Tomorrow is National Grammar Day

Not sure how excited to be about this, but I suppose, if invented usage celebrates any day, it should celebrate National Grammar Day.

It's certainly nice to see that the usage blog community is alive and well -- I found out via twitter about this grammar limerick contest.

I'm entertained enough that I will participate by pretending it's about cognitive grammar, and maybe grammatology, rather than the pedantic lack-of-error grammar and a celebration of cringes. I intend to have a grammartini, at the very least.

(Thanks to Maveric for the tip!)

Update: Unfortunately, his week is also National Procrastination Week, so grammar will have to wait.

in memoriam: David Foster Wallace

in David Foster Wallace a great part of the american landscape of literature and language was lost. As an addendum to Scott's last post, i wanted to point out the ways DFW touched invented usage.

better than Dave Eggers
when we decided to book club on invented usage, our first (and so far, only) attempt was Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. i was still reeling from my first encounter with Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and those discussions showed it. in both part 1 and part 3, i really revealed how much he influenced all the reading i did afterward. if you'll permit me to quote myself...

and the thing that sets the gimmickry of ahwosg apart from that of, say, david foster wallace, is that eggers never turns the lens around. he never makes the reader speak to him, never comes out with 'the only access you have to these tragedies is what i'm choosing to tell you about it, and you can't trust me!'. (part 1)

i think that witty, po-mo, self-referentiality was, at one time, a very new idea. but now we've read david foster wallace and the whole new generation of writers that he and Eggers spawned, so i feel like the style has lost some freshness. (part 3)

for a certain genre of writing, DFW has informed, if not outright spoiled, innumerable readers of our generation.

death of a SNOOT
in the summer of 2006, i came across an article by DFW, Harper's Magazine: Tense Present, that i felt compelled, as a usage liberal, to engage with. the resulting post, the SNOOT fallacy, generated a lot more comments than average, and in turn compelled me to write one of my favorite posts, the deconstruction of a stradivarius.

it's an understatement to say i was surprised to find out that DFW was a SNOOT. really, it shook the core liberal values that have inspired this blog from the beginning. if a writer like DFW, who so clearly knows and respects the value of language, calls himself a SNOOT, maybe SNOOThood isn't as bad as i'd previously thought?

i stood my ground, obviously, and those posts explain why, but DFW was the most worthy SNOOT adversary i can imagine. that confrontation is a moment worth pointing out in the blog's history.

suicide the internet
DFW is called a postmodern writer for several reasons. not the least of these, i think, is his engagement with media in a lot of different forms. what little of his writing i've actually read involves characters who realize that their whole lives are built by text and so on. for me, he really brought home the ways in which we are surrounded (in some cases trapped) by the texts that surround us (writing and speech about us, by us, for us).

i'm not sure whether it's ironic or appropriate, then, that he's now the subject of an extensive online obituary. gawker's compilation points out the fact that DFW will now continue to reach out, via the internet -- from beyond the grave -- to new readers. mcsweeney's probably has THE example of this postmodern obit. their 'memories' page collects the eulogies of anyone and everyone who ever met DFW -- especially those who got kind notes from him -- so that seemingly every word he wrote is collected and instantly accessible.

but this new DFW is surrounded by his suicide. if his work was somewhat disquieting before, it will now be a road map into depression or an extended suicide note.

suicide presents all kinds of questions, and writings like DFW's provide lots of possible answers. i predict, the commentary (see all the comments on the links above) from readers will no longer be about our modern times or about technology, but about the man himself. and who knows whether he would have wanted that?

go sok!

I've sort of buried the hatchet. There's at least one reasonable prescriptivist out there, and she blogs here: Red Pen, Inc. I feel like I've got an evil twin. It's a cute, snarkily written blogspot website with a home-made, annotated banner. But she consistently uses capitalization. (I have too, for the last few posts. More on that later.) We exchanged a nice series of emails regarding this post, but it's this one, about the Red Sox, that I want to take issue with.

Leave aside for the moment that she's a Yankees fan, though that explains some of her added grammar-nazi ire. Leave aside the fact that Scott has found that blogging about the Red Sox drastically increases your hit count, though that partly explains this post and completely explains this parenthetical (Big Pappi David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, 2007 World Series Champs).

For now, let's just consider how angry she is about this error:

Curt Schilling will remain a Red Sox.

She's really angry. Notice, I don't disagree that it's an error. If it were Derek Cheater, he would be remaining a Damn Yankee, not a Damn Yankees. But the correction that she suggests is, "Curt Schilling will remain a Red Sock," which strikes me as preposterous.

