Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English' 667
Pikoro writes: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explains why the concept of a "proper" English isn't realistic. Quoting: "It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. ... As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. ... We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. ... That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's damn certain there is Improper English.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:4, Funny)
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Funny)
Here is all of slashdot translated into "unproper english". Makes me laugh. LOL!
http://www.gizoogle.net/tranzizzle.php?search=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2F&se=Go+Git+Dis+Shiznit
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:4, Funny)
That's how tha fuck scholarly linguists work.
If I were a scholarly linguist, this would be my new .sig.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Despite everything, I insist that the word "unisex" is incorrect. "Uni" means "one!" It does not mean "many" or "all."
In the word "universe," it is the "verse" part of the word that makes it mean "all things." The "uni" part of the word means "taken as one."
The word should be "omnisex." That is what people mean when they say "unisex." So, that is what they should say instead.
I secretly pass harsh judgment against everyone who says "unisex" when they mean "omnisex."
Re: (Score:3)
Right now, with so many illegal immigrants, they are isolating themselves not only by hiding from the law, but by not speaking English.....
A common language requirements would force people to learn and integrate more into a larger society.
The melting pot is disintegrating into more segregation and largely by language.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Insightful)
I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects. If you can teach one set of rules for the language as being "correct" and make sure everyone understands it that way, then at least you have a common starting point for all the different dialects, and hopefully keep people ostensibly speaking the same language actually able to understand each other.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Insightful)
trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.
English is not fragmenting. It is coalescing into a single global language. A century ago, English spoken in widely separated areas, like say Australia and America, were much further apart than they are today. In the past, even different regions of America, like say New England and the Deep South, sometimes had difficulty communicating. Today, regional accents are slowly dying out, and vocabulary is standardizing. Part of the reason is easy air travel, but bigger reasons are the globalization of media and entertainment, and the Internet.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Insightful)
Years ago, in Basic Training, had a guy tell me he was from "Soccolonna"?
And I was like "Where?"
South Carolina.
I'm fine with taking a certain stylistic convention (such as supposed "proper english") and teaching is the norm (similar to Standard Received Pronunciation used to be in the UK).
This ensures that we can still communicate with one another. Without the regional drifts becoming so bad they become an unintelligible dialect to pretty much anyone else.
We don't have to declare english a "closed language (see DEAD LANGUAGE)" the way those idiots in France have tried and failed to do.
But using "English is a living, growing language" to justify "Fo shizzle"isms is disingenuous at best, with me leaning more towards "downright idiotic".
The point of a language is to be able to communicate in a standard manner.
Having to decipher pseudorandom grunts and vocalizations defeats that purpose.
The same thing can be said for the written language.
Spelling stuff "just any old way" is just unacceptable.
Try reading medieval English (from the period of Chaucer and before). And I don't mean copies that have been spelling corrected as of today. I mean the originals.
It can be done. But it's a MASSIVE pain in the balls, and in some cases, requires additional schooling.
Now imagine people turning in manuscripts, scientific papers, reports, etc, etc like that TODAY.
Again, you don't have a common point of reference. Therefore you don't have a language.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean "distinct", not "disparate".
While the British Isles has many forms of English, and a number of dialects, regional variations are mainly confined to accents and some vocabulary. There is no mutual incomprehensibility between a Mancunian and a Kentish resident, even if there's the odd word or phrase used by the one and not the other. This is also true for Scottish English, which is very definitely not typically "hard to understand as even being English". Cockney slang as slang is barely used by anyone any more, while more generally Cockney English has, of course, more or less been replaced by Estuary English, which is spoken by people all across the South East. In the East End, English is most likely to be difficult to understand for people who only speak Standard British English because of imported words and features from new immigrant communities such as Sylhetis and Lithuanians.
Regional variations continue to exist in British English, and will continue to be generated, but it is undoubtedly true that the extent of variation has lessened compared to 50 years ago, and that this is partly driven by migration and partly by media.
