Thing that I’m tempted to do: tell people that the plural of cactus is actually cactopodes.
The opposite of a shibboleth is a frisco?
A shibboleth is a word that insiders can pronounce but outsiders (presumably) cannot, but its use requires a deliberate test. It requires insiders forcing suspected outsiders to pronounce the word. The identification cannot happen surreptitiously, whereas anti-shibboleth works in spontaneous conversations. As soon as the outsiders mispronounce the word, the insiders know that they are outsiders, without necessarily alerting the outsiders that they have been found out. […]
My desire to find a name for the anti-shibboleth grew stronger recently, when I read Dan Engber’s excellent piece in Slate about how all the idiots on the internet keep saying “Correlation does not imply causation.” Scientists know that, whenever someone says “correlation does not imply causation,” we are dealing with clueless civilians. The phrase is a perfect anti-shibboleth to smoke out civilians pretending to know something about science, but I still didn’t have a name for it. What I wanted was a catchy, exotic name, infused with culture and history, like “shibboleth,” that means “something that outsiders spontaneously say that secretly marks them as outsiders unbeknownst to them.” So I asked around, and it turns out that Dan Engber himself had a perfect answer.
As a former resident of San Francisco, Dan knew that people from all over the country think it’s cool to call San Francisco “Frisco,” but no genuine native San Franciscans would ever use the word to describe their city. He tells me that there was even a laundromat in his neighborhood called “Don’t Call It Frisco Laundromat”! So “Frisco” is an anti-shibboleth that identifies outsiders to San Franciscans, and “frisco” is a perfect generic name for the category of such words.
The parallel with anti-shibboleths for scientists goes deeper. It’s not like scientists are physically incapable of saying “correlation does not imply causation,” in the sense that Ephraimites were presumably physically incapable of pronouncing the word “shibboleth.” It’s just that no real scientists would. Similarly, it’s not like native San Franciscans are physically incapable of saying “Frisco.” It’s just that no real San Franciscans would.
Frisco. I like it. More on the history of “shibboleth” for background.
So, what are some linguistics friscos?
I’d say anything prescriptivist, for one. And any claims that “X language has no word/eleventy billion words for Y” (see a huge list of posts refuting them from Language Log).
What else tells you immediately that someone isn’t a linguist?
Literacy Privilege and Descriptivism
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. […]
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.
![Vexations of the Can-May Distinction
From Motivated Grammar:
If someone were to lend me a time machine and ask me to go back and figure out exactly what first set me down my road to dedicated descriptivism, I would first ask them if perhaps there wasn’t a better use for this marvelous contraption. But if they persisted, the coordinates I’d start with would be my elementary school days. I suspect it was some time around then that I first asked for permission to do something and was met with one of the archetypal prescriptions.
“Can I go to the bathroom?”, I surely must have asked, and just as surely a teacher must have answered, “I don’t know, can you?”
The irritation that I felt at this correction was so severe that even though I can’t remember when this happened, nor who did it to me, I still can call to mind the way it made me seethe. It was clear to me that the pedant was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out quite how to explain it. So, at the risk of sounding like I’m trying to settle a two-decade-old grudge, let’s look at whether it makes sense to correct this. I say that the answer is no — or at the very least, that one oughtn’t to correct it so snootily. […]
You can see there’s a changeover in the mid-1960s, when the usage levels ofMay Ifinish plunging andCan Istarts rocketing away. As you well know, this sort of fairly sudden change in relative frequency tends to generate a backlash against the newly-prominent form as a sign of linguistic apocalypse, so there’s no real surprise that people would loudly oppose permissiveCan I. As always, the loud opposition to it is one of the surest signs that it’s passed a point of no return. By my youth,Can Iwas ensconced as the question of choice, and nowadays, I doubt many of our kids are getting being corrected on it — though it remains prominent enough in our zeitgeist to function as a set-up fora range of uninspired jokes.
