When did "pull oneself by one's bootstraps" flip meaning ?

Factual Questions
41

As Exapno has already explained quite well, Kobal2’s original comment about the “descriptivist tide” was a bit odd. It deserved comment since it appears to be based on the persistent misconception that descriptivists are just the same kind of thing as prescriptivists: it’s just that descriptivists don’t have any solid values, they don’t care about upholding standards, they are laissez faire to the point that “anything goes”.

In fact, descriptivism simply means “doing science”. All of science is descriptivist by definition: a physicist seeks to understand the rules of nature, not to prescribe them; a biologist seeks to understand the process of evolution, not to practice eugenics. In just the same way, descriptivism is the empirical scientific approach to understanding language. Contra wolfpup, all linguists are descriptivists by definition, since they seek to understand language as it is through the evidence of the way people actually speak. A linguist (when engaged in linguistics) does not make value judgments about the way people should be speaking any more than a physicist seeks to tell planets how to orbit.

That’s not to say that we cannot be (descriptivist) linguists and also have subjective value judgments about language. Any linguist can appreciate great literature and recognize terrible writing just like anyone else. But the key is to understand the category difference between a scientific description of language and a stylistic value judgment about clarity or beauty in language. Virtually nobody who calls themselves a prescriptivist understands this category difference and why it’s significant.

What does that mean in practice? It was entertaining to hear that the reversal of meaning in the “bad apple” metaphor is probably attributable to the Osmonds. That’s descriptivist linguistics, and a very cool thing to learn. At the same time, I fully agree with Kobal2’s opinion that the original meaning of the “bad apple” metaphor obviously makes much more sense. Who could disagree? But what makes no sense is to blame a “descriptivist tide” for this change. That’s a category error. As Exapno said with a different simile, it’s like blaming a biologist for the fact that we evolved from damned dirty apes.

There are some value judgments that are so clear that you’d have to be a fool to disagree: that Shakespeare was a great writer, for example. More controversially, someone might claim that Eminem’s output shows similar talent. But both are in the same category - they are value judgments rather than empirical observations. And prescriptivism can be okay when it’s recognized (with due humility, when appropriate) as falling into that category.

And here’s the rub. People who call themselves prescriptivists almost never understand the nature of language well enough to grasp when prescriptivism is appropriate and when it’s not. Kobal2’s opinions about the reversal of the “bad apple” metaphor are sound and logical, and I share them fully. This is a perfectly reasonable form of prescriptivism. But the problem is that prescriptivists frequently express equally strident opinions about completely arbitrary aspects of language. They insist that one way of speaking - invariably the dialect of their own time and place - is right, and the way that certain other people speak is to be decried as wrong.

While Kobal2’s reasoning is logical and reasonable, and the meaning of the “bad apple” metaphor is not arbitrary, prescriptivists will often make similar but bogus arguments based on “logic” or “clarity of communication” simply to seek to impose the arbitrary conventions of their own familiar dialect as “proper” and “correct”.

It’s interesting that nobody has any problem with the idea that (say) Japanese people employ a completely different language to communicate. There might be some senses in which one language is better than the other for certain purposes of communication, but nobody would claim that English is “right” while Japanese is “wrong”. We all recognize that the differences are arbitrary conventions. And in a similar way, nobody has any problem with the existence of differences between American and British English, most of which are similarly understood to be just a matter of arbitrary convention. So we don’t, in principle, have any problem with people in other communities using different conventions in language. It seems to be when we perceive that people are supposed to be speaking our own dialect that the uglier forms of prescriptivism arise, when the prescriptivists start to insist that certain entirely arbitrary variants in grammar or semantics are just wrong.

Sure, most prescriptivism is harmless ignorance. But, even setting aside the question of how much we can really ever influence the development of language through prescription, it’s astonishing how most people fail to recognize the difference between a valid argument based on genuine merit, and pseudo-logical rationalizations to support a familiar form of speech. All prescriptivism is designed to promote the form of speech of prescriptivist’s own time and place, and the differences in the decried inferior forms of speech are often entirely arbitrary. If prescriptivism is genuinely about merit, when has a prescriptivist every advocated a change in the language to something less familiar but superior?

42

Here’s an analogy to illustrate the category error.

Prescriptivists are the Conservative Party of language. Since descriptivists apparently don’t hold solid conservative values, they assume that “descriptivist” must mean “socialist” or “anarchist”. In fact, it means “scientist”.

43

Agreed. I think Kobal is misunderstanding the usage. When someone says “it’s just a few bad apples”, they are acknowledging that bad apples can ruin all of the apples given time. Removing the bad apples prevents the spread of the rot. The term is being used appropriately; they are saying that the bad apples were dealt with before the behavior had ruined the organization. Hence, “only a few bad apples”. Again, the implication is that they were removed before things got worse.

