Dogmatism can be entertaining. Fanatical devotion to an appropriate cause is frequently praiseworthy. I really hope neither of you would do this on a date, though
Hellestal, I agree with your notion that “different” is not equal to “wrong.” But you’re as far off one end of reality as HolyFreakingMoly is off the other. You appear to be saying that any old random gibberish is inherently “right.” If I see an unfamiliar (to me) word and grotesquely mispronounce it, that isn’t “dialect.” I made a mistake.
If (Heaven forfend) I ended up dating again, I would not ask out a woman unless I thought I could communicate with her. If her speech patterns were so far off the norm that it was distracting, and it wasn’t a recognizable regional or cultural dialect that I recognized and felt I could get used to, that would be a dealbreaker. I think that’s what HolyFreakingMoly is saying, too.
Lukilee, these sentens aint worng, curs Hellestal goes like it were a dialect.
No no, I mean like on a date or when you’re talking to them. They seem like they attach extra importance to whoever’s on the phone than the person (usually me) that they are talking to face to face. I would never answer a phone during a conversation unless I kept getting calls from the same person over and over. Its rude, and whatever it is, should be able to wait
Come on, now. That’s the exact opposite of what I explicitly said.
The complaints in this thread have all been about established dialectical variations. Every single one of them. Those forms are not mistakes.
But it’s still fine to be turned off by them. I’ve said repeatedly that that’s fine. I’ve said in every post in this thread that that’s fine. I don’t know how I could possibly make that more clear.* The way another person speaks is absolutely going to be an important matter for dating. Completely understandable. And in fact, my own silly deal breaker is extremely similar, as I mentioned in my first post:
I’ve spent time living abroad in different countries, so it’s not important to me that people’s speech be perfect. But I do want them to display adaptability to the situation. A native English speaker who’s stuck saying “ain’t” regardless of the social situation will not get a pass from me, and that’s regardless of their native dialect of English. That was my contribution to the thread, small though it was. I don’t want to make passive-aggressive swipes at people, but I’m also not going to sit here in silence while people continually attribute to me things I’ve never said.
*The “utterly obvious” comment was extremely snotty of me, and I shouldn’t have said it. It was obviously distracting from the main point. What’s obvious to a person who has studied linguistics will not necessarily be obvious to other people. But I didn’t just say “obvious” and then move on. I specifically compared examples of grammatical and ungrammatical speech.
My single biggest dealbreaker would be indecisiveness…
If I ask you *“What do you want to do…?” *I am really saying “I want to see what you consider as fun, and if there is any point even continuing this charade” hell I may well enjoy it and find we have a (gasp) common interest
What I am NOT looking for is wishy-washy “Whatever you like is fine”…
If I wanted to use THIS date to show you what I like I would have warned you from the start.
Other breakers:
Smoker or not, I dont particularly care (I am one). But if I light up (I only do it outside in open air anyway) and you start an anti-smoker’s diatribe… Consider yourself lucky if you get a bus fare
Vegetarians for any reason other than medical grounds (And even then thats a stretch)
“Cutsie stuff” If I successfully get to the stage where we are in your house and about to get naughty and I see cuddly toys or underwear with sesame street characters, I am out of there…
Oh god, fingernails…Long ones on men are just revolting. And the worst…are the guys who only let their pinky nail grow out. Took me a while to find out WHY some people do it, which makes it even more disgusting.
Oh and…well hair is SUPER important. It has to be between a certain length. About an inch or two of growth. No shaved heads. No long hair. No beards or mustache and for the love of god, please please PLEASE have minimal chest hair. None is best!
Being rude to waitstaff is an instant dealbreaker, as in, date’s over, nothing to see here, time to go home.
Also, anyone who brings up prescriptivism on anything like a first date is probably going to regret it, and anyone who rails on about the death of the English language is out. That’s more of a “stick around until the meal/movie/whatever is over and then make an excuse to get out” thing, though. Similarly, I lose sexual interest immediately in anyone who claims to speak terrible English, makes a conscious effort to stop saying “like”, etc. I think I just start to see someone as a case study at that point.
