David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

And if you at least provisionally grant that meaning is use and language public and communication impossible without consensus and rules, you’re going to see that the Descriptivist argument is open to the objection that its ultimate aim — the abandonment of “artificial” linguistic rules and conventions — would make language itself impossible. As in Genesis 11:1–10–grade impossible, a literal Babel. There have to be some rules and conventions, no? We have to agree that tree takes e ’s and not u ’s and denotes a large woody thing with branches and not a small plastic thing with dimples and TITLEIST on it, right? And won’t this agreement automatically be “artificial,” since it’s human beings making it? Once you accept that at least some artificial conventions are necessary, then you can get to the really hard and interesting questions: which conventions are necessary? and when? and where? and who gets to decide? and whence their authority to do so? And because these are the very questions that Gove’s crew believes Dispassionate Science can transcend, their argument appears guilty of both petitio principii and ignoratio elenchi, and can pretty much be dismissed out of hand. (back to text)

33 In fact, the Methodological Descriptivists’ reasoning is known in social philosophy as the “Well, Everybody Does It” fallacy — i.e., if a lot of people cheat on their taxes, that means it’s somehow morally OK to cheat on your taxes. Ethics-wise, it takes only two or three deductive steps to get from there to the sort of State of Nature where everybody’s hitting each other over the head and stealing their groceries. (back to text)

34 This phrase is attributable to Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss philologist who more or less invented modern technical linguistics, separating the study of language as an abstract formal system from the historical and comparative emphases of 19th-century philology. Suffice it to say that the Descriptivists like Saussure a lot . Suffice it also to say that they tend to misread him and take him out of context and distort his theories in all kinds of embarrassing ways — e.g., Saussure’s “arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” means something other and far more complicated than just “There’s no ultimate necessity to English speakers’ saying cow .” (Similarly, the structural linguists’ distinction between “language behavior” and “language” is based on a simplistic misreading of Saussure’s distinction between “parole” and “langue.” ) (back to text)

35 (If that last line of Pinker’s pourparler reminds you of Garner’s “Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems,” be advised that the similarity is neither coincidence nor plagiarism. One of the many cunning things about ADMAU’ s preface is that Garner likes to take bits of Descriptivist rhetoric and use them for very different ends.) (back to text)

36 Pinker puts it this way: “No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples the eat boy or The child seems sleeping or Who did you meet John and? or the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.” (back to text)

37 (FYI, there happens to be a whole subdiscipline of linguistics called Pragmatics that essentially studies the way statements’ meanings are created by various contexts.) (back to text)

38 (presumably) (back to text)

39 In the case of little Steve Pinker Jr., these people are the boy’s peers and teachers and crossing guards. In the case of adult cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the straight world and wear pants to those jobs, it’s bosses and coworkers and customers and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and tie to work, it’s mostly his boss, who doesn’t want his employees’ clothes to send clients “the wrong message.” But it’s all basically the same thing. (back to text)

40 Even Garner scarcely mentions it, and just once in his dictionary’s miniessay on class distinctions: “[M]any linguistic pratfalls can be seen as class indicators — even in a so-called classless society such as the United States.” And when Bryan A. Garner uses a clunky passive like “can be seen” as to distance himself from an issue, you know something’s in the air. (back to text)

41 In fact, pretty much the only time one ever hears the issue made wholly explicit is in radio ads for tapes that promise to improve people’s vocabularies. These ads tend to be extremely ominous and intimidating and always start out with “DID YOU KNOW PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY THE WORDS YOU USE?” (back to text)

42 To be honest, the example here has a special personal resonance for this reviewer because in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I’ve actually lost friends this way. (back to text)

43 (… not to mention color, gender, ethnicity — you can see how fraught and charged all this is going to get) (back to text)

44 Discourse Community is a rare example of academic jargon that’s actually a valuable addition to SWE because it captures something at once very complex and very specific that no other English term quite can. * (back to text)

45 Just how tiny and restricted a subdialect can get and still be called a subdialect isn’t clear; there might be very firm linguistic definitions of what’s a dialect and what’s a sub-dialect and what’s a subsub-, etc. Because I don’t know any better and am betting you don’t either, I’m going to use subdialect in a loose inclusive way that covers idiolects as distinctive as Peorians-Who-Follow-Pro-Wrestling-Closely or Geneticists-Who-Specialize-in-Hardy-Weinberg-Equilibrium. Dialect should probably be reserved for major players like Standard Black English et al. (back to text)

46 (Plus it’s true that whether something gets called a “subdialect” or “jargon” seems to depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community. Garner himself has miniessays on airplanese, computerese, legalese, and bureaucratese, and he more or less calls all of them jargon. There is no ADMAU miniessay on dialects, but there is one on jargon, in which such is Garner’s self-restraint that you can almost hear his tendons straining, as in “[Jargon] arises from the urge to save time and space — and occasionally to conceal meaning from the uninitiated.”) (back to text)

47 (a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it from? ” isn’t redundant [mainly because whence has receded into semi-archaism]) (back to text)

48 E.g., for a long time English had a special 2-S present conjugation — “thou lovest,” “thou sayest” — that now survives only in certain past tenses (and in the present of to be, where it consists simply in giving the 2-S a plural inflection). (back to text)