It sounds to me, as a Brit, as though you're simply subscribing to a popular US view of how Britain's language works from several thousand miles away; a view which is inaccurate.
Re:There might not be Proper English (Score:4, Insightful)
I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.
If governments and institutions really wanted to slow down the fragmentation of the English language, then they would just standardize on American Los Angeles Hollywood English.
As it stands, most people are selfish and most people are the center of their own little worlds. They're perfectly willing to make their own dialect the new standard that everybody else has to abide to, especially to get jobs and government benefits, they're perfectly willing to make their language a marker of group identity and group pride, but they're unwilling to change their own language when it is found that another dialect is becoming the new standard.
A perfect manifestation of this kind selfishness is the British queen. Why can't she just learn proper Hollywood english like everybody else? She's just holding her own people back if she continues on this path.
Understanding rules looser than style guide rules (Score:5, Insightful)
The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides. Still, following the rules in a major style guide will help you stay well within the rules for understanding.
Re:Understanding rules looser than style guide rul (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, take note of one of the rare times "looser" is actually used appropriately. Nowadays, my brain makes a nearly audible 'tic' whenever it first spots that word anywhere on the internet, probably because of the tiny mental trauma inflicted on me each time someone misspells "loser".
Re: (Score:3)
Postel's Law. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Understanding rules looser than style guide rul (Score:5, Funny)
For understandability amongst illiterate Marxists, also known as Slashdotters, shouldn't that be "loser than"?
"Loser then", if I'm not mistaken.
Not sure it's confined entirely to us 'illiterate Marxist Slashdotters' though. =)
Re: (Score:3)
Let's hope that their friends aren't so mean as to stagmatize [tumblr.com] them!
Re: Understanding rules looser than style guide ru (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Understanding rules looser than style guide ru (Score:4, Informative)
This is really an argument about values, isn't it? Quite a lot of people want "others" (and as your post implies by referring to ebonics, the other here is typically young black people) to value what they value -- a good job in academia or business. And want them to *de*-value, literally, the form of English they have grown up using, and see it as worthless to "getting ahead". This, despite the pretty obvious fact that if you used what you describe as "formal English" in the context in which many people live, it would be detrimental to your interests, just as using ebonics would be detrimental to your interests if used in a merchant bank. It's really about an underlying desire to not want alternative value systems to evolve, in which getting ahead may mean something other than getting a good job at a corporate or institution.
As the guy doing the hiring, you had fucking better share my "values" or at least be able to fake it.
It is my experience that those that don't want to speak reasonably correct English do so on purpose, and do to set themselves apart into a different (lower) class deliberately. Those speeking Thugeese and Dinduese do so as a way of fitting in with their group. I am more inclined to let the strategy work as I am never going to want to be around someone who's main negotiating ability is over who gets to sell crack on what corner.
Speak however you want. No loss, it makes it easier to pick out the gems from the garbage.
Re: Understanding rules looser than style guide ru (Score:4, Interesting)
It made me try much harder with spelling, and rely less on automatic spelling corrections, and also gave me a new insight into the Bible!
Re: (Score:3)
You're missing my point. Anyone who's aspiring to a career in, say, banking is pretty likely to make an effort to learn some form of "standard" English. But this is really about trying to control the language spoken by people who could not give two shits about a career in banking, because they are living very different lives in which such an aspiration is not only absurd but potentially dangerously distracting too.
Re: (Score:3)
If there were rules set fast in stone 500 years ago, then every single one of us who speaks English would be breaking most of them. Even if rules were carved out 100 years ago most of us including English professors would be breaking them. It's like trying to follow a map when old roads vanish and new ones are being built.
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, that is the nature of mapmaking, reflecting the changing landscape due to, say, old roads being bulldozed and new roads being built. At a faster rate than linguistic change, I might add.
