I've had two ideas for blog posts buzzing away in the back of my mind for the past month or so, but have been delaying my return to writing because, well, the longer I leave it, the more intimidating it gets (on which subject, by the way, you should certainly read this excellent article on why Procrastination Is Not Laziness).
The first idea runs thus: "Enforcing conformity to unnatural linguistic rules jolts the mind out of the flow of communication, and demands that the sentence be analysed on a grammatical level. As a byproduct, the content and meaning of the sentence are also subjected to conscious analysis, and therefore a higher quality of message is ensured"
They gonna getcha
I'm almost ashamed to have thought this up, and I'm only airing it in public because I desperately hope that someone will prove me wrong. Despite my deep and abiding love of grammar, structure, and puzzling out complicated rules, I actually abhor linguistic prescriptivism and grammatical sticklerhood. Even though I may derive delight from swinging on the jungle gym of grammar (where playing within the constraints is half the fun!), I'm always conscious that there is nothing to elevate my chosen set of rules above anyone else's other than popular consensus. There is no absolute grammar - and to suggest that any otherwise-adequate communcation is wrong by virtue of arbitrary rules is to be not only ignorant but arrogant.
On a sidenote (and if you didn't like wandering tangents, then what on earth are you doing reading this blog!?), this is one of the reasons why I dislike the phrase "you've got good taste". Taste is subjective, and it can only ever be "judged" by how well it agrees with your own. By all means, rejoice in the fact that someone enjoys the same things you do - but to congratulate them for doing so, because yours are implicitly the best choices, is the height of arrogance.
Of course, telling someone they have
bad taste is even more unpleasant
To return to grammar. "But language is always evolving!" is a common cry to hear in defence of a heinous crime against grammar. And yes, it's true; insofar as there were agreed upon grammatical rules in Shakespearean times (I'm no scholar, but the consensus appears to be - barely any), the Strunks & the Whites of nowadays wouldn't have passed muster, and vice versa. We no longer fully decline "to be" or "to have", while Shakespeare was quite happy to casually end sentences with prepositions.
This is a good thing. Language evolves to fit the minds and the tasks in which it is used. Although the widely held misconception about Inuit words for snow isn't exactly true, the mere fact that we believe it shows that we are comfortable with - in fact, eager to believe - that languages should adapt to reflect the ideas it is called upon to express.
They do, however, have nearly two hundred words for "awwww"
Just because we have accepted language as fluid, however, doesn't mean that it is advisable to throw all of the rules out of the window. A number of grammatical and stylistic rules give sensible guidance for a well-structured and pleasing sentence. Rules are there to be broken, yes, but, as Granny Weatherwax would say, only by them as knows what they're doing. An admonition against polysyndeton is a good rule to train young children out of steam-of-consciousness splurges, but no-one would criticise Ernest Hemingway or Quentin Tarantino on that account. Ending a sentence on a preposition can leave a sense of suspension or incompleteness, but sometimes that's precisely the feeling a skilled poet wants to leave you with.
(I can't think of a good way to work this into the flow, but I just wanted to mention here the spontaneous evolution of the gender-neutral pronoun in Baltimore teen slang. Fascinating stuff, for the armchair psycholinguist)
As with anything, though, extremes are dangerous and the middle way of moderation is best (Another sidebar - if you haven't already had it pointed out to you, revel in the irony that "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is an absolute statement). Rejecting grammar because "I don't need, like, rules to tell me how to speak, man" is no less ignorant or arrogant than declaring an entire argument invalid because it's author misused an apostrophe or failed to employ the subjunctive.
And yet. And yet. I just can't think of a compelling counter-argument to the original hypothesis - which was, if you recall, that forcing an unwieldy and unfamiliar set of constraints onto grammar will force the speaker to be more aware of not only the form, but also the content, of their message. Which appears, disturbingly, to be an argument against natural, fluid, evolution of language, and in favour of artificially and externally enforced Correct Grammar(tm). Someone, please, formulate a counter-argument!
On a related note (and this won't be so well fleshed-out, because I'm already flagging), that argument can also be used in favour of something else I find distasteful, exclusive, and ostracizing - Tumblr-speak. This is the term for the cliquey notion that concepts about social justice issues can only be valid if they are expressed in the terms of the current fashionable ideology; if you don't know the right shibboleths, your argument is invalid. And yet, the line of reasoning I outlined above suggests that, by being forced to recast your views into unnatural vocabulary, you are forced to more closely examine your assumptions (until, that is, you internalize them - the target of that pronoun was deliberately left vague).
(If you haven't already spotted the deliberate mistakes in this article, then I do not recommend you go looking for them. If you have, then you will have already gleefully emailed me pointing them out before reading this postscript. Congratulations!)
EDIT: Oh man oh man oh man, George just sent me this link about related concepts, and it reminded me of a couple of truly awesome things that I forgot to include here - first off, the evolution of words about colour is CRAZY, yo!? One of my favourite articles on the subject can be found here, wherein the author discusses how creating a distinct concept/word for a colour shifts it's recognition from a right- to a left-brain activity. Brains, yo? They be cray-cray!
I hate you and your deliberate mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I have objectively good TASTE.
^^^ I am Jack Jackson and this is my favourite comment on the internet.
ReplyDeleteHaving strict or loose linguistic rules seems to allow equal-but-different score for playing with those rules for literary effect. Latin was notoriously proscriptive, but this meant even the little deviations could have large significances; Classical Greek had lots of complex rules, but these were barely followed by a lot of authors (partly a byproduct of a range of dialects, regions and distinct time periods), but this selfsame lack of rigidity allowed for the same fluidity in artistic expression.
ReplyDeleteI'm always interested to contrast, back in the modern world, languages like English vs languages like Spanish, which their own body dedicated to defining and preserving the language (I think the RAE, offhand), to preserve the language. Does this make them more linguistically pure, somehow?