David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

These principles look prima facie OK — simple, commonsensical, and couched in the bland s.-v.-o. prose of dispassionate science — but in fact they’re vague and muddled and it takes about three seconds to think of reasonable replies to each one of them, viz.:

1—All right, but how much and how fast?

2—Same thing. Is Hericlitean flux as normal or desirable as gradual change? Do some changes serve the language’s overall pizzazz better than others? And how many people have to deviate from how many conventions before we say the language has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent? Where do you draw the line? Who draws the line?

3—This is an old claim, at least as old as Plato’s Phaedrus . And it’s specious. If Derrida and the infamous Deconstructionists have done nothing else, they’ve successfully debunked the idea that speech is language’s primary instantiation. 27 Plus consider the weird arrogance of Gove’s (3) with respect to correctness. Only the most mullah-like Prescriptivists care all that much about spoken English; most Prescriptive usage guides concern Standard Written English. 28

4—Fine, but whose usage? Gove’s (4) begs the whole question. What he wants to suggest here, I think, is a reversal of the traditional entailment-relation between abstract rules and concrete usage: instead of usage’s ideally corresponding to a rigid set of regulations, the regulations ought to correspond to the way real people are actually using the language. Again, fine, but which people? Urban Latinos? Boston Brahmins? Rural Midwesterners? Appalachian Neogaelics?

5— Huh? If this means what it seems to mean, then it ends up biting Gove’s whole argument in the ass. Principle (5) appears to imply that the correct answer to the above “which people?” is: All of them. And it’s easy to show why this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle. The most obvious problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Well, because you can’t actually observe and record every last bit of every last native speaker’s “language behavior,” and even if you could, the resultant dictionary would weigh four million pounds and need to be updated hourly. 29 The fact is that any real lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what gets in and what doesn’t. And these choices are based on … what? And so we’re right back where we started.

It is true that, as a SNOOT, I am naturally predisposed to look for flaws in Gove et al.’s methodological argument. But these flaws still seem awfully easy to find. Probably the biggest one is that the Descriptivists’ “scientific lexicography”—under which, keep in mind, the ideal English dictionary is basically number-crunching: you somehow observe every linguistic act by every native/naturalized speaker of English and put the sum of all these acts between two covers and call it The Dictionary — involves an incredibly crude and outdated understanding of what scientific means. It requires a naive belief in scientific Objectivity, for one thing. Even in the physical sciences, everything from quantum mechanics to Information Theory has shown that an act of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically inseparable from it.

If you remember your old college English classes, there’s an analogy here that points up the trouble scholars get into when they confuse observation with interpretation. It’s the New Critics. 30 Recall their belief that literary criticism was best conceived as a “scientific” endeavor: the critic was a neutral, careful, unbiased, highly trained observer whose job was to find and objectively describe meanings that were right there, literally inside pieces of literature. Whether you know what happened to New Criticism’s reputation depends on whether you took college English after c. 1975; suffice it to say that its star has dimmed. The New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove’s Methodological Descriptivists: they believed that there was such a thing as unbiased observation. And that linguistic meanings could exist “Objectively,” separate from any interpretive act.

The point of the analogy is that claims to Objectivity in language study are now the stuff of jokes and shudders. The positivist assumptions that underlie Methodological Descriptivism have been thoroughly confuted and displaced — in Lit by the rise of post-structuralism, Reader-Response Criticism, and Jaussian Reception Theory, in linguistics by the rise of Pragmatics — and it’s now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter’s particular ideology. And the consequence of (a)+(b) is that there’s no way around it — decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer’s ideology. And every lexicographer’s got one. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

There’s an even more important way Descriptivists are wrong in thinking that the scientific method developed for use in chemistry and physics is equally appropriate to the study of language. This one doesn’t depend on stuff about quantum uncertainty or any kind of postmodern relativism. Even if, as a thought experiment, we assume a kind of 19th-century scientific realism — in which, even though some scientists’ interpretations of natural phenomena might be biased, 31 the natural phenomena themselves can be supposed to exist wholly independent of either observation or interpretation — it’s still true that no such realist supposition can be made about “language behavior,” because such behavior is both human and fundamentally normative .

To understand why this is important, you have only to accept the proposition that language is by its very nature public — i.e., that there is no such thing as a private language 32—and then to observe the way Descriptivists seem either ignorant of this fact or oblivious to its consequences, as in for example one Dr. Charles Fries’s introduction to an epigone of Webster’s Third called The American College Dictionary:

A dictionary can be an “authority” only in the sense in which a book of chemistry or physics or of botany can be an “authority”—by the accuracy and the completeness of its record of the observed facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest principles and techniques of the particular science.

This is so stupid it practically drools. An “authoritative” physics text presents the results of physicists’ observations and physicists’ theories about those observations. If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Hypothesis to be included as a “valid” theory in the textbook — just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply or aspect for perspective, these usages become ipso facto “valid” parts of the language. The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they’re pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the “facts” they are recording. It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re observing and tabulating, but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are — to be blunt — moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an “authoritative” ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do .