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:5, Funny)
I could care less.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, but the ultimate goal is communication, and to that end some change is useful, some is harmful - and almost any change will have the effect of making older texts less readable.
Think of descriptivists as scientists and prescriptivists as engineers (albeit, it must be said, not always very good ones). I think there is a role for both.
Nature doesn't owe us any favors. (Score:4, Interesting)
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought [kotaku.com]. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Oh bugger off. I can see from a mile whether some unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American or by someone who is learning the language. Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
However, since there are indeed many people on the internet whose first language isn't English, you should realize that using improper English makes it a lot harder for these people to understand you, and in the worst case they learn improper English from you. So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh bugger off.
unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme
I see... It's impolite, is it? I'll certainly keep that in mind. We wouldn't want to be impolite now, would we?
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:5, Funny)
From the z in apologize I'd think we're dealing with an American troll.
Your's,
The Grammar Nasi
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.
Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here [pbs.org], both on the American and British sides.
Re: (Score:3)
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones.
Interestingly, in the USA the dialect of English spoken in the rural Appalachians [wikipedia.org] is often claimed to be the closest thing you will find to Elizabethan English in the modern world. It is simultaneously probably the single least prestigious dialect of English in North America.
(Note: "Prestige" is how linguists talk about dialects being perceived as wrong or bad by other speakers. IOW: Most people will tell you someone speaking this dialect has "bad English". Irony.)
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh bugger off.
Tisk tisk. Cannot end a sentence with a preposition
Oh bugger off, jerk. There, FTFY.
Re:A Language With No Rules... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet.
The errors that people for whom English is a second language mage cannot properly be characterized as 'all over'; they are almost invariably errors that result from adults, who lack the flexibility to learn new languages readily, running past the end of their knowledge of English and by reflex applying the grammar and lexicon rules of their own language to English. Where there have been populations that spoke another language that became integrated into the English-speaking population -- the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Vikings, among others -- aspects of grammar from their own languages got absorbed into English, cases where English grammar were overly complicated got elided. For example, Celtic languages have a 'meaningless do' -- where, in other Germanic languages you would say 'saw you him today?', in Welsh it would be 'did you see him today?'; similarly, nouns lost the forest of cases, genders, and plurals that other Germanic languages retained. And this ignores the vocabulary changes from words the speakers of other languages brought; for example, the perfectly good 'ingang' has long since been buried by the Norman French 'entrance', while other Anglo-Saxonisms got relegated to a 'lower-class' status by French and Latinate words by association with the social class that used them -- 'ask', 'question', and 'interrogate', for example, or 'quick' vs. 'rapid', 'look' vs. 'regard', 'daze' vs. 'stupefy', 'room' vs. 'chamber', 'learning' vs. 'erudition'.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll
Re: (Score:3)
But that's the point. It's the linguistic equivalent of relative morality. If there not a single morality, then there is no morality. If there are no fixed and unchanging rules, then there may as well be no rules. A common frame of reference is required.
How would a physics work if the rules of physics changed at the whim of the physicist? How could programmers work if they were able to change the syntax on a whim? When they do, they call it a new language.
If you don't follow the rules, then you can't order [youtube.com]
Re: There might not be Proper English (Score:4, Funny)
You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.
Me fail English... (Score:4, Funny)
Talk Proppa, (Score:2)
actually... (Score:3)
No matter how good the accent is, injecting the word "actually" several times in a sentence marks the speaker as an Indian.
Mind, you can identify a native New Yorker the same way, by the references to coitus and oedipal desires.
The problem with "bad English" is that it tends to be imprecise and ambiguous. Using a word "wrongly" might not be bad when talking to friends, but when placing a large order or designing an airplane, precise use of the language can really make a difference.
Re: actually... (Score:3)
Headline Is Wrong (Score:2)
Should be: Why They're Ain't Any Such Thing as "Proper English."
Your welcome.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Why they ain't be nothing such as "Proper English"
Re:Headline Is Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Should be: Why They're Ain't Any Such Thing as "Proper English."
