March 31, 2023: Against Fanaticism -

I got some fun pushback to "They're All Read Words." 

One beleagured parent protested that he had to keep his daughters from using words wrong, or no one would ever understand them. My friend Keith patiently explained to me that "mansplain" is suboptimal,  while "personsplain" is better. (Well played, Keith.) My friend Mark threatened to send a 12,000 word correction. 

And Faithful Reader Glaven sent in a response worthy of guest editorial status. So I'm bumping it, and sharing the limelight:

Glaven wrote: 

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.

This 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.)

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Thanks, Glaven. 

You make strong points.

Let's be grateful that the malaprop misuse of “Escucha me” didn’t catch on! It might have been another sad tale like that of our old friend “beg the question.”

Or worse! In some future hellscape, my yoga teacher’s pronunciation of the “B” in the word “subtle” might become widespread. I already wince and fall out of a flow state every time she says it.

In fact, last term, my professor and I had a laugh over the “wince as diagnostic” test for proving that a person had an Inner Prescriptivist, no matter how good her Nonjudgmental act might be. (She said there was nothing like talking to her brother to bring on a fit of wincing, and that her Inner Prescriptivist is always nearby.)

That said, I don’t know any pure Descriptivists (which by your middle-excluding definition means I don’t know any Descriptivists at all – now I have to rename the whole CONCEPT, darn it). 

At least, I don’t know anyone who claims never to wince. PSU doesn’t have a department of Pure Linguistics, or Theoretical Linguistics, or whatever it may be called at other institutions. They only have a department of Applied Linguistics, which seems to border on Sociology a lot of the time.

I agree that pure Descriptivism (a cult whose adherents I haven’t met, though there must be some out there, and those thugs likely tried to gaslight David Foster Wallace; I should be glad I never got to go to grad school!) does inevitably lead to chaos, proliferating idiolects, widespread confusion, and the failure of language as a reliable means of communication.

Impure Descriptivism (wait, you’ve defined it as impossible. I need that new name I mentioned above! Gimme a sec! Okay, got it!!)

What I’ll call Descript-ISH-ism might have arisen to counter excessive Prescriptivism. There’s the whole grammatical elitist thing (which the Sociological bent of Applied Linguistics is pretty sensitive to). But setting that aspect aside, excessive, fanatical Prescriptivism fails to describe (there’s that word again!) the way real people use language, and the way they understand others, and the way language works and evolves.  

At least, that’s what I think.

I think the DescriptISH urge arose not so much as a religion whose adherents are all horrible hypocrites, but as a worthy tool with which to perform language analysis that held true in the real world.

Anyway, it’s been my (admittedly limited) experience that reasonable people (neither louche, permissive degenerates whose toddlers play unsupervised in the dangerous thoroughfares of Nonsense, nor repressive Calvinists who wear THOU, THEE, THINE pronoun pins) tend to fall somewhere on the scale from DescriptISH to Prescriptive. None of the students of language that I’ve met would advocate for a) Chaos/Babel/Failure to Communicate, nor for b) Ossification/Jail/Failure to Allow for Wordplay, Poetry, Casual Speech, Slang, Dialects, or Language Change.

Fanaticism is so weirdly infuriating, and yet so boring. Also so unsuBBBBtle.. I’m glad you and I are not fanatics.

[Oh, but, apparently (and I regret I didn’t make notes on this bit when it came by), there is some tiny fundamentalist faction of language reactionaries that has decreed that American English reached perfection with … maybe, The Federalist Papers? They sound like Constitutional Originalists, only less dangerous and more amusing. Anyway, these folks reject any coinages or usages that have come into use since whenever their chosen holy document was written. If one of them says “internet,” I think we get to yell HYPOCRITE at them!]