It's not just obstinate literalism you know
It's all well and good people attaching a second meaning to a word, but the next generation will suffer for it. This is especially true in this case where the two meanings have some overlap, and the original meaning covers a very important and not-at-all intuitive concept.

Just like when 'incredible' stopped meaning "not credible" and 'fantastic' stopped meaning "illusory" and both came to mean simply "good", we lost some vitality, texture and depth of meaning in our language.

I do understand the arguments of the language permissivists, and agree to a certain extent - but you can't seriously tell me that when you compare what is spoken in the House of Commons today to what is recorded as spoken 100 years ago, that we haven't lost a great deal of subtlety, depth of comprehension, accuracy of communication and scope for originality, by allowing our language to become de-formalised (if that is a word).

The permissivist argument centres around a naturalistic conception of human behaviour. The line goes something like this- 'you wouldn't accuse birds of degrading their birdsong, or accuse whales of not producing whalesong as perfectly as their ancestors, so you can't accuse human beings of corrupting language'.

It's a nice argument and obviously holds some weight, and it's appealing because it sounds a lot more science-y than the arguments of most grammar nazis and letter-to-the-editor writers. But it denies the fact that some languages are simply better than others, and there are many ways that one language can be judged to be superior to another. It sounds a bit nasty and un-PC, but could you really argue that speakers whose first language is pidgin-French have no disadvantages in communication compared to speakers of proper French?

The other problem with the permissivist argument is that it justifies a laissez-faire approach to the evolution of language, encouraging people to let language be modified by any old cunt, rather than consciously and conscientiously trying to ensure that meaning is preserved. Underlying it is a rather Hegelian assumption that history is going to work out for the best whether we try to shape it or not, and that some unseen hand is guiding us towards some inevitable and happy endpoint. While I'd like to believe something like this could be true, there's no good reason why it should be. Also, believing it would be pretty dangerous - we should probably start trying to sort out our shit and make sure everything works properly, rather than thinking that some kind of hidden metaphysical process of sublimation is going to prevent us from becoming a species of babbling, retarded shit-flingers, unable to understand the concepts or technology of ancestors whose language used to be tightly formalised by academies and institutions.

Whoops- accidentally wrote a short essay. Back to work!
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 14:03, 4 replies)

Brilliantly put.
(clinteastwoodbradfield, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 14:21, closed)

Actually
I find it hard to argue with most of that. It's a shame I didn't qualift my statement by adding something like "not to know how to not know how the word 'random' is being intended and used in this QOTW"

Oh. Wait. I did.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 14:34, closed)

I think the point in the mini essay is that even trivial things like this can contribute to cheapening of the language, and in communication becoming less nuanced.

As another example, imagine witnesses to a shooting. Police arrive and speak to witnesses. A witness says, while in shock "it was just so random, the bloke just started shooting"

The proper usage of the word, without the bastardised colloquialism, would clearly imply that the shooter fired indiscriminately, the slang usage just implies that the witness hasn't seen a shooting before. If the witness believes that they are using random correctly, the investigation could become confused before it has started, with the idea of the shooter planning to target a specific person or people ruled out.
(clinteastwoodbradfield, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 14:59, closed)

I think....
...that if I cared, I'd bother to read that, but I'm done.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 15:08, closed)

Most people haven't seen a shooting before so the slang usage of the word would more than likely be correct


Either way, please stop going on about it now.
(Nanny Pat vote for me, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 15:13, closed)

The slang usage almost certainly wouldn't be correct there at all.
(clinteastwoodbradfield, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 15:16, closed)

You said:
'the slang usage just implies that the witness hasn't seen a shooting before'


And they probably hadn't
So it would be right.