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are. And English doesn't actually change anywhere near as fast as many of these folks claim. Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today. But you can, except for the occasional stray word. You still get the meaning.
Re:Headline Is Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
There is something exquisitely irritating about a post that says "Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White" when the article explicitly discusses Strunk and White. FFS, Jane Q Public, would it really have troubled you that much to have read the article you've chosen to criticise, at least to save yourself from looking like a complete and utter tit?
Elements of Style is not authoritative (Score:4, Informative)
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a set of opinions [wikipedia.org], not a set of rules. All the difference in the world. I can point you at numerous books and experts on grammar and writing that disagree with significant portions of that overused book.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are.
There is no single authoritative set of rules for the English language. There are rules in the sense that there are commonly agreed to informal "standards" which persist for a time based on culture and comprehensibility but it is quite correct to say that that there aren't any rules in the sense of rules laid down by an authoritative body.
Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
Quite simply not true. You merely have to go back far enough in time to get to a point where the language is no longer the same. Old English [wikipedia.org] is for all practical purposes a completely different language than our modern version of English.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today.
Perhaps you haven't actually studied Shakespeare. Significant portions of his writing are quite inscrutable today without an explanation of the context, temporal usage and intent. That said, Shakespeare isn't so far removed from us that it is impossible to read - it's just a few hundred years and languages usually don't evolve that quickly. Go read Beowulf in the original Old English and tell me again that the rules of the language never change over time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there are rules. For instance, it's acceptable to use apostrophes to show plurals of single lower-case letters. Right, Jane? Flag as Inappropriate
No. Single quotes are used for that.
Do you honestly think I (and Slashdot management) don't know who you are?
Go away. Stay away.
Re:Headline Is Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone mod that up. It's better than TFA.
Speaking of, from TFA:
He's got the dialect part correct. But he left out things like slang and local idioms and so forth.
"educated" ... that's the problem.
If you are "educated" then wouldn't you know the correct usage?
So he's falling back on whatever the majority (as he sees it) uses as being ... not incorrect.
But in the end, he's wrong. You can mix Yoda-speak/LOLcat with the latest slang and your friends will probably understand you.
But it will probably not impress when you use it on your resume.
Re: (Score:2)
What's with that city slicker dialect, are you putting on airs? It's "Why thar Taint No Such Thang!"
u fkn wat (Score:2)
English belongs to the world (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:English belongs to the world (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would they? They term "lingua franca" (italian for "language of the Frankish") originated during the renaissance to describe a "universal" language spoken throughout the mediterranean and used for commerce and trade. It is composed of mostly Italian (80%) with some greek, portuguese, arabic, spanish, old french, occitan. In this context, the term "Franca" (Frankish) does not describe "France". The term "Franca" was used by Greeks, Arabs and others to describe Western Europe.
Re: (Score:3)
A few years ago I was at a conference in Germany, which was mostly held in English, with a few sessions in German. One of the speakers started out by saying that in some previous conferences he'd apologized for his English, but had been told by the moderator (who was Turkish) that "Bad English is the most widely spoken language in the world."
Dialects != Language (Score:2)
ah doesn't reckon yer thesis is necessarily co'reck, an' thet th' article is cornfusin' dialeck wif language.
I don't fink yor thesis is necessarily correct, right, and that the article is confusin' dialect wiv 'am sandwich.
Or maybe you reckon the above is "English"?
Re:Dialects != Language (Score:5, Informative)
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...
In spelling, Norwegian has two methods of writing: Nynorsk, and Bokmål... one is more like Swedish, the other is more like Danish, respectively...
But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible. There is less different between the Scandinavian languages than Spanish and especially Arabic.
There is less difference between Romanian and Moldavian than there is between American and British English, yet some Moldavians insist that they speak a different language in order to create an "us vs them"
Linguists know that a language is just a dialect with an army.