As for smoking, I really like the smell of stale smoke on someone’s body and clothes when I’m cuddling them. Crazy, I know.
Oh, and AHunter3, EWWWWW. Those kind of fingertips are an instant turnoff to me.
Seconded. And anybody going into a career where a suit is required (except elected office, I guess) is right out. I’m also suspicious of overachievers in general; I’ve learned to love one or two of them as friends (I go to UCSD, after all), but it’s still a total turn-off for me.
And this is probably covered by most of the other stuff, but if you’re a business major or a fraternity member, please save yourself some time and don’t ask me out.
Also, I agree with all this:
For some reason, the Asian thing comes up a lot at UCSD. It’s not like our percentage of Asian students is significantly higher than in the general population here, but a lot of people have a stick up their ass about that community anyway. I can’t take that ignorant bullshit. I just don’t have time for it; I have too much shit going on in my own life to deal with a date’s ignorance too.
OK, WTF, spoiler tag, maybe? Come on, that movie came out just last year and you’re going to spring the ending on us when we least expect it? This isn’t even a movie thread.
OK, how about people who insist that their arbitrary definitions supersede the reality established by empirical science, just because their particular misconception of the field in question happens to be relatively widespread? If you were a cancer specialist and people just went around saying that broccoli cures cancer, you’d speak up about it.
That said, I think we need to lay off HolyFreakingMoly, who may well be using language that gets our descriptivist hackles up*, but (s)he’s essentially conceded that the usages (s)he doesn’t like are acceptable in their proper context. (S)He just doesn’t want to hear them on a date. What’s wrong with that? There are certain dialects that just shouldn’t be used at job interviews or on dates with HolyFreakingMoly.
*Word to the wise: the phrase “crap grammar” is going to start arguments at any gathering of linguists unless you’re talking about WTF grammar.
Sigh, this again…
Reductio ad absurdium is a fallacy, not a legitimate debate tactic. You’ve pulled the classic prescriptivist fallacy of claiming that descriptivists should, by our own rules, sanction every absurd usage that anyone could possibly come up with. That’s not what it’s about at all. What we’re talking about is that each dialect has its own variations on correct usage within that dialect. Nobody has claimed that gibberish or grotesque mispronunciations are inherently right.
I agree with this sort of, but it’s good to make exceptions as needed - think about Barack Obama, who has a law degree from Harvard. He went there for all the right reasons - because he saw it as a pathway to being a more effective advocate for change. (At least, this is what I deduce from his book Dreams of My Father.)
Business school seems a bit harder to justify, but my boss has an MBA and (as far as I know; I only interact with him professionally) his heart is in the right place. At any rate, his job involves strengthening Indonesian industry, but with the understanding that it should be done in a socially responsible, environmentally sound way, and so that ordinary people have jobs.
That’s an interesting perspective on that issue, CairoCarol. I wish I could say that I were a good enough person to evaluate that so deeply, but really, I tend to just shut those kinds of people out of my life.
Again, I’ve been making exceptions–for example, I have a friend who’s a full-time student and works nine jobs. I shit you not. Her email signature is longer than most of my entire emails. I’m pretty sure she’s addicted to stress, which is not uncommon on a UC campus.
Still, any initial attraction is usually gone once I find out someone is part of one of those categories. Barack Obama would probably be an exception, judging from the fact that he likes to crank up the heater and dress down to IT manager level. That’s a man after my own heart. Not to mention that he knew how to have fun in college. If you’re an overachiever and you want to impress me, it helps to know how to make time for relaxing with the people you love, which seems to be a particular skill of Barry’s. (The whole change-the-world thing helps too. )
He’s also a straight shooter, which I just admire the hell out of, especially in a politician. It’s probably easy to disagree with his policies, but the man is just hard as hell to dislike on a personal level. Everything from his casual but assertive “I screwed up” to the dijon mustard episode he described in The Audacity of Hope.
But then, I could go on for days about Barack Obama. What were we talking about again?
Hey, what a coincidence! Just now, I accidentally stumbled upon my go-to cite for combating excluded-middle/ad-absurdium prescriptivist theology, which I wasn’t going to bother to find:
Women who have three or more cats or three or more dogs. It’s a perfectly valid lifestyle choice to have as many pets as you can handle, but in most of these circumstances the pets rule the house and the house or apartment kinda-sorta stinks, but they are oblivious to it.
