MLK/Bin Laden Quote

3 May 2011

[Update at end]

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quotation flashed across the internet yesterday, following the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden. It’s a neat quote. The first time I saw a friend post it on Facebook, I even “liked” it. The problem is that the Reverend King never said it.

Quote magnets, those people who tend to attract false quotations, are nothing new. I’ve mentioned them before here; follow the link to an interview with quotemaster Fred Shapiro on the subject. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill are classic quote magnets; anytime you see a quote attributed to either of those two, your skeptical-meter should peg out. But this false MLK quote is something new.

As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic points out, what’s new about this false quote is the speed with which it was created and circulated. I can find no examples of it before Bin Laden’s death. (I would not be terribly surprised if someone does find an earlier example, but it certainly was not popular at all before yesterday.)

Props must go to whoever created this one. It is a nearly perfect hoax. It certainly is something that King would have said, and the sentiment strikes a chord with those, me included, who firmly believe that this world is a better place with Bin Laden gone, but who get a bit queasy seeing the raucous celebrations of his death. About the only clue that it might not be true is, as McArdle points out, that there is no plausible context that would prompt King to refer to the “loss of thousands.”

(Tip o’ the hat to numerous friends on Facebook.)

UPDATE, 3 May 2011, 7 pm EDT:

McArdle has done some sleuthing and may have tracked the origin of this false quotation down.

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.