English and American (Score:3)
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible.
Which is pretty much the same state of affairs with English and American although there are quite a few words which are completely different: lift vs. elevator, car bonnet vs. car hood, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. egg plant, car boot vs. car trunk etc. and more confusing an English word can have a different meaning in American and vice versa often to embarrassing effect e.g. rubber, pants, suspenders, chips, fanny etc.
This is why it is helpful to give the two 'languages' different names: they
Something completely different... (Score:3)
The article doesn't explain why there is no prescriptive body for the English Language; something that would be equivalent to the Acdemie fancaise. Instead it discusses how English lacks a prescriptive basis, and how it becomes incumbent upon the speaker to match their use of the language their audience and purpose for speaking.
Re: (Score:3)
Elements of Style, by Strunk & White, is one of those informal "rule" books, in the same sense that Emily Post wrote a book that was (informally but very widely) considered to be the "bible" of American etiquette.
Re: (Score:3)
The lack of a prescriptive body for English is a historical accident, the same way the United Kingdom doesn't have a constitution, just a shitload of case law, treaties and statutes. For quite some time, Norman French was the language of government - naturally, the government did not try to regulate the grammar of a language they never spoke. After that, it was a populist thing - trying to formalize English would cause backlash at your supposed elitism. There was a brief window where a prescriptive body cou
Some pedants are more pedantic than others... (Score:3)
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions."
Some of us pedants are aware of how non-grammar the "grammar" rules are, and actually champion wider usage!
Double negatives are totally awesome, and there's no reason to think they're bad. Split infinitives are totally ok too, because the "to" is not actually part of the real English infinitive! And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do. Because it's not a preposition, it's a component of a complex verb.
Re: (Score:3)
"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - Churchill.
Re: (Score:2)
You will all my internets for the day.
Re: (Score:3)
"Fuck him, and the horse in on which he rode."
You know, just because it's hilarious to correct this sort of thing in this thread... ;)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well... the loss in grammar actually loses meaning too.
In 'proper' English:
If I were rich...
and
If I was rich....
have different meanings. 'were' implies a hypothetical situation. 'was' implies it might have actually been true in the past.
Common English uses 'was' for both situations.
Re: (Score:2)
And in AAVE "he be workin'" and "he workin'" have very different verb moods.
But everyone seems to insist that it's lazy English... so...
And no "*If I was rich..." doesn't make any sense when you allow for use of subjunctives. It's a wrong mood verb stuck into a sentence. It's like saying "I were a good girl!" instead of "I was a good girl!"
The use of "was" as in past tense and "was" as in the subjunctive are actually in mutually exclusive use. That's why English even bothered to lose the subjunctive in the
Hard to disagree with TFA (Score:2)
Given the copious amounts of written language-related pedantry found here (search for "begs/begging the question" and related discussion), this is a surprisingly relevant topic. I wonder if programmers and other tech types tend to get overly hung up on language rules because of their profession. When it comes to computer languages, after all, if you're not borderline pedantic, you're likely to write sloppy or buggy code.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not a programmer thing; just look at the comments to the Wall Street Journal article and you'll find the same complaints. I find that pedantry is mostly a class issue. The educated upper classes (and those who see themselves as such) use pedantry to place themselves above others they view as lower class and uneducated ("begging the question" being a perfect example). You will never hear complaints about Bostonians who don't pronounce "r" (*Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd."); you will hear endless complaints about black people who say "ax" instead of "ask" (even though "ax" is actually the original pronunciation [npr.org]). The Boston accent is perceived as cosmopolitan and part of a historic American tradition. African-American vernacular is saddled with poverty and ghetto stereotypes by those outside the communities.
By definition, "improper" English is how poor people speak.
Here are a few words from a posh Brit on the matter. [youtube.com]
That's not entirely true. Several of us where I work poked fun at a Bostonian coworker's references to his "cah".
