The Descriptivists Dilemma
For those of you who know, I try to be very nonjudgmental when it comes to my friends and their opinions on certain things. That is why I am ranting here, and not in a full public display. Today it happened as a result of a post by my cousin. She had mentioned how she wondered how people have gotten as far as they have in life with atrocious spelling. [please insert a shriek of the Sam Kinison varietal here]
The second I read someone complaining about another person's horrible spelling or bad grammar, it makes me want to knock that person off their high horse. I for some reason, find myself giving them one of those usually British movie villain accents, and imagine them with a monocle. Male or female, it works both ways for me.
Languages are complicated, and spelling and grammar should not be held up as some sort of perfected model of speaking. Shakespeare existed in a time without a dictionary and created numerous words that never existed before their utterance. Even after the dictionary existed, writers like Lewis Carrol was creating all sorts of word. In fact, the Jabberwock is full of nonsense words with just enough regularized English to hold it together. We don't go back and discuss writers like this as fugitives.
English, and from what I have been told French, have both undergone massive vowel shifts. How the hell do you think it is that the sound represented in most Indo-European languages as "i" comes out as something akin to what Anglophones pronounce as "eye?" Why is it that George Bernard Shaw famously wrote that fish could be spelled "ghoti?" It's because our vowel system doesn't make a lick of sense!
In regards to grammar, people spend way too much time creating ideas that we're all supposed to follow. We have asinine rules that state that infinitives in English cannot be split! Like hell they can't! People split them every day! These are all manufactured! You can go back and literally find the books that did these. They aren't conventions of the language. THEY'RE ARBITRARY!
A lot of this comes from organizations that demand that our languages regularize in a certain manner. Well, guess what? When a language becomes perfectly regularized, à la Latin, it's because no one bloody well speaks it anymore except for people who know what and where high table is.
It's not just English that has this problem though, and other languages do this too. In France, there is seriously an organization that tries to prevent other languages from creeping into French. The French Academy seriously meets and decides whether one should say the Americanism "e-mail" or if it would be better to have a French word for it. (Which they did with courrier électronique.") There was a perfectly good loan word, but no, France decided to be difficult. In Italy, there's the Dante Society that talks a big talk about proper Italian. Dante was considered pretty controversial in his time, FOR WRITING IN ITALIAN! He was supposed to be writing in Latin. Dante actually openly encouraged using what was considered a vulgar form of what people were supposed to be using at the time.
Ok, I feel slightly better now. I think I'll see if iTunes X is available yet....
The second I read someone complaining about another person's horrible spelling or bad grammar, it makes me want to knock that person off their high horse. I for some reason, find myself giving them one of those usually British movie villain accents, and imagine them with a monocle. Male or female, it works both ways for me.
Languages are complicated, and spelling and grammar should not be held up as some sort of perfected model of speaking. Shakespeare existed in a time without a dictionary and created numerous words that never existed before their utterance. Even after the dictionary existed, writers like Lewis Carrol was creating all sorts of word. In fact, the Jabberwock is full of nonsense words with just enough regularized English to hold it together. We don't go back and discuss writers like this as fugitives.
English, and from what I have been told French, have both undergone massive vowel shifts. How the hell do you think it is that the sound represented in most Indo-European languages as "i" comes out as something akin to what Anglophones pronounce as "eye?" Why is it that George Bernard Shaw famously wrote that fish could be spelled "ghoti?" It's because our vowel system doesn't make a lick of sense!
In regards to grammar, people spend way too much time creating ideas that we're all supposed to follow. We have asinine rules that state that infinitives in English cannot be split! Like hell they can't! People split them every day! These are all manufactured! You can go back and literally find the books that did these. They aren't conventions of the language. THEY'RE ARBITRARY!
A lot of this comes from organizations that demand that our languages regularize in a certain manner. Well, guess what? When a language becomes perfectly regularized, à la Latin, it's because no one bloody well speaks it anymore except for people who know what and where high table is.
It's not just English that has this problem though, and other languages do this too. In France, there is seriously an organization that tries to prevent other languages from creeping into French. The French Academy seriously meets and decides whether one should say the Americanism "e-mail" or if it would be better to have a French word for it. (Which they did with courrier électronique.") There was a perfectly good loan word, but no, France decided to be difficult. In Italy, there's the Dante Society that talks a big talk about proper Italian. Dante was considered pretty controversial in his time, FOR WRITING IN ITALIAN! He was supposed to be writing in Latin. Dante actually openly encouraged using what was considered a vulgar form of what people were supposed to be using at the time.
Ok, I feel slightly better now. I think I'll see if iTunes X is available yet....