All Things Linguistic

From Johnson, nice deconstruction of the arguments against singular “they” as an anaphor. 

If singular they has deep historical precedent, then it is dispositive on the sub-question of what is traditionally correct. In this case, liberal descriptivists and conservative prescriptivists can sing a happy song in harmony. Descriptivists note that nearly everyone uses singular they, at least in speech. Prescriptivists can relax in the knowledge that Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James translators, Swift, Byron, Austen, Goldsmith, Thackeray, Shaw, Herbert Spencer and others used it. In collecting these examples, the “Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage” notes that these are not “lapses” by the greats. They are the regular pattern, many centuries old. The “prohibition” of singulartheyis only two centuries old. This simply should not be a controversy.

What about the fear of confusion? We should avoid even technically correct usages if they are ambiguous. Mr deBoer says that singular they is “very unlikely to produce confusion”. I’d go beyond “very unlikely”. It’s always possible to create a fake sentence in isolation that might be ambiguous. “Many professors make every student buy their own books.” Hm, are the students forced to buy their own books (rather than being allowed to use library copies)? Or are the professors, in their vanity, requiring students to buy the books that the professors wrote?

This example, which took me a while to come up with, is genuinely ambiguous. But such statements, already rare, are never said in a vacuum, the entire utterance of a speaker who walks up to you, says it, and walks away. Instead, this will be appear in a context like “It’s a shame that universities don’t put multiple copies of required books in the library where poorer students can get at them for free. Many professors make every student buy their own books.” Or “Professors shouldn’t abuse their discretion to push their own academic theories or line their own pockets, but many professors make every student buy their own books.” I think it is nearly literally impossible for singular they to be confusing in an actual conversation or in a longer piece of writing. Readers are invited to try to construct such an example to prove me wrong. And that still doesn’t prove singular they ungrammatical.Richard told John he loved his wife is ambiguous, but grammatical. And as above, context (a bit of knowledge of Richard’s and John’s love lives) will almost certainly save the day.

Interesting analysis of why prescriptivism is harmful, from the perspective of unpacking literacy privilege. It’s hard to figure out what to excerpt (and there are two follow-ups that are also interesting), but here’s a quote: 

I am a recovering grammar snob.

There was a time that it gave me a blush of pride to be referred to as “the Spelling Sergeant” or “the Punctuation Police”. I would gleefully tear a syntactic strip out of anybody who fell victim to the perils of poor parallelism or the menace of misplaced modifiers. I railed against atrostrophes and took a red pen to signs posted in staff rooms, bulletin boards and public washrooms. I was, to put it bluntly, really, really annoying. […]

It’s one thing to take an erudite journalist or grandiloquent blogger (don’t know any of those, myself) down a notch, although there are valid arguments against even this; grammatical exactitude can suffocate creativity and clarity, and many prescriptive rules were totally fabricated by Latin-centric snobs. But when a poor newbie on a discussion forum introduces himself with “hi im jonny n i like wachin x facter” and gets linguistically skewered by someone because they personally hate the pants off of Simon Cowell – well, that is a different kind of problem. […]

Literacy Privilege Checklist

And for the tumblinguists who correct people who post prescriptivist stuff in #linguistics, some thoughts on how linguists engage with people’s attitudes towards language and prestige:

I think it’s worth speculating about why this particular piece of research on vocal fry captured the collective media imagination. The research itself was very modest in its scope, and there is a vast universe of research out there that media outlets could have chosen to report on. Putting aside the academic press, you could fill hours of television with just the postings to Science Now, where the vocal fry piece first got some play. So why did this particular piece of research get reported on TV, and all over the internet?

The answer lies, I think, in the supposed culprits: young women. This is a very simple case of language shaming.[…] The problem is that most people want to be able to use language as a device to separate the inferior from the superior. This kind of desire surfaces in almost every conversation I have about language with a non-expert. It becomes amplified in the media, and it operates at all levels of the social hierarchy.

Hey tumblinguists, want to troll some prescriptivists? This blog is having a competition for who can invent the most convincing-sounding bogus rule of English usage. 