Of course there's proper English (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it has nothing to do with purity. English is famously a language which mugs other languages for their vocabulary. But just because it is impure and inconsistent doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Really? Because (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
modern English grew out of Old English
Actually it grew out of a combination of Old English and Medieval French.
"My bad" (Score:2)
One manager was really bothered by "my bad", which used to be "my mistake". He called it "gang slang". "My bad" has slipped into common usage it seems to me. I'll avoid it around him, but he came across as a fuddy-duddy. He should be thankful people admit their mistakes, something uncommon around here.
Nice Try Soulskill (Score:3)
If that were true ... (Score:2)
Can we still agree that (Score:5, Insightful)
people shouldn't say "For all intensive purposes" or "should/could/would of"?
It's alive ! (Score:2)
Yes it's a frightening fact, our language is alive and if we blink we will be left behind. But it's a wonderful thing to see when our eyes are open. English is by far the biggest language and, lamentably, the most difficult for others to learn but that is exactly the reason to learn it. Many concepts in science, technology, engineering, obscenities, medicine etc cannot be adequately expressed in other languages.
English has always stolen from other languages (and the other way too) and it has always been a h
The whole premise is an excuse for illiteracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.
nonsensical (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, a language is a dynamic thing. The rules are constantly changing, and what was 'unacceptable' to purists is okay for casual use, and what was casual use only ten years ago might be perfectly acceptable even in rigorous settings today.
Further, English is a very agglomerative language; it's turned out to be astonishingly tolerant of loan words, adoptions, etc from other languages freely. Thus, at least in American English particularly, there's a tolerance (largely, I suspect, due to our immigrant past) for odd phrasings, word orders, or odd usage that eventually may become common parlance.
NEVERTHELESS, as much as it's getting down into the weeds of linguistic OCD to insist (or not) on the Oxford comma, or avoiding prepositional endings, or on specific adjectival orders (there's a rabbit hole if you want to see grammarians duking it out), that doesn't mean that there aren't rules of usage that are common for understanding, or that "there are no real rules at all" as this article seems to claim.
Yes, it's very intellectual to assert there are no rules, but a normal person recognized that's stupid: of COURSE there are rules. Are they regularly ignored? Sure. Should they be? It depends on context; if you're talking with your friends "u" is probably a perfectly acceptable replacement for "you". If you're writing a business letter, it will simply make you look like a moron.
If someone points it out to you, Insisting with sophomoric sincerity that "well there really are no rules in English anyway" will simply certify their opinion.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Common ground. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren't real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
These conventions are what make communication possible between the old and the young, the past and the present. The speeches of Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King resonate to this day, without translation.
The only pure English is the language of Beowolf (Score:5, Interesting)
Before a bunch of French speaking Vikings invaded in 1066, before Nordic speaking Vikings degraded the language.
THAT is proper English!
Am I the only one who's noticed? (Score:4, Funny)
Funny how often these articles come from the country that brought "sox", "labor", "dialog" and "liter" to the English-speaking world. ;-)
Cult of dumb at WSJ (Score:3)
The problem is a popular culture that celebrates stupidity. If you want to break grammatical rules, either do so after reading Strunk & White and learning how to write properly. Then it's an artistic decision. Or you can learn English from lolcats and rappers, in which case you are just flaunting ignorance. I remember a drawing anatomy teacher who bemoaned a young artist's work. He had talent but never learned how to draw the human form. It is hard. However there's a difference, even if you paint abstract. There may be talented and educated rappers, but just because you can text and rhyme doesn't make you a poet or a journalist.
two branches (Score:5, Insightful)
Linguistics has two branches. One branch is descriptive linguistics which studies how language is used. The other is proscriptive, who describes how a language should be used. This divide is covered pretty often by language log [upenn.edu] (worth reading pretty often).