Now, the 'Sox' spelling is presumably a phonetic adaptation of the common noun 'socks.' 'X,' god knows why, makes the same sound as 'ks,' or, it's often spelled, 'cks.' But I don't think we should assume that we can subtract sounds the same way we subtract letters to go from plural to singular. Clearly, when the Sox instituted their invented spelling, they should have determined and publicized the preferred singular. They're not perfect, after all.

But I think we should embrace the haphazard, happy-go-lucky, Manny-being-Manny ethos of the Sox. Let's make Johnathan Papelbon a 'Red Sok.' Let's admit to our phonetic natures and do away with the stodgy, old English 'c.' I've only found one web site that uses this, but it looks fairly high-level, and it doesn't mention the use at all, it just does it, as though it had done it before. All the other first-page hits seem to use 'Red Sok' as the plural. Get out your Red Pen... even I don't understand that one.

what's in an error?

seb's recent post raises several interesting questions. the one that currently interests me most is: what is the definition of a speech error?

for most of the cognitive and linguistic literature on speech errors, it's something like 'an utterance that doesn't correspond to the utterance the speaker intended to produce.' people that use this definition are generally studying instances like "cattleships and bruisers" being produced when "battleships and cruisers" was intended. these are known as errors of performance. what this definition (sometimes explicitly) excludes are errors of competence. these are substitutions like "spicket" for "spigot." for most linguists, if you think that word is "spicket," intend to say it that way, and execute it properly, you haven't made an error.

or have you? clearly, for grammarians, using the word "spicket" where better-educated speakers would use "spigot" is an error. it's a violation of, as seb says, "the way things are" in the language at this point in time.

what's the disconnect here? grammarians are talking about the Language as it is recorded in dictionaries and linguists are talking about the intention a speaker has to make a particular utterance without regard to its correctness in the Language as a whole. this seems to be Saussure's parole and langue distinction in action. langue was his term for the language as a whole unified entity, whereas parole was the individual utterance spoken at a particular moment in an absolutely unique context.

the two domains are so distinct that they even have completely different ways of defining what an error is. yet it strikes me as part of the mystery of language that langue is built completely from parole. and, in turn, parole is built on langue; we each learn how to form utterances by taking in a ton of language, riddled with error though they may be.

what interests me further is this: the two constructions stand in very different relations to the speaking subject. he's sort of surrounded by langue while in control of parole. but both definitions of error have to do with the speakers' intention. what does this mean for educational policy? what does it mean for humanity? stay tuned?

Common Errors in English

I'm too slow on my defense of a radicalized gaming agenda, but I found a website today that works hard to fight any sort of radicalized linguistic agenda.

I give you:

Common Errors in English

It is a compilation of "errors" in the English language. It is quite impressive, covering everything from the use of "spicket" to mean "spigot" to the alleged redundancy of "cheese quesadilla."

This raises a question for me, though: isn't it a contradiction for something to be a common linguistic error? Paul Brians, the creator of the site (and the book it's based off of) is not ignorant of the point, and presents his work in a particular, practical context:

What is an error in English?
The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

But isn’t one person’s mistake another’s standard usage?
Often enough, but if your standard usage causes other people to consider you stupid or ignorant, you may want to consider changing it. You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to, rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.

What do we think about this? Paul Brians seems innocent enough. But how should we deal with the problem of language standardization in general? I once heard a great definition of a speech error, which was simply a speech act that doesn't have the effects that it was intended to have. If that's the case, the Brians' catalogue would be appropriately named--he is not universally prescribing a usage as "true" to the language, but rather providing a kind of instrumental prescription: "To not be laughed at, don't say 'spicket.'"

Perhaps this awareness of the scope of the prescription is all that's needed in linguistic education to make it less insidious. If language is taught not as "correct" or "incorrect" but rather as "(in the present context) effective" and "(in the present context) ineffective)", politicization of speech 'errors' (with its racist and classist effects) might not make as much sense to anybody.

On the other hand, linguistic competence seems to be such a basic faculty, I have doubts that conscious realization of the contingency of linguistic 'rules' will do much to stop the automatic perception of those that make 'errors' as being ignorant of some True Way Things Are.

But on a third hand--is incompetence withing the scope of the present linguistic conditions any better than a kind of ignorance of some (perceived as) universalized facts about language? Maybe speech errors ought to be looked down on, if only as a way of providing an incentive for people to get up to speed.

grammar nazis, explain yourselfs!