Women who insist you treat their pets exactly like children, even if the dog or cat is very poorly socialized or behaved
Women who *claim *, almost as a point of pride, to like challenging intellectual and rhetorical discourse without adding the required addendum “as long as you agree with me and don’t ever contradict or argue with any of my positions or opinions”.
Women who can’t cook or are unadventurous diners who won’t try new dishes
Women who are crypto racists or homophobes
Women with no fashion sense. If you are professionally dowdy it generally speaks to other parts of your personality
Women who let their kids walk all over them and treat them like doormats
Hypochondriacs who want to talk and talk about their laundry list of ailments. I feel for you if you have problems but there’s a limit.
Women who
Try to act cute when they are way past that stage (Just plain, hate it)
Are loud speakers and generally being noisy. (Seems uncivilized and draws attention)
Complain about food during the whole meal (Dont like it, dont eat it)
Dislike walking (Walking is very enjoyable for me)
Comment about my socks collection (I have around 100, I already know it is wierd)
Oops! I wasn’t thinking about that. I apologize. I went back and edited in a spoiler tag. I’m sorry if I messed it up for you.
I understand. I wasn’t using it as a debate tactic so much as an expression of frustration. Extreme positions bother me. I need anchors in life. As a writer/editor, my job is to communicate clearly. When I encounter a “misspelled” or “mispronounced” word, I really don’t care whether a community of 74 English-speaking Slovakian immigrants in Haiti do it that way, thus making it “right” or “acceptable.” What matters is whether my audience will understand it and not find it jarring, annoying, or unclear.
Descriptivists who seem (to me) to accept virtually everything as a legitimate dialect bother me every bit as much as proscriptivists who tell me I can’t start a sentence with “and” or use the word “ain’t.”
I’d extend this to anyone who makes disparaging comments about someone’s collection of anything.
Similarly, men who act campy. Unfortunately, this cuts down my dating pool a fair bit.
Thankfully, that’s changing thanks to a generational shift in the gay world. And spending all of my time at the campus LGBT community center means I’m hanging out with gay activists, who are mostly too emo to be campy. Of course, it’s hard not to be, after the harsh lessons of Proposition 8. But I digress.
Apology accepted. Thanks for being more thoughtful in retrospect. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
I must admit, the Slovakian-immigrants-in-Haiti thing made me smile a little.
But, of course, the perspective of an editor is different. That sort of job requires a certain degree of prescriptivism, just like public speaking. That being said,
I think you’ll find that most descriptivists don’t accept virtually everything as a legitimate dialect, and are probably a bit offended by that characterization–which is mostly a fabrication of prescriptivists. The Language Log post I linked to a little earlier expresses that a little better than I can. When you exclude the middle, you’ll get frustrated at the extremes without realizing that the reasonable viewpoint you’re looking for is right under your nose.
Dude, it’s prescriptivists ;). (Unless you are using another word that I have not encountered before.)
I think people should remember that written language is not the same as spoken language. Prescriptive grammar makes more sense when dealing with written language for a number of reasons. The primary reason is probably that the intended recipients of written language may be far from the writer in distance and time. Another reason is written language generally has fewer channels of information than spoken language (i.e. it has a huge non-verbal component as well as a real-time feedback system).
I too feel that people should be able and willing to adjust their speaking style to facilitate communication when there is a need to do so. However, it is not dogmatic, in any useful sense, to object when someone says that non-standard grammar is bad grammar or ungrammatical.
I said I was an editor. I didn’t say I was a good editor.
Let me try one more time to clarify my position: I don’t feel that all prescriptivists are extreme. I am just annoyed by the ones that are. Ditto the descriptivists.
Guys who don’t tip in restaurants. Now I know there is a Europe/US divide here, that in the US it is totally unacceptable not to tip, whereas in the UK and Europe it is not such a big deal. But I once went out with a guy who didn’t tip at all, and just looked baffled when I took him up on it. First and last date!