This article is just someone discovering descriptive linguistics for the first time and ecstatic that their prejudgments are backed up by a branch of something that sounds like a science. Congratulations. "Science" has "proved" that there are no standards for language and all those teachers that marked up your papers with red pens were just being mean.
There is no One True English, but there sure as hell is a Don't Sound Like a Moron English. Like it or not, people hear more than just what you say. They also hear how you say it, and they tend to figure out who you are, or at least, who you are similar to.
Same goes with clothes. People know who you are just by looking at you. They may be wrong occasionally, and you can feel smug for subverting their expectations, but it is a tool that is right most of the time, and it seems to be wired very deeply into us, so no one is going to stop doing it.
You can whine all you want about how unfair it is, but if you want your ideas heard, your best bet is to sound (and look) like someone worth listening to.
Grammar isn't pedantiv (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a silly blanket statement. It's true of some things, such as the split infinitive. Other things, such as correct comma placement, play an obvious role in understanding a sentence. I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution. Text speak is just lazy.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Technology model (Score:3)
In technology you have an RFC published by a body whose authority supported by consensus. Then when you implement that technology, you can choose to be as compliant with RFC as you want. English teachers tend to see things as right vs. wrong, while in technology it's compliant vs. noncompliant, strict vs. loose/flexible. Loose compliance is often beneficial - how many people you know actually type the trailing dot on all of their FQDN's (e.g. http://slashdot.org./story)? The RFC says you're supposed to, but people rarely except when editing DNS records. Do we say that everyone is "wrong", or just noncompliant with RFC?
I find the technology model far less judgmental.
Dumbest reasoning I ever heard. (Score:3)
Picking the lowest common denominator is just plain sad when it comes to language.
Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
the Brits have the final word on what is true and "proper" English
The "traditional" view was that proper English is the grammar, pronunciation and maybe even the dialect used by BBC newsreaders. This doesn't really stand anymore, as there are many more regional (british english) dialects on national TV than were encouraged in the past.
However I can see the confusion as the word for "American" in the american language is "English". That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
Re: (Score:2)
However I can see the confusion as the word for "American" in the american language is "English". That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
It has long been accepted that American English and British English are 2 decidedly different variants of the same language. But they ARE different enough that there is "proper" American English, and "proper" British English, and they are NOT the same things.
There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.
salt and freshly ground black people (Score:4, Funny)
As a coda to my post, consider this howler:
World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling [huffingtonpost.com]
This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.
It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.
Re:Stupid question (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
Actually, in Europe (at least where I live) we do study British English in schools. But then people learn American English because of America's cultural supremacy.
Re:Stupid question (Score:4, Informative)
Comparing French to English is completely nonsensical. The former has a department regulating the development of language and purity laws that preserve the language and its use. The latter is an all out clusterfuck where the abbreviations LOL, and WTF end up in the Oxford English dictionary simply because they are in "common use".
So if the primary dictionaries are based on common use, what then determines proper use?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
EULAs can use fancy words, knowing that average Joe is barely literate, and put them in various forms of electronic bondage. Credit card applications... you name it.
Actually, the reason why legal language is so complex is because it has to close loopholes that crazy pedantic intelligent people find.
It's the idea of "you have to be smarter to debug a piece of code than to write it."
This specifically comes to a head in that boilerplate contracts are automatically interpreted as opposing the interests of the drafter as the language allows.
Re: (Score:3)
Yipppppppeeeeeee!!!!! is now official English!
Yippppeeeeeee!!!!!!
You misspelled it the second time.
Re: (Score:3)
Just try to listen to a 200 years old English recording, you wouldn't understand it. Languages evolve, and in a few 10's of years no American will understand the current British English.
10 years... They already have to subtitle most English accents on TV... And I mean a Londoner, not someone from Blackpool or Yorkshire.
Re:Experimental science says otherwise. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like flawed assumptions. You can have very proper English that makes you think harder than the equivalent in slang. That's why txting is so popular, because it's easier to understand. But an oldster might be at a loss.