works because of the BB RR B aliteration
Big red bouncy rubber ball works because ‘bouncy rubber ball’ works on its own
Bouncy big red rubber ball sounds a bit strained but could happen if it was required for lyrics or poetry
Big red rubber bouncy ball works because ‘bouncy ball’ works
I’d be interested if anyone can think of a series of adjectives where this reverse priority order doesn’t work. I’m sure there are cases, but I can’t think of any. For instance if I wanted to describe a “tall old French woman”, this follows the prescribed order. Any other order sounds wrong.
Is that “natural order” also something that occurs in other languages, or do other languages have different “natural orders”?
In German do those long compound nouns have a similar “natural order”?
IOW does it reflect an aspect of human cognitive or individual language idiosyncrasies?
There is a defined order in English. No one is taught it, yet everyone knows it. It goes opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
Unless it follows the I–A–O rule, as in Big Bad Wolf.
Forgive me if I am misrepresenting your stance, but to me, it seems a bit like if someone walked around an art gallery and stated that the examples of naturalism or realism were better than all of the other art styles, because of some notion that painting should be like photography and is best if it precisely and realistically depicts the subject.
There would be nothing wrong with that as an opinion or preference of course, but it would be missing the point to look at a cubist or impressionist painting and criticise its deviation from photorealism as if this were a failing of the artist.
Edit: not so much in the post I actually replied to, but earlier it did seem like you were equating formality with superiority
FWIW
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-041835
Adjective ordering preferences stand as perhaps one of the best candidates for a true linguistic universal: When multiple adjectives are strung together in service of modifying some noun, speakers of different languages—from English to Mandarin to Hebrew—exhibit robust and reliable preferences concerning the relative order of those adjectives. More importantly, despite the diversity of the languages investigated, the very same preferences surface over and over again. This tantalizing regularity has led to decades of research pursuing the source of these preferences.
I don’t think you’re misrepresenting my point so much as misunderstanding it and using an inappropriate analogy.
My personal writing style aside, I have no problem with very informal writing, with playful language (PG Wodehouse was a master of it), and even with very unconventional use of language in poetry. If I come across a turn of phrase that stirs me emotionally, I’d be the last to nitpick its grammatical correctness. I think I can be a competent formal writer who also appreciates language as an art form. By the judgmental criteria that you seem to have drawn up, I should probably loathe Shakespeare because everything he wrote is “wrong”! The reality is that when I was in college I had a Shakespeare class that was given by a noted Shakespearean scholar that instilled in me a lifelong love of his plays and sonnets. It’s part of the history of my love of language.
The problem with your analogy is that the judgment of the quality of the paintings in an art gallery is almost completely subjective, whereas the quality of writing is not. Whether or not it adheres to accepted norms is fairly objective, and the norms are published in reference books, though opinions may vary as to whether such deviations are acceptable. Pedantry about grammar aside, it’s usually also very obvious when someone is a top-notch writer – they write with style, with the confidence to creatively deviate from established norms to add impact to their writing; as someone once put it, their writing literally sings (I’m using “literally” here in an appropriate metaphorical sense 
).
No. But I was indeed lamenting the fact that we live in a surprisingly illiterate society by objective measures, with the consequence that half the freaking adult population cannot read above grade-school level (which severely limits their world view), and presumably cannot write any better, so often cannot communicate effectively outside their own community of peers. It really, really irks me when I see what I regard (perhaps wrongly) as a defense of objective linguistic defects. As I said earlier, some 56 to 57% of American adults fall below the Level 3 measure of literary competence, which means that they’re at least partially illiterate. By any set of reasonable social values, this cannot be a good thing.
Fair enough. My apologies for missing the mark
And I think this is a good example of use of language being syntactically correct, but failing to convey the desired meaning. Your thesis has gone through several revisions in this thread, and the first few iterations I had difficulty understanding what you meant, but as you revised it, your points became clear.
If I’m actually understanding it correctly though, I think these series of posts support your argument. Writing is a means to convey a message, and the default should be with “proper” grammar, but it’s not the only way, and there may be reasons to use alternative grammar.
Or stated more succinctly: code-switching in language exists for a reason.
And as long as I have the reply window open…
I think it should qualify, because my one word definitions are something like
literally (actual/metaphorical) or (true/exaggerated)
Plus it’s on this list, and there is literally no higher authority on words than a popular click bait site.