Another Prescriptivist/Descriptivist Blog Post

11 March 2011

Gabe Doyle, a grad student at UC San Diego and the mind the behind the blog Motivated Grammar, has penned a great summary of why prescriptivism is silly:

If you want to know why descriptivists oppose rule-following in the absence of any justification for the rule, you don’t have to sit there and wonder if it’s something deeper. It’s right there! The absence of justification for a rule means that it is not a valid rule and should be opposed! Sure, demanding that people follow inaccurate rules reeks of snobbery, but that takes a back seat to that fact that you’re demanding that people follow inaccurate rules. (Emphasis original.)

Doyle sums up my feelings on the subject almost exactly.

I do, however, differ ever so slightly from his opinion. For one thing, the tone of Doyle’s piece implies that Fowler is the icon of prescriptivism. But as prescriptivists go, Fowler is a pretty reasonable guy and rejects most of the silliest of prescriptivist shibboleths (e.g., Fowler thinks split infinitives and preposition stranding are just fine). This may not be a real disagreement between us, but I think it needs to be said. (I do think that Fowler’s book is woefully outdated and shouldn’t be used for anything other than pleasure reading—some of Fowler’s pronouncements are just fun to read—and for historical linguistics work.

And I do believe that there is an aesthetic to writing. A well-worded passage can be beautiful, and a poorly worded one can seem like nails on a chalkboard. My problem with prescriptivists is their casting these judgments as “proper” English, as if there is a right and wrong way to write such passages, when it actually is question of taste and opinion. Furthermore, and perhaps more important, almost without exception, the prescriptivists don’t tell you how to write well. Their propositions have little to do with what makes a passage exquisite and wonderful to read. Case in point:

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a read yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

In these closing lines of Ulysses, Joyce breaks just about every rule in the book, but it’s so beautiful. Don’t get me wrong. The mechanics of writing are important, but the mechanics are not what makes writing good, much less great. That’s the big lesson that prescriptivists have failed to learn.

Grammar, Religion, and Dating

6 March 2011

The internet dating site OkCupid periodically publishes data about dating trends and what strategies are successful on its site. It’s not hardcore statistical research, but it appears to be generally valid and they’ve got a huge (if somewhat biased by self-selection) collection of data with which to work. On 8 February, they published information on what questions to ask on a first date to find out if the person you have just met is a candidate for soul mate.

The last question they address is “Is my date religious?” The good statisticians at OkCupid suggest that to find the answer to this question, you should ask “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?” Could there really be a connection between religious faith and prescriptivism? The folks at OkCupid seem to think so, but the connection may not be what you think.

(Scroll to the end of the OkCupid blog post to find the question and data.)

According to the OkCupid data, there is a rather strong correlation between faith and prescriptivism, but it runs the opposite of what you might think. By a 2:1 margin, people who think grammar mistakes are no big deal are at least moderately religious. It is the atheists and agnostics who are more likely to whip out the blue pencils and correct the errors of others.

This correlates with earlier data they published that those whose dating profiles are written at a higher proficiency level tend to be less serious about religion. Now the standard tools for measuring writing proficiency (which I’m pretty sure the OkCupid folks used; they’re widely available and it’s not like the service is going to invest in developing its own linguistic tools) are crap and don’t really tell you anything about a person’s real writing ability, but here we have a correlation between professed religious belief and a measurement of some arbitrarily selected aspects of writing proficiency.

It also fits in with a question that puzzled me when I was doing my research for Word Myths. When working on the chapter on political correctness, all the examples I could find of people getting upset over the political implications of particular words and phrases were progressives and liberals (e.g., feminists upset over rule of thumb, the false etymologies of picnic and nitty gritty). I searched in vain for examples from a conservative perspective because I did not want to appear to be coming from one particular side of the political spectrum. Now religion is not politics, but there is a connection between religious belief and conservative politics, at least there is today in the States. Is prescriptivism in the mix as well? The data from OkCupid would make it seem so. Sounds like a nice Ph.D. dissertation, too bad I’m doing medieval lit and not sociolinguistics.

Lexicography, Lame Jokes, and SCOTUS

2 March 2011

Dahlia Lithwick has a column in Slate in which she discusses the latest of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinions and how he is really a funny guy. Frankly, Ms. Lithwick has been spending too much time reading court opinions if she thinks this stuff is funny. Yes, there is a tinge of wry humor in the opinion, but this is not the stuff of great yucks. John Roberts is no Lenny Bruce. But the opinion is somewhat interesting in that Roberts gets his basic linguistic facts right and shows a rather sophisticated view on how words develop semantically. 

At issue in FCC v. AT&T is a claim by AT&T that the Federal Communications Commission should not release information about the company pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request because release of the information would violate the corporation’s personal privacy. The company claimed that the law defines corporations as persons, and therefore it has a right to personal privacy. The relevant law does not specifically define the adjective personal. The court ruled unanimously 8–0 that AT&T did not have personal privacy rights. (Justice Kagan did not participate in the deliberation, presumably because in her former role as solicitor-general she had represented the FCC in the litigation.)

In the opinion, Roberts chooses some arch examples to illustrate his point:

Adjectives typically reflect the meaning of corresponding nouns, but not always. Sometimes they acquire distinct meanings of their own. The noun “crab” refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective “crabbed” can refer to handwriting that is “difficult to read,” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 527 (2002); “corny” can mean “using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,” id., at 509, which has little to do with “corn,” id., at 507 ("the seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food"); and while “crank” is “a part of an axis bent at right angles,” “cranky” can mean “given to fretful fussiness,” id., at 530.

And he later continues:

Certainly, if the chief executive officer of a corporation approached the chief financial officer and said, “I have something personal to tell you,” we would not assume the CEO was about to discuss company business. Responding to a request for information, an individual might say,“that’s personal.” A company spokesman, when asked for information about the company, would not. In fact, we often use the word “personal” to mean precisely the opposite of business-related: We speak of personal expenses and business expenses, personal life and work life, personal opinion and a company’s view.

Roberts concludes with what is the only truly, albeit mildly, amusing remark in the opinion:

The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.

Addition: Mark Liberman has a more detailed analysis over at Language Log.

End of "On Language"

25 February 2011

The New York Times Magazine is discontinuing the “On Language” column that has been running since 1979. Ben Zimmer’s last “On Language” column is here.

William Safire wrote the column from its inception until his death in September 2009, and since then Zimmer has been writing it. The original plan was that the column would run for maybe a year. The column was one of the highest profile venues for linguistics in the US and it will be missed.

Zimmer continues to write his “Word Routes” column for the Visual Thesaurus.

Watson & Natural Language Processing

17 February 2011

A John Henry story for the information age, except the humans lose. Ben Zimmer has a summary of the competition between IBM’s Watson computer and two Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Programming a computer to interpret and respond appropriately to normal human language is really a significant development. Granted that the format of Jeopardy! questions is highly formulaic (among other things, they are pre-classified into categories and each question contains at least two clues) and it’s far from being able to engage in conversation, but it’s still quite impressive.

I’m not going to recount the duel—Zimmer does that quite well—but I will point out one of Watson’s flubs that has personal relevance to me as an American living in Toronto. In the category of “US Cities,” the question, or rather answer, was “Its largest airport is named for a WWII hero. Its second largest for a WWII battle.” Watson buzzed in with, “What is Toronto.” (The correct answer is, of course, Chicago.) When asked how the computer might make such an elementary error, to wit, thinking Toronto was a US city, one of Watson’s programmers explained that since Toronto’s baseball team, the Blue Jays, plays in the American League, the computer might have inferred the city was in the US. Evidently thinking like a human is more subtle than it may seem.