No misuse of the idiom, no “flipping” of meaning whatsoever.

44

Perhaps you’re right. It’s an older crowd on here. It would be interesting to survey some younger people to find out if they are clear that the idiom still has the original meaning.

45

I always associated the “by his bootstraps” with Horatio Alger stories, although I suppose there’s no direct quote or whatever that really connects that - but “by their own heroic effort” seems to be the implied meaning.

Bootstrapping a computer, as I recall, certainly goes back to when computers were loaded for each task - a very simple program loaded a more complex program that would load the necessary more complex program to do the actual work. The idea of a series of programs each doing progressively more complex work until things were working - was equated with the task of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.

46

No descriptivist has ever said that. It’s precisely the way that prescriptivists persistently misrepresent descriptivism, however often they are corrected.

Since you insist on restating the trope that descriptivist linguistics means “anything goes”, here’s my response again. It’s preposterous to claim that prescriptivists are the ones who truly understand the concept of “rules” in language. Most prescriptivism essentially derives from misunderstanding the concept. I’m talking more about grammatical rules below, but the same applies to semantics.

(See also the subsequent discussion in that thread.)

No true rule of language is ever going to get any attention from a prescriptivist. If all native speakers of a dialect follow a rule flawlessly, why would they care? Any “rule” promoted by a prescriptivist is always going to be something where variant usages are prevalent, otherwise there would be nothing to peeve about. Here’s a reliable rule: any rule described by a prescriptivist is not a rule. If you want to understand the actual rules of language, talk to a linguist.

47

Reading old prescriptivist arguments, though, can be fascinating. Jonathan Swift writes:

" There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very must to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables; yet, to same Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. This was a Pretence to take up the same Custom in Prose; so that most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, Fledg’d, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain."

The rule that Swift is complaining about people breaking is pronouncing words that end with “-ed” by merging the “-ed” into the previous syllable, instead of pronouncing “-ed” as a part of a new syllable (like all decent folks should) - apparently, every word that ended with “-ed” should be pronounced the way that we say “learned” when used as an adjective (or “blessed” when about half the time).

48

I hope nobody is discouraged from collecting rules and compiling grammars and dictionaries, otherwise it would get much harder to learn languages. (The old technique of reading a lot remains indispensable, but it is nice to be able to look stuff up.)

49

Yup, this is a great example of a prescriptivist doing what they usually do: a rambling rationalization insisting that one entirely arbitrary convention (as always, the one familiar to him) is superior, rather than just different.

It’s transparent to everyone now that his claims for the superiority of the older pronunciation are a rationalization, because the language did change, and he’s not arguing in favor of what is now the familiar form. But modern prescriptivists learn nothing from this, and seem totally lacking in insight that most of the differences that they peeve about are purely arbitrary, and that their assertion that the disputed form is inferior or objectively wrong (rather than just different) is based on similarly weak rationalizations.

50

Obviously young children do not use grammars and dictionaries to acquire spoken language. Presumably you’re talking more about literacy (written language).

Learning to write is quite different from learning to speak, it’s a more didactic process, with rules and conventions taught more explicitly. Native speakers already have spoken grammar in place, so it’s not a question of learning the fundamental grammar at that stage. What you’d call a “grammar” (for a native speaker) does not contain the fundamental rules of the structure of language. It’s about learning writing conventions, how writing differs somewhat from speech, formal vs informal register, acquiring good writing style.

51

Wrong. For instance, I present to you one of the resident descriptivists on this board who frequently opines on the subject, stating precisely what you claim no descriptivist has ever said:

“Meaning was communicated. The person who used the language therefore used it correctly.”

There are many other examples right on this board.

And speaking of misrepresenting things …

… that’s a fine bit of misrepresentation you’re doing yourself there! You are totally muddling two completely different concepts – the science of linguistics which studies language, and the art of using language creatively and effectively – an obfuscatory muddling that I never made. You’ve constructed a straw man argument that I never made, and then proceeded to demolish it to your great satisfaction. When I speak of language rules I speak of the latter – the art of using language creatively and effectively – which includes style preferences and a desire for discipline and consistency in usage for the sake of clarity. You appear to acknowledge this in the next paragraph in discussing the subjectivity of these language values, but then screw it all up in the last sentence by inexplicably making the bizarre claim that no prescriptivist has ever recognized this distinction.

You make a very good analogy in a subsequent post where you compare prescriptivism and descriptivism to conservatism and liberalism. You should give that some further thought, and take your own advice to heart. Just as in political distinctions where there is a spectrum within which individuals fall along a broad continuum reflecting subjective values, so it is with our approach to the use of language. To arbitrarily define some straw-man concept of a “prescriptivist” and then accuse this hypothetical non-existent entity of “ignorance” (as you did in the last paragraph of post #41) is exactly like accusing a conservative or a liberal of “ignorance” because of his relative position on the political spectrum: it’s just an absurd, meaningless pejorative that’s in the category of “not even wrong”.

