March 20, 2023: They're All Real Words -
Of all the Linguistic-ish things I’ve done lately, the one
I’ve enjoyed the most is listening to a podcast called Lingthusiasm. My favorite episode is #25, Every Word is a
Real Word.
The presenters start right off with that assertion, because
they are descriptivists, and they don’t want to leave the question hanging, in
a faux-both-sides style, only to be resolved in the end. Nope. All words are
real words, end of debate. But then they list the subcategories of what they
think people mean when they say, “That’s not a real word.”
That’s not a word I know.
One of the presenters first saw the word “isthmus” when she
was 27. I was 67 when I encountered “octothorp.” They sure don’t LOOK real, but
we must remember we do not know everything there is to know.
That’s annoying jargon; that’s a word of which I
disapprove; that is a word you made up
or a brand name you are using when you should be using a generic; that’s a
highly informal and colloquial world; that word isn’t in the dictionary!
I’m putting four related objections together to save time,
but here are illustrations: “learnings,” or “impact” used as a verb, lots of
corporate speak; “funner,” “majorly,” and “majorly funner!”; to google
something, to Skype with someone, to Zoom with a group, to ask for a kleenex, “arghhhhh,” “smooshable,” much onomatopoeia; “ain’t,”
“varmint,” and such; oh, please, the dictionary is an ever-expanding list, not
the law.
(They don’t argue that all of the above are words you should
use to make a good impression on every occasion. They say standard words are
useful in many cases: tombstones, job applications, term papers, etc. They just
assert that all words are REAL, however much you or others may object.)
(Speaking of the dictionary, the “Fake Word Generator” which I found by searching just that term (because I wanted a pic for this post), spits out 12 words at a time that aren’t in the dictionary!! I don’t know which dictionary! And as you’ll see from the screen snip, a bunch are words you know, and as for the others, we can just start using them, if we want. This happened every time I generated a new list. Hey, it’s free!)
The Schadenfreude Objection
This is a tricky one, and it’s about compound words.
Basically, it’s an argument that if there is a space in the middle of a term,
then it isn’t a “word,” because words have space on either side of them. I’m
not going into this one in depth, but descriptivists believe that compound
words, in English, can have spaces between their parts, and don’t have to have
a hyphen in the middle or be squished all the way together.
My favorite: The Mansplain Objection
This happens when a person objects to the IDEA expressed by
the word, or denies that the idea represents a real thing, or thinks those who
use the word have been brainwashed by the word into believing something is real
when it isn’t. What I like is that the name of this objection is very meta.
There is no such thing as mansplaining, and I am NOT mansplaining that to you,
I am DISAGREEING at you!
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Inasmuch as my keyboard doesn’t know the International
Phonetic Alphabet, and I’m pretty lazy when it comes to looking up symbols and
inserting them into things, you all may be in for a well-deserved rest, this coming term,
when I'll be tackling Phonology. Or not. Time will tell.
The problem with descriptivism, as DFW pointed out in his essay, is: how many times do "the people" have to use a word to mean something other than what the dictionary says it means before you accept it as vaild? Peggy Hill, on "King of the Hill", fancied herself fluent in Spanish, and when someone defied or stood up to her, she would say, in an outraged voice, "Eschuca me?!" Which does NOT mean "Excuse me." (It means Listen to me.) But That's how Peggy used it - so any descriptivist going out in the world would have to - HAVE to - say that "Escucha me" = "disculpe" because it kinda sounds like "excuse me" in English. And Peggy Hill constantly used it to mean that. And to be consistent with their Usage Uber Alles view, descriptivists would have to say it began to mean that after the FIRST time someone (mis)employed it thusly. From here, it's a *very* small jump to ... it's impossible to misuse a word because the word means whatever you want it to because you used it to mean that thing.
ReplyDeleteThis may seem a reductio argument, and in some ways it is, but the thing is if the descriptivists reject ANY usage you find out there in the real world, then they are no longer descriptivists. They have crossed over into PREscriptivism. And you CAN'T be both. (It's a logical impossibility.)