So shut up guy
(Nanny Pat vote for me, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 15:49, closed)

Yes - the slang usage implies that the witness hasn't seen a shooting before - instead of implying that there was a random element to the shooting, eg that the shooter seemed to be indiscriminate in who he was targeting. So the slang usage is misleading or confusing, which was my original point anyway.
(clinteastwoodbradfield, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 17:09, closed)

I want to clicks it, but can't. :(

(Shippy likes linebreaks and doesn't care what you think, Thu 21 Apr 2011, 22:57, closed)

Lots of words there,
all of them imbued with the idea that language left to its own devices will start reducing to a set of grunts with no meaning. It won't. Try traveling to one of the many places where native languages without any written form routinely distinguish between whether information was seen, heard or just heard about.
Also, by definition there's no such thing as a native speaker of a pidgin. English-derived languages that you may consider unintelligible or savage (to take an example Tok Pisin) are not pidgins, and they also often allow for greater expression rather than less. Tok Pisin, for example, distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful actions using prepositions.
In short: Nobody designed the language, nobody's going to design it in the future. Go read something about historical linguistics and language change (I suggest this book as a good starter) then come back and make your case.
( Zuowan, Fri 22 Apr 2011, 7:32, closed)

You're totally right of course
"a species of babbling, retarded shit-flingers" was gross hyperbole on my part. I'm no linguist and happy to admit that my understanding of the subject does not go beyond the level of popular science books.

A few points though. History has furnished us with examples of people who ended up with a true pidgin as their first (not native) language - slaves taken from various countries who ended up in the same plantation. Within a single generation this developed into a pidgin language derived from the language of their captors (I can tell you know already this, of course). These pidgins eventually developed into creole languages, which had a consistent grammar and only loose connections between derived and original words, like Tok Pisin. This creolization does not appear to support my argument, since it shows how language and grammar will develop spontaneously and ecologically (and as recent findings show, with a greater dependence on pragmatics than was previously admitted).

But I stand by my criticism of the now orthodox view on linguistics because of what I see as two very misguided assumptions.

First is the Hegelian assumption that I discussed briefly above. We do not have an explanation of the mechanism (or supposed mechanism) that keeps language evolving and alive. When you say that 'nobody designed language' you leave out the very salient examples of design in the history of language - the strict formalization of Latin and the various attempts in Europe to bring local languages more in line with Latin using prescriptive grammars and dictionaries (L'Académie française springs to mind). Not only that, there is the assumption that similar formalizing activities never took place in places like ancient Egypt or the Fertile Crescent, despite the discovery of works of grammar that would seem to suggest just that.

Secondly, there is the relativistic assumption that the linguistic output of two cultures is equally valid, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, and swinging accusations of ethnocentrism and even racism at anyone who questions this view (not accusing you of this of course). But then, you don't need me to tear relativism a new arsehole because Sokal did that in 1998 (and Paul Boghossian finished the job in 2006). I don't believe that you could translate a complicated book, say for example, A Brief History of Time, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into a creole language, no matter how skilful the translation, and expect the meaning to be preserved in all its subtlety. A better example might be comparing the King James Bible to one of these awful American "everyday English" bibles - a hell of a lot of depth of meaning is lost.

I do not think that language left to its own devices will reduce us to meaningless grunts (although I am aware of an increasing amount of meaningless grunts in the language I hear spoken every day). In tribal cultures, all members must be keen botanists, meterologists, cartographers and much more, and this is very clearly reflected in their language (I'm thinking of Jared Diamond's account of the language of Papua New Guinea). But in Europe we live in a built environment, where technology, media and other artifice is our entire existence. My concern is that by abandoning prescriptive grammar and allowing pragmatics and mere accident to shape language, we will end up with language that reflects life in the west as it appears, rather than how it is. To truly take part in modern civil society you need to understand many extremely complex and counter-intuitive ideas, and I think that relying on some unseen hand based on theories of broad patterns in history to guide language may be a mistake.

Edit: I just bought the book you recommended. I've heard of it before, looks like a good overview and I'm looking forward to reading it.
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Fri 22 Apr 2011, 12:19, closed)