52

Since this was Swift, are you sure he was being prescriptivist rather than satirizing prescriptivists? :wink:

Most of the nonsense behind the amateur prescriptivist argument stems from school days. English teachers have a hard job. Children first learning the language are incapable of understanding the nuances of ten billion earlier writers and the various shades of meaning that are needed to understand the ten billion contexts. Rules are critical for teachers and I don’t blame them for teaching language that way.

The ones I blame are the ones who clamp onto those rules and insist on dragging them into adulthood without bothering to learn nuance and context. Few people ever become linguists and nobody outside the profession understands what they do. When people who never went beyond arithmetic try to make pronouncements about advanced math, sufficient real mathematicians exist to tell them how wrong they are, and have sufficient real world prestige to make their denunciations stick. Telling prescriptivists that their blatherings are as meaningful as trying to insist that octonions have to be communicative because they learned the word in fourth grade doesn’t go over as well.

Usage does not have rules. It has snobbery. A recent usage guide is titled Right, Wrong, and Risky. Right and wrong are mostly applied to cases where similar words get confused for one another. Actual usage is handled under risk, i.e. the risk that some pedant or snob will downgrade you for not conforming to old-fashioned - risk-free - usage no matter the situation. It’s English class for adults. Learn these rules and you won’t get a red mark on the paper you handed in.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with this. Most people need rules about language because they are incapable of cutting through the thickets of discourse by themselves. And why should they? Only professionals need to understand language in such depth. And here’s a little secret: no two professional writers agree about usage. Prescriptivists don’t want to hear that, of course, but the truth is that prescriptivism died in 1968. That’s when the American Heritage Dictionary, intended to be a correction to the heretical Webster’s Third, was released. But the AHD people thought they would be clever. They compiled a usage panel of 200 famous writers and asked them whether they approved of various usages. They thought this would stomp modernist language into the ground. Instead, the answers were all over the place. On average every usage was supported by 100 writers and denounced by the other 100. There were no rules. The best and the brightest couldn’t agree.

That was over a half century ago. The descriptivist tide, as the OP put it, has been coming in for all of our adult lifetimes. No excuse exists for an adult to be a prescriptivist. It’s as dead as phlogiston, pseudoscientific as creationism. There was no Golden Age of language. It changed always and the changes were always decried as the death of language. The English language has been dying for hundreds of years if you talk to a prescriptivist. But it hasn’t. It’s bigger and better and more nuanced and more capable than ever.

And you want to know what will happen to the worst stuff? One of two things. Either it’ll disappear or else it will become so ingrained that future prescriptivists will insist on its being used. Quel irony.

P.S. Written before I saw wolfpup’s post, which I will have to get to later.

53

I was about to say the same thing. And I promise that A Modest Proposal was not sincere.

54

That is absolutely not what I said. That was the whole point, that this is not the correct analogy, it’s just that prescriptivists think it is, and that’s their category error. Perhaps you should read it more carefully, and take it to heart:

Presciptivist is to descriptivist as conservative is to scientist.

55

Ignorance fought. I’ve only ever taken a cursory look at it, but I always thought it was genuine. Poe’s Law, I guess.

56

Hm. Good point. Looking around, I find this article strongly argues that Swift was satirizing Welcome to books on Oxford Academic | Oxford Academic (but also refers to other authors who take Swift to be sincere). I don’t know enough to tell one way or another.

57

I misread your attempted analogy because it was so obviously applicable to the situation and your strained intended meaning was so bizarre and obscure. The respect and the pragmatic utility that one accords to the traditions and rules of language is indeed closely analogous to the subjective values along the conservative-liberal political spectrum. How one subjectively approaches language formalisms is entirely subjective and has absolutely nothing to do with “science”.

Any chance that you will actually reply to the refutations in my post #51? Specifically, that descriptivists really do say the things you claim they never say, and that you have been totally muddling the distinction between the science of linguistics and the pragmatic arts of usage and style.

58

First of all - no, I’m not going to dissect a one sentence comment that LHoD made thirteen years ago, and how it might be interpreted or misinterpreted. Do you really think something hinges on that?

The underlying point is that you persistently misrepresent descriptivism as being in the same category as prescriptivism. You seem to think that both are in the business of making value judgments about language, but they just have different values; and that descriptivism involves a value judgment that “anything goes”. Are you now actually claiming that you believe this misconception, despite repeated refutations, just because a brief comment in 2005 could be interpreted that way? Or do you accept what I and others have explained many times: that descriptivism is simply the science of linguistics, it’s about making empirical observations about the nature of language, rather than value judgments.

That was the point of my analogy about conservatism. Prescriptivism is linguistic politics; descriptivism is science. They are in different categories, and your mistake is to assume that descriptivism just means different politics.