So historically, what can we say of can and may and permission and ability? We’ve seen something of a historical switch. In the distant past, may could indicate either permission or ability, while can was restricted to ability. Over time, may‘s domain has receded, and can‘s has expanded. In modern usage, can has taken on permission senses as well as its existing ability senses. May, on the other hand, has become largely restricted to the permission sense, although there are some “possibility”-type usages that still touch on ability, especially when speaking of the future:
I think there’s also another reason that correcting people on “can” versus “may” seems annoying. It’s implicature. Even if the person seems to be literally asking “Am I able to go to the bathroom?”, this would generally not make sense as a question to ask. So the Cooperative Principle (Maxim of Relevance) implies that you should interpret a person’s utterances as relevant to the conversation, which means that since the logical thing for them to be asking is whether they’re allowed, this is probably the best way to interpret the question. Replying “I don’t know, can you?” is being non-cooperative and understandably annoying.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/ac950e98405a01b63a122e11fe970894/tumblr_mer8vmbJh01rwewyjo1_500.png)
Vexations of the Can-May Distinction
From Motivated Grammar:
If someone were to lend me a time machine and ask me to go back and figure out exactly what first set me down my road to dedicated descriptivism, I would first ask them if perhaps there wasn’t a better use for this marvelous contraption. But if they persisted, the coordinates I’d start with would be my elementary school days. I suspect it was some time around then that I first asked for permission to do something and was met with one of the archetypal prescriptions.
“Can I go to the bathroom?”, I surely must have asked, and just as surely a teacher must have answered, “I don’t know, can you?”
The irritation that I felt at this correction was so severe that even though I can’t remember when this happened, nor who did it to me, I still can call to mind the way it made me seethe. It was clear to me that the pedant was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out quite how to explain it. So, at the risk of sounding like I’m trying to settle a two-decade-old grudge, let’s look at whether it makes sense to correct this. I say that the answer is no — or at the very least, that one oughtn’t to correct it so snootily. […]
You can see there’s a changeover in the mid-1960s, when the usage levels ofMay Ifinish plunging andCan Istarts rocketing away. As you well know, this sort of fairly sudden change in relative frequency tends to generate a backlash against the newly-prominent form as a sign of linguistic apocalypse, so there’s no real surprise that people would loudly oppose permissiveCan I. As always, the loud opposition to it is one of the surest signs that it’s passed a point of no return. By my youth,Can Iwas ensconced as the question of choice, and nowadays, I doubt many of our kids are getting being corrected on it — though it remains prominent enough in our zeitgeist to function as a set-up fora range of uninspired jokes.
So historically, what can we say of can and may and permission and ability? We’ve seen something of a historical switch. In the distant past, may could indicate either permission or ability, while can was restricted to ability. Over time, may‘s domain has receded, and can‘s has expanded. In modern usage, can has taken on permission senses as well as its existing ability senses. May, on the other hand, has become largely restricted to the permission sense, although there are some “possibility”-type usages that still touch on ability, especially when speaking of the future:
I think there’s also another reason that correcting people on “can” versus “may” seems annoying. It’s implicature. Even if the person seems to be literally asking “Am I able to go to the bathroom?”, this would generally not make sense as a question to ask. So the Cooperative Principle (Maxim of Relevance) implies that you should interpret a person’s utterances as relevant to the conversation, which means that since the logical thing for them to be asking is whether they’re allowed, this is probably the best way to interpret the question. Replying “I don’t know, can you?” is being non-cooperative and understandably annoying.
Standard English is like the hot skinny blonde on the cover of a magazine: sure, some people were born that way, and that’s fine; but everybody else feels like they’re being judged because they weren’t.
Prescriptivist Trolling Competition
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.
Descriptivist and prescriptivist almost getting along?
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.
Bulwer-Lytton worst fiction of 2012
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)
Mmmm…the delicious taste of plosives in the morning! Although personally, I prefer my coffee to taste like a liquid.
I think Descriptivist Ghost and I are going to have a nice long future together, responding to bogus prescriptivist claims. Here it is in handy reaction form:
Hovertext: But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay on strong ‘if it were’.
Dear Randall Munroe, I think that’s actually the conditional past. Props for being descriptivist though.
