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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I feel like there's conflation in these discussions between four rather different things.

  1. People who insist on "rules" for "good English" that were never rules of English grammar in the first place. Examples include things like "don't split infinitives" and "don't end sentences with prepositions", or even typographical bits like the use or non-use of the Oxford comma and where to place punctuation relative to quotation marks.
  2. People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.
  3. People who complain about dialectal differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, because these don't match usage in their preferred dialect.
  4. People who object to trends in speakers of a specific dialect (usually, let's face it, a prestige dialect; nobody cares about other ones) using words or phrases incorrectly per the current or recent standards of that dialect.

People in category 1 or 2 are just silly (or maybe I should say nice rather than silly)? They are often the butt of discussions of prescriptivism and I think that this is what was originally meant by the term.

People in category 3 are either trying to enforce their preferred dialect as the "best" form of the language, or just don't understand that different dialects are not simply inferior or erroneous forms of the prestige dialect. In the latter case they are just wrong; in the former, they simply have a goal that a lot of people disagree with, and therefore those people find it useful to imply that they are just wrong.

Category 4, on the other hand, includes almost everyone at one point or another, and trying to tar them with the same brush as 1-3 is always and only a rhetorical move to try to establish the change that the category-4-person opposes as a fait accompli.

Objections to double negatives might be category 3 or category 4. Objections to "literally" as an intensifier, "could care less" for "couldn't care less", "bemused" meaning "amused" (surely a generation ago this one would have counted as a malapropism?), "irregardless", and the like are pretty much squarely in category 4. Argue about each at the the object level if you want, but these objections are not the result of a misunderstanding of linguistics or a chauvinistic desire to devalue another dialect, but out of a desire to preserve something that the objector finds valuable about the language.

(I'm not sure whether arguments about "enormity" and "peruse" are more category 4 or category 2, but I'm afraid that we're likely stuck with at least a double meaning if not outright replacement by this point.)

PS: If you want a masterclass in analyzing what confusions can result from the same word being used in different senses across time and space, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words.

People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.

My favourite example of this are communists, and my favourite examples of linguistic prescriptivisms among that group are Stalinists, who would demand that people call them "Marxist-Leninists."

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