(note, this post probably won't make a lot of sense unless you're familiar with facebook.com, the social networking website, and the 'groups' contained therein.)

it has come to my attention that there is a young breed of grammar nazis with a loud, proud presence on the facebook. a facebook search for ‘grammar’ returned 500+ hits for group names. a lot of these are grammar school reunion type groups, but even more are dedicated to proper grammar, or, more accurately, to hating improper grammar. i intended to look at all 500 and count how many were pro-grammar nazism and how many were against, but honestly, i just couldn't take it after about 10 pages of group profiles. (and my search, of course, didn't hit groups about vocabulary, spelling, or punctuation!) suffice it to say, of my sampling, the ratio of nazi to non-nazi groups was about 7 to 1.

this might not appear very worrisome at first glance--after all, has facebook so far proven to be an effective launch pad for political causes? and the ratio of, say, pro-drinking to anti-drinking groups is probably much higher than 7 to 1. yes, they're frivolous and often ironic. so i'm just taking the website, and people's willingness to join these groups as some general indicator of the vague fancies of my generation. the thing that does, honestly, make me feel a bit threatened is the vehemence and violence with which groups (from both sides of the aisle) attack their causes and each other.

i use the word 'cause' carefully in that last sentence. each group on facebook has a category designation, and the most common by far among grammar nazi groups is 'common interests: beliefs and causes'. they're positively militant! several of the group names/descriptions involve the joke 'bad grammar makes me [sic],' but several are even stronger, such as 'bad grammar makes me want to shit myself and die' or 'bad grammar kills kittens.'

aside from the violently titled groups, there are the social pressure groups, which seem to fall into two main categories, with a bit of overlap in the middle: judgmental, and sexual. the judgemental groups are mostly of the 'i judge you when you use bad grammar' variety. the description of the group 'Correct grammar is your friend,' to take one example among many, reads:

Your and you're are not the same thing.
Ur, u, r, and any other stupid abbreviation are not words.
How about we learn how to use correct grammar and spelling so our generation doesn't look like retards?

the groups i'm calling sexual rely on the notion, as do so many causes and ad campaigns, that sex sells. (a search i never thought i'd try, 'grammar sex,' returned 16 groups, about half of which were on topic.) they have names like 'good grammar is sexy,' 'proper grammar is a turn on,' and 'girls like guys with proper grammar.' and isn't that just a coercion off a different color?

of course, i'm not the first to notice this phenomenon. already there is a backlash in the facebook community--that outspoken eighth group that is anti-grammar nazi. these groups have names like 'bad grammar just had sex with your bf/gf,' and 'educated people against grammar and spelling.' a post on the message board of 'bad grammar feels good and sounds cool' (bgfgasc) reveals the depth of hatred between the two camps (i'm sorry for the length--i can't resist posting the whole thing.):

this group is a threat to all who use language.
grammar is not a joke!
grammar does not exist for the purpose of being raped by inexpressive and incoherent fools like yourselves! manipulating grammar to form thoughts and ideas is what allows human progress to occur!
you think shakespeare didn't care about grammar? thornton wilder? shel silverstein?
you fools, with your screwed up syntax and abuse of punctuation, will bring the downfall of language itself!
and such a slippery slope! what's next?
you all simply don't realize what kind of greatness can be achieved by using good grammar in speech and in writing because you don't have the ability or the will.
think about this: [sic--watch as he struggles not to end the sentence with a preposition!] how can bad grammar feel good without the good grammar to which to compare it? when you've reached the point where you don't know the difference between good grammar and bad, how will it feel good anymore?
but seriously. grammar is important. your use of it is what expresses your true intentions.

rape? fools? human progress? downfall of language!!? a group member responds:

"you fools, with your screwed up syntax and abuse of punctuation, will bring the downfall of language itself!"

We can only hope.

there are, of course, more moderate groups like 'good grammar: not entirely unimportant,' but their message boards are equally abuzz with members correcting each others' grammar (even a member of bgfgasc writes, "We're talking about speaking with bad grammar, right? Because poor grammar in writing is bad bad bad.") and railing against the opposite group.

lest you assume i will wholeheartedly come down on the grammar-free side of the debate, let me say that i find many of these groups almost as disturbing as their proper grammar counterparts. first, they use the same rhetorical tactics (sex, death), as the grammar nazis. second, almost all of the groups i've cited so far use the same fallacious reasoning about what grammar is and how it works. personally, i blame the schools.

