Grammar Puss: The fallacies of the language mavens (1994)

Funny I read the whole thing thinking that this is like The Language Instinct by Pinker and then at the end saw it was by him. That explains why nothing but one point in it was new to me.

The point that did spark my interest was that it's not rules that are important but expressing yourself as a writer (or speaker), which most people are poor at.

Pinker is good, Christopher Hitchens was good, George Orwell was excellent at condensing ideas down into clear, lucid pros. Our own Dijkstra is probably admired mostly for his ability to write so clearly regardless of the topic. Hacker News's Paul Graham's success as an author of articles seems to me to be 80% his writing abilities and 20% actual valuable ideas.

That comes down to the really important point for me. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't communicate them, they'll just sit in the shed propping up cobwebs. You may get lucky and someone else does it for you. If there's a "one thing" that language teaching efforts should be focused on, it's getting your point across effectively.

My wife and I discus this all the time. She's in the "descriptive rules" camp, and I straddle the line.

The advantage to prescriptive rules for language is that you don't lose the context of a language over time or distance. My hope was that the popularity of the web would make it easier to communicate and understand each other, and also that languages would mature to the point where we could read historical documents without a language barrier.

Instead, it seems like language in popular use seems to have evolved more quickly, we're not as good at communication as before, and we collectively choose our words less carefully out of a smaller pool.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.

This reminds me a lot of music theory. I used to think of the elements of western music as being prescriptive, like major and minor keys and functions. But I came to understand that the most groundbreaking treatises on music theory were originally descriptive, before becoming understood as prescriptive. Great artists found ways to innovate new practices, and eventually theory began to fragment as it became seemingly impossible to create a coherent set of rules to cover all popular music, even though so many idioms are shared between genres.

And what's particularly fascinating to me is the fact that music can't really even be said to communicate ideas. So it's a bit of a mystery why it should have idioms to begin with. And yet...

I'm all for verbing nouns, but the person who decided "decisioning" should be a word needs to be disciplined severely.

>What is behind this contradiction? If language is as instinctive to humans as dam-building is to beavers, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA, why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts pen to paper?

Because just having language faculties doesn't necessarily make you smart or informed or well-read, nor it makes you someone that pays attention to what they say and how they say it.

Sex is an instinct too -- but how many do it badly?

Meta: It's interesting to note how different the writing is 20 years later. It seems like it's much more complex than most writing today.

Has our writing improved in clarity or has it gotten simpler? (or was this similarly far from the mean in its time?)

  > So just because "Al Gore and I" is an object
  > that requires object case, it does not mean
  > that "I" is an object that requires object case.
  > By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to
  > have any case it wants.

This is the only part of the article that seems controversial to me and I cannot explain why it seems wrong!

The closest I can get is to suggest that a paraphrase of "Give Al Gore and I a chance" is "Give Al Gore a chance, and me too" and that this intended meaning is what constrains the pronoun to be "me".

I was hoping this article was about analytic philosophers.

I also urged my dear friends to take it easy with their agressive attitudes towards those living at the edge of language correctness; language is a living organism, it changes in time. And as long as we convey the meaning of what we are trying to express on the other side it is ok. And for sure not to be responded with active/passive aggression as I see it so many times.

"Authority and American Usage" is generally better. [0]: http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...

> treating "bummer" as a sentence

I've never heard a complaint about that.

It seems as much a sentance as "Sorry" or "Okay"