It’s ironic that you’re claiming that I’m the one muddling empirical science (i.e. descriptivism) with stylistic value judgments about language. The entire problem with prescriptivism is the failure to distinguish between value judgments about arbitrary norms and empirical reality. The reality is that language is diverse and mutable, and that most variation is entirely arbitrary, with few variants objectively better or worse than any other. And, of course, there are many dialects, with none inherently superior to any other, and all equally complex.

I have no problem with anyone expressing their opinions about good use of language, provided they are correctly characterized as opinions. But prescriptivists are fond of claiming that their subjective opinions are rules, and telling people the way that they speak is objectively wrong. Lying behind these prescriptivist assertions is a misconception that some perfect and superior form of language sits above the way people actually speak. The reason that I push back against ill-conceived prescriptivist “rules” is that there can be a chilling subtext of social elitism, a supposition that deviation from some prescribed linguistic norm is a function of ignorance and low social standing. As the well known aphorism goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Sure, most prescriptivism is harmless ignorant peeving, but it can sometimes go to very ugly places, as in the case of Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin and a witness at the trial of his killer.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161

59

Yes. The fact that you were wrong. And the cited example is from one of our more vocal and opinionated descriptivists.

Let me summarize this silliness. You’ve declared that “no descriptivist” has ever said that the mere communication of meaning is all that matters in language, and I showed you (in #51) that you were wrong. You’ve declared (in #41) that all prescriptivists are ignorant of the distinction between linguistics as a science and stylistic judgments about clarity and beauty in language. I don’t know if I’m a “prescriptivist” but I’ve been accused of it in the past by yourself and others, yet I fully understand this distinction and have made it abundantly clear. Nor am I making a “category error” in contrasting prescriptivism and descriptivism as opposite poles of a spectrum in which we all have our preferred position – just look it up in any dictionary (example 1; example 2). The fact that traditional linguistics can be characterized as “descriptive” (as can any science, of course) has absolutely nothing to do with how those words are used in describing the continuum of language style preferences and priorities. I can and do, for instance, accept the basic premises of descriptivism and the dynamically evolving nature of language yet can still be annoyed by departures from standard usage that are due to simple ignorance, and in some cases find the attempted rationalizations by the likes of McWhorter and Pinker to be stretched to the point of absurdity.

And finally, in declaring the absolute separation between the empirical science of linguistics and language norms, you’re overlooking the important effects of societal norms and culture on language – the field of sociolinguistics – and even more pertinently to this discussion, the sociology of language, which studies the effects that language can have on society. So while science is always empirical and non-judgmental, the intersection of linguistics and sociology does provide us with pragmatic reasons for caring about how we use language.

You appear to be wrong about virtually all the absolute declarations you’re making here.

Of course I agree with you that some prescriptivists (like grade school grammar teachers and the authors of some style guides that purport to be all-purpose language guides) are ridiculous sticklers for useless rules, but that isn’t the point here and I’m nowhere near there on the prescriptivist-descriptivist spectrum.

Consider an utterance like “i could of went too the party but i didnt because their was less of my old friends their then last year”. I can recognize linguistics to be a non-judgmental empirical science and still declare that sentence to be full of poor usage arising from ignorance – usage that in the common vernacular can only be called mistakes. And trust me, people really do speak and write that way – to use your words, this is “the way [some] people actually speak”. To get back to my analogy, it’s the equivalent of a dinner party guest who, abandoning the last vestige of table manners and any notion of using the right utensils, proceeds to stuff his face with his bare hands. He causes no offense to the purely empirical dietary sciences, but the successful achievement of his nutritional needs is not the criterion by which I judge table manners, nor is the successful if laborious decoding of someone’s mangled speech the criterion by which I judge the desirable use of language.

I’ll add as a side note that the desire for clarity and consistency has nothing to do with your allegation of “elitism”, though it’s easy to make such a false and superficial association, as indeed you do repeatedly. I’m just as annoyed and opposed to most of the ridiculous and pretentious executive “biz-speak” as I am to unintentional language abuses arising from ignorance. It is of course true that the very nature of sociolinguistics acknowledges the intricate link between language and culture, but that association is intrinsically neutral. In cases like the one you cite where AAVE has been denigrated, it’s because racism already exists, not because AAVE caused it. The fact that cultural and regional dialects exist is not a refutation of the reality of – or an excuse for – sloppy and confusing language use either in standard English or any dialect.

60

Aside from the use of “less” for “fewer” (a minor peeve of mine), how would anyone notice any thing unusual about your example utterance? “Their” is pronounced the same as “there,” “i” is pronounced the same as “I,” and “could of” is pronounced the same as “could have” (unless some is speaking an a deliberately affected manner (and I’m someone who pronounces the “r” twice in “February”).