Had a brief argument with my friend last night about whether Fark or Reddit is better, and what do you know... this morning, Language Log happens to prove my point:
Geoffrey Pullum's article about The Elements of Style, like any other piece of prescriptive grammar advice, being a wad of fail.
Fark's response according to Pullum (original thread of fail)
Reddit's response
tl;dr -- only losers read Fark.
Besides, what the fark (<_<) style="font-weight: bold;">
EDIT
Since people asked, here's a bit on why linguists tend to hate/ignore/get rather irritated by writers of prescriptive grammatical advice. Since I seem to write better comments at 5am than blog posts at high noon, for whatever reason, I'll just repost my comment here.
Prescriptive grammar has several issues:
a) to linguists it tends to be of little interests as it does not reflect the innate tendencies of language speakers, which is what the study of language mainly focuses on. Prescriptive grammar is largