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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).

This is the type of ridiculous and irrelevant retort beloved of the kind of progressive critic who points out that evidence that a handful of black people might occasionally have graced Elizabethan London with their presence means that a depiction that uses the city’s modern demographics is in fact entirely historically accurate.

Lest this dissolve into another generic debate about Lyotardian postmodernism and grand narrative, I think everyone who believes that “axe” sounds ugly and wrong and that people who say it should be corrected agrees that this sentiment is unfounded on any fundamental laws of the universe. I simply prefer it, and I believe that the state, society and institutions should enforce my will and my preferences upon everyone else. Does that satisfy you?

In 10 years, suppose proper SAE (which descriptively is the prestige dialect used by the American college educated class) has managed to extirpate archaic forms like "mom" and "mother" in favor of the correct "birthing person." They remain in use among some holdouts insisting on speaking CAVE (conservative American vernacular English), but state, society, and institutions all vigorously police its use and shut out CAVE people from positions of power. What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?

What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?

Obviously there will be prescriptivists on both sides -- the fact that institutions are vigorously policing its use demonstrates there are prescriptivists on the novo-SAE side. The issue is to be decided by the axe. Though the fact that the new thing is "SAE" indicates that in your scenario it already has been.

While I don't know the history of "ask" vs "aks", I do also tend to find a lot of stuff like this in descriptive linguistic spaces, which is something that annoys me that I did not include in my original post.
Often when I see someone committing a prescriptive faux pas by questioning certain misuses of language, I see many people rush in to tell that person they're wrong.

Don't you know that use of the singular "they" in English is correct and ancient? Shakespeare used to use the singular "they". The same goes for use of "literally" as an emphasis. And we've always been at war with Eastasia.

I'm not personally equipped to argue back at these people, because I don't know enough of linguistic history, but something just feels like it could be wrong, like they may be misrepresenting history. But I have no way of knowing.
Maybe it was used, but was it "proper"? Must we defend any language simply because it was used at some point in history?

The singular they where gender is genuinely unknown is legitimately old, in the sense of predating middle English(IIRC it comes from old Norse which used neuter for referents with unknown gender), and opposing it is actually a neologism attempting to bring English in line with continental languages which use a generic he.

Using it to refer to persons whose gender can be reasonably implied(the father took their son to the matinee) is as stupid as any other gender ideology neologism.

The singular “they” is often used in a particularly annoying motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Motte: The singular “they” has been used for thousands of years! Shakespeare used it! [Used it—but in the context of an unknown person or unspecified person, as in “Someone left their bag here”]

Bailey: Let’s use the singular “they” to refer to specific, named people! (E.g. “When I asked Jamie what they were doing this evening, they said that they were going to the protest”)

And none of that changes that it is bad English to say "axe a question". The people who say that aren't appealing to some older tradition, they are ignorant and speaking the language poorly.

They aren't ignorant: they know that SAE has you say ask instead of axe. Otherwise, they wouldn't axe someone who used ask: "why you speaking white?" And people can and do regularly code switch depending on their audience.

Vernaculars are used as a way to indicate tribal membership. Going out of your way to use a vernacular mismatched with your audience is always going to raise eyebrows.

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