WTF? Ya Gotta Be Kiddin Me
Woo-hoo! Next Tuesday is National Grammar Day! Ha! And you thought the big news was the Ohio and Texas primaries. Nope. Tuesday will be all about making sure everyone writes and speaks right.
You’ll find some details and commentary at Language Log–a blog written by people who actually know something about language. This gets it about right:
The first is the assumption that non-standard variants are unclear and therefore impede communication. This proposition is mostly just taken for granted, without any kind of defense — in what way is “between you and I” less clear than “between you and me”? in what way is “all shook up” less clear than “all shaken up”? they’re non-standard, certainly, but LESS CLEAR? — and the occasional explanations of how particular non-standard usages are unclear don’t survive scrutiny. Instead, it’s just an article of faith that non-standard variants (and conversational, informal, and innovative variants, and variants restricted to certain geographic regions or social groups) are unclear, vague, sloppy, or lazy; the written, formal, established, generally used standard variants are taken to be intrinsically superior, and everything that deviates from them to be intrinsically debased to some degree. I have yet to see actual arguments in favor of this idea, and it has always struck me as deeply mean-spirited. After all, you can point out that some variant is standard (generally used by the educated middle class) and an alternative non-standard without demonizing the non-standard variant.
The point Arnold Zwicky is making here is particularly important from a rhetorical perspective. False claims of impeding communication work to silence dissent from groups that speak/write in so-called “non-standard” forms. The “mistakes” allow critics to ignore substance–whew!–and diss a message on style (thus implying the speaker is stuuuupid). How convenient!
(When I write about such things, someone usually responds with: So you teach journalism students it’s OK to make mistakes? Nooooooo. I teach them a professional discourse that is neither correct nor incorrect. It is simply the way one should write if one wishes to practice journalism and get paid for it. Oh, and I teach them never to look down on those who write and speak differently.)
So Rhetorica formally declares next Tuesday as National Talk, Like, What-Evrrr Day. Get out there and deliver your messages to the world fearing not in the scorn of those desiccated souls who would police your language at the expense of your thoughts.
Man, I wanna dig your rap.
Tag: journalism
Tag: rhetoric
Tag: politics
How about a National Pay Attention to your Audience day? The thing I particularly liked about Mr. Zwicky’s note (and about your note about plagiarism the other day) is that audience matters.
There is a difference between an email to a buddy and a class assignment; there is a difference between a LOLcat caption and a campaign slogan; there is a difference between a newspaper article and a NPR radioscript; there is a difference between a conversation and a lecture. Each of these has its own grammar. Each has different rules for quotation, citation and attribution.
Isn’t that obvious?
But no, evidently it isn’t.
Thanks,
-V.
V- Yes. Good point. Although I would add that some “non-standard” speakers cannot reproduce the “standard” well. Their voices still count.
True.
I should add that one reason that some “non-standard” speakers do not speak “standard” well is that the whole audience thing isn’t explained to them as they are growing up. Or, worse, the audience thing is portrayed as hypocrisy, putting on airs, okey-doking. Race, class, geography … it’s complicated stuff.
I’ve been reading Pygmalion; everybody should read Pygmalion (he says, imposing his tastes). Remember that Henry Higgins makes his living teaching the Yorkshire mill-owners to speak “proper English”; Alfred Doolittle accuses him of engineering the bequest to force his lessons on another poor sap.
One reason there is “standard” English (or any other language) is to make it easy to distinguish between the proper sort of people and riffraff. America prided itself on its contempt for those distinctions (while imposing them, of course, in our own way). I imagine it’s very hard to teach a pre-teen that the system is set up to Keep Your Kind Out, and that you should learn it and use it for your own purposes. Particularly since it actually is an important and useful tool for an employer to be able to infer ever so much about an applicant by the use of “non-standard” English in an application or interview.
Anyway, I could rant for ages, but it’s more polite to do it on my own blog.
Thanks,
-V.
V- We’re on the same wavelength here. And even if we weren’t: Rant away!