most, if not all of these groups treat grammar as a set of rules of the type you learn in middle school. and that's fine. be as pro or anti the teaching of grammar as you want. but in a deeper sense, language IS grammar. a lot of group descriptions, and especially discussion board posts, act as though language could exist without a grammar. (another post at bgfgasc: "To have no universal laws of grammar would be like physics without math to explain it"... ... ... WHAT!?) then they argue that this would be good and freeing, or that it's dangerous to the possibility of communication.

both positions are patently absurd because, and i can't stress this enough, even our mistakes are grammatical. EVERYTHING we do toward the end of communication involves grammar. 'improper' grammar follows patterns. speech errors, typos and mispellings are systematic. people who think they're eschewing grammatical rules to feel good and sound cool are sorely mistaken! they're just following even more deeply (cognitively?) ingrained rules that are so basic you don't even have to learn them in school! the same admonition goes for those who think others are 'breaking' the rules. they may break with certain conventions of erudite usage, but they'll never escape grammar or--god forbid--damage communication in any way. if people make mistakes that are too wild, they fail at communication, and that's the end of the story. if the same mistake occurs over and over again (and these are the mistakes grammar nazis are really afraid of), it's, first, psycholinguistically motivated, and second, it becomes the norm (or the rule, if it gains enough status). and that's how language changes.

i did find one group, 'El Club: Where Creativity And Originality Meets Punctuality And Grammar,' that seemed to have a reasonable political agenda. it bills itself as a safe space for spanish speakers to express themselves (in spanish, english, or spanglish) without worrying about grammatical norms. this makes sense because a minority or foreign group can be persecuted/excluded/marginalized for speaking improperly, and speaking properly in a foreign language might be especially difficult and socially intimidating. (interestingly, this group wasn't listed as a 'cause', but as a 'common interest: language' group.)

but, by and large, these groups that people choose to freely associate themselves with are argument for the sake of argument. they're all anti and very little pro. almost none of the groups posted anything resembling the 'beautiful' or 'free' language they claim their approaches will generate. they rhetorically marshal all the best and worst things in life: sex, death, illness, politics (don't think they don't talk about W.), violence, money, prestige, and acceptance, for what? for words? for apostrophes and commas? for a subject-verb agreement that will change in 50 years no matter what we do? that makes me sad for my generation.

deconstruction of a stradivarius

i already devoted a whole post to this article by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in Harper's. as satisfying as writing that was, there is one point, one essential metaphor of Wallace's text, that deserves even more attention.

writes wallace: "A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that

listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails."

a wildly descriptive analogy (isn't it?) that serves to illustrate wallace's SNOOTy outlook for the rest of the article. the analogy doesn't just characterize a snoot's logical position, but also the rhetorical and emotional impact of the 'mis'use of language. to introduce such a charged metaphor into what wallace considers a 'logical' argument is to already break down those distinctions (logical vs. rhetorical vs. emotional appeals) to which wallace clings so strongly.

consider the emotional impact of watching someone literally use a stradivarius to pound nails. one would be not only appalled but almost sickened, and certainly justified in trying to stop that clearly destructive action. that is, this use is not just misapplication of an instrument and an unsuccessful endeavor. it also causes the destruction of something finely-wrought by a long-dead master, which, had it been preserved, could have been used by someone else to produce something profoundly beautiful.

it takes a lot of training to properly use a violin, and even more to derive the full benefit of playing an instrument like a strad. there are those, one supposes, who appreciate the music but do not have the education necessary to produce it, but there are apparently others whose ignorance regarding the instrument reveals a ignorance to even the beauty of music.

a stradivarius is a fragile physical object with huge historical significance. to even have access to a strad means having extreme privilege and expertise. the number of such old violins is so limited that even professional recording artists must take excessive precautions when playing them. the VERY wealthy own strads. the poor pound nails.

a SNOOT is one who believes that the voice of an uneducated person is a detriment to language.
they believe that your 'mis'use of language is an infringement upon their ability to use language correctly--not just correctly, but sublimely.
they believe that language is an object that a community shares and should view as a valuable link to the past. if you 'mis'use it, it is significantly, violently and irreparably damaged.
they cannot write the poetry of Keats because you say 'ain't.'

i'm not sure how the idea that language can be damaged got started, but it's very old and often taken for granted. perhaps the snoots feel that the nail pounders should be given an instrument other than language--at least it would be well-applied to the kind of communication 'most people' engage in.

the metaphor, of course, carries intense classist and even racist undertones. the violin and the hammer might as well be symbols of stereotypical leisure and working class activities. the violin is the height of a certain kind of refinement--but only classical european refinement--the only kind that counts. the metaphor calls to mind a savage native trying to bootstrap up to his first use of tools while the european craftsman looks on, disgusted.

doubtless, the snoot utterer, being perfectly in control of language and very well-educated about the consequences of its 'mis'use, knew all this in advance and packed it into the metaphor in question to precisely reveal her own superiority. doubtless wallace quoted it for its concision at debasing those who don't use language as prescribed. kudos to them both. now that's an artful use of language.

the SNOOT fallacy

at issue is this article by David Foster Wallace (who i typically like and agree with). it's quite lengthy but well worth the read; Wallace is a very interesting writer and the topic is the politics of usage and dictionary-making. what could be more at home here on invented usage? there's a lot here i'd like to talk about and argue with, but i'll try to focus.

the article, which appeared in Harper's, i believe, amounts to a glowing review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. true to form, though, Wallace also gives us all the backstory including the 'seamy underbelly' of lexicography: the descriptivist/precriptivist divide. descriptivists would like a dictionary to reflect language the way people actually use it, insofar as possible, while prescriptivists tend to believe that a dictionary should tell us what's right and how to use words properly. i found it somewhat surprising that Wallace himself comes down firmly on the prescriptive side, proudly calling himself a SNOOT. that's a nice, cute term for something i've called a 'grammar nazi' or a 'big fat jerk' elsewhere on this blog. i'm sure he has his reasons for capitalizing it (and for once mispelling it as 'SNOT,' i'd like to add).

his precious reasons. wallace, garner, and snoots of their ilk are fond of reasoning about language. and the basic premise of 99% of logical arguments about language is... drumroll please... "the purpose of language is communication." in fact, this maxim is taken so keenly for granted that it is embedded only in parentheticals on linguistics departments' webpages. (Brown's for instance: How does the function of language (to communicate) interact with its structure?) so of course wallace feels justified in defending at least the prescriptivist rules that aid 'clarity and precision.'

i'd like to submit (usage liberal that i am) that language has more purposes than just communication. i even believe it goes beyond wallace's observation that the diction/style/accent we use communicates something about us. language is used to confuse, to distract, to entertain, to kill time, to remember, to make art, to perform ceremonies, all of which could be considered communicative under my usually broad definition... but beyond even that, the ways people judge each other based on language use are PART OF LANGUAGE ITSELF. its purpose is also to divide, include, grade and judge. these functions determine who gets listened to, and in extreme cases, who gets listened to is a matter of life and death.

wallace quotes a snoot friend of his: "listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails." this analogy reveals more than a few things about the prescriptivist (snoot) perspective. first, it reveals that they consider language an object. an object that we all approach the same way from the outside and use for a determined purpose. they believe there is a right function and a wrong function for language, that that function is essentially benign and beautiful. wallace acts as though prejudice, awkwardness, and judgmentality are faults of people, and not built into language in any way.

wallace writes,

These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity, of advertising and P.R. or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will — we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed — or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on "reason" alone.

and i'd like to object. postmodernism is NOT relativism, though this is a common misconception. postmodernism never says 'everything is the same. it doesn't matter how we speak because everything is as good as everything else.' it says 'the distinctions we make in language are arbitrary, but they have to be made. we have to make the choice to have an official academic language, or to read a certain text a certain way. it's just VERY important that we consider why (and from what cultural standpoint) we're making those decisions.' wallace's distinciton between different rhetorical strategies is an old one--one of the oldest, in fact. but language has never been transparent. there has never been a 'logical' argument that was not also rhetorical and emotional. EVERY statement that has content also has form and also has a speaker who speaks from a particular perspective and whose words therefore have a particular emotional impact. as soon as a word enters the language (or is uttered... not the same thing, i guess) it's encoded with information about the social and mental status of those who use it. logic never has been and never will be free of language.

wallace finally praises garner's dictionary of modern usage because garner himself seems not to speak from a normal human position.

It's like he's so bland he's barely there. E.g., as this reviewer was finishing the book's final entry, it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more striking was that I hadn't once wondered about any of this up to now; something about Garner's lexical persona kept me ever from asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies were informing what he had admitted right up front were "value judgments."

that is, according to wallace, the perfect person to judge language is barely a person at all. garner lays bare his assumptions, but doesn't admit the sociocultural ground he makes them from (although i'll lay 20-to-1 he's white). this is perfection in scientific distance and objectivity. maybe it's a great way to write a text book, but it misses something fundamentally beautiful about what language is: inconsistent and ever-changing, as anything determined by everyone in the world all at once has to be.