The rule has to be a brand new one, not announced in any previous usage manual, but—and this is the hard part—it has to look venerable. Nobody is going to pay attention to a rule that looks new and arbitrary and idiosyncratic. No, you want a rule that appears to have been followed by careful writers all along, while being misused or ignored by careless writers.

There’s even a book prize! Contest closes next week. I have no affiliation with this, it just looked cool. 

From the New York Times Room for Debate series:

Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used. If we were from the two extremes, I would open fire by saying that you preach stodgy nonrules that most people don’t obey, and that people like you don’t understand that language must grow and change. You would then call me a permissivist who ignores the fact that people can use language incompetently or well, and that people want to write and speak well. But I believe that we’re both reasonable moderates, and have something more interesting to say than that old pantomime.

This debate itself is pretty interesting and well-reasoned, but don’t venture into the comments for love nor money. 

I think my favourite has to be:

He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!” (David S. Nelson)

“Wikipedic insouciance”, everyone. Wikipedic insouciance. This is my new favourite phrase.

Linguistically, this is a cute example of productive derivation from a brand name, in the same vein as “googled”, and it’s interesting that the meaning of “wikipedic” appears to be not the fairly-obvious “pertaining to Wikipedia” but rather “knowing a lot”, which says interesting things about the perceived authority of Wikipedia. (Urban Dictionary has a similar definition, but more focussed on trivia.)

Bulwer-Lytton is a contest for “badly”-written prose (see also Lyttle Lytton). But the winning sentences are most emphatically not bad on several counts: they generally follow prescriptivist rules for written English structure, spelling, and punctuation. They are not rambling, incoherent, or dense, and in fact often evoke a vivid and humorous mental picture. Their “badness” seems to arise instead from incongruity of imagery or register. For example, this year’s winner juxtaposes love and eyelash mites: 

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting. (Cathy Bryant)

And a previous winner juxtaposes formal written English with internet memetalk:

 ”The evil Intergalactic Emperor surveyed the destruction he wrought. ‘Booyah!’ he cried with glee. ‘I’m in ur base! I’m killing all ur mans!’ ” (James Wall)

Apparently I’m not the only one who rewrites songs to make them about language things. Here’s someone who rewrote Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major General to be about prescriptivists.

I am the very model of an amateur grammarian
I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian
But I make no apology for being doctrinarian
We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian

I’d sooner break my heart in two than sunder an infinitive
And I’d disown my closest family within a minute if
They dared to place a preposition at a sentence terminus
Or sully the Queen’s English with neologisms verminous

I know that ‘soon’ and not ‘right now’ is the true sense of ‘presently’
I’m happy to correct you and I do it oh so pleasantly
I’m not a grammar Nazi; I’m just a linguistic Aryan
I am the very model of an amateur grammarian

There’s more. It’s fantastic. 

ETA: I’ve now come across another rewrite of this song, this time about a phonetician.

(Source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)

From Ganesha’s Scarf: 

I love finding out about Canadianisms that go beyond the obvious – eh, aboot, ketchup chips, etc.  This one is huge.

Yesterday Libby informed me that for the past YEAR she has thought that I had some grammar problem because I kept saying I was done things… “I’m done work,” I’m done my sandwich,” I’m done Bossypants so now you can take it”, etc.  Apparently she didn’t want to point it out lest she embarrass me, until the other day when she heard another Canadian interviewed who kept saying the same thing.  (btw for everyone who has no clue what’s wrong with these quotes, apparently most people would say “I’m done with work” “I’m done with my sandwich”

I can say both “I’m done my essay” and “I’m done with my essay”, but to me they mean different things. “I’m done my essay” means that the essay is completed, conclusion is written, finito. “I’m done with my essay” could mean that, but it could also mean that I’m sick and tired of working on it so I’m setting it aside for the night, even though I still haven’t finished it. 

Things that I’m wondering, fellow tumblinguists: does anyone make different distinctions between “done” and “done with”? Is this only a Canadian/American difference? Is it only certain regions of Canada? (I can confirm Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.) What do English-speakers from other countries do?