This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
How do people here land on the subject of "prescriptive linguistics"? I personally find myself getting irritated at people putting down prescriptive linguistics. For the past 10 years, anyone who tells someone they're not using certain words correctly gets shut down as a prescriptive linguist. I'm reminded of an SSC post
I feel like the same applies for "prescriptive linguistics", it's basically a cudgel, a way of telling someone to die in a fire.
Charitably, people justify this argument by saying that linguistics is a descriptive science, so there's no place to be prescriptive. In their mind, linguistics is meant to just describe how people use language, not tell people how to use it.
Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything.
In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.
I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists! They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
It's not their sacred duty to simply understand language no matter what, so don't call them a prescriptive linguist. When I tell someone not to use the word "literally" as emphasis, it's because I'm finding that the word literally is less useful than it used to be, and I want to combat that. Nowadays there is no word that accurately works in as an antonym for "figuratively"; the meaning is muddled and unclear because people have watered down the definition of literally to be something else.
I also sense there may be political aspects to the use of the word "prescriptive linguistics". relating to Noam Chomsky's history in the field and his political affiliations, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I'm interested if anyone here has info on this.
The issue I have with linguistic prescriptivism is that it tends to arise from a pretty incorrect view of how language works. The processes it decries as degrading modern English are the same things that led to the emergence of the language from Middle/Old English, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European etc. I'm sure there were plenty of people during the great vowel shift upset at the "incorrect" way people were using the language, but I've never heard anyone advocate that we go back to speaking like Shakespeare.
I suppose you could argue we should forcibly halt all further evolution of English so that things don't get any worse, but prescriptivists IME seem to want to maintain some supposed purity or elegance of the language as it stands, which is like believing it's necessary to maintain the chastity of the village whore.
There are a plenty of things we could do to make English more effective that no one seriously suggests because the language works well enough as it is. Should we reintroduce "thou" so it's possible to unambiguously differentiate between singular and plural second-person pronouns? (Ironically enough, most hardcore prescriptivists would frown on people using "y'all" instead of "you" when referring to multiple people, even though it's strictly more effective at conveying meaning!) Maybe we should condense the inflections of "To be" so that instead of saying "I am", "You are" and so on we just say "I is" "You is" etc. English isn't a pro-drop language, so those extra conjugations are redundant. You might say that would sound ugly, and I agree, but I also think the Welsh accent sounds ugly, and I recognize that doesn't mean anything in terms of how effective or legitimate a way it is of using the language.
As someone who uses "y'all" and someone who believes in making language more effective, yes, I'd be in strong favor of people starting to say "thou" again.
That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.
It would actually make it less effective. Condensing inflections seems to be discarding redundant information, but the redundant information makes verbal communication more robust to noise. And verbal communication in real environments has to happen over very noisy channels.
I'm sure this argument applies in some cases but proves too much when applied to English IMO. If we accept that English's minimal conjugations for person and number (limited in almost all cases to the '-s' suffix for third-person singular) encode useful redundancy in any real sense, we'd have to accept that modern English is monumentally inferior to languages with fuller inflectional profiles like Old English or Proto-Germanic for reliable communication. And we should subsequently advocate for far more extensive language reforms, like a complete re-introduction of the case system, than e.g. telling people off for using double negatives or whatever.
As conjugations have been lost, there's been a trade-off to add more redundancy via other linguistic structures. For instance, modern English uses articles, prepositions, and modal verbs much more extensively than Old English. Forcibly dropping more declension and conjugations would just drive us to other forms of redundancy.
If there were a free lunch to be had by dropping redundancy, some individual would have taken it and used it to process information more efficiently.
I think written English could use some significant reform (making spelling more consistent), but the language itself is on the Pareto frontier of information efficiency.
Hasn't it been shown that all major spoken languages are riding extremely close to that frontier? Once many people speak a language over a long period of time, it quickly evolves towards extreme information efficiency. For its speakers, there's really no clear advantage English has over its more complicated cousin German, or over Chinese or Arabic.
English is clearly the easiest to learn if you aren't a speaker already, so there's certainly an advantage in that. But only a very minor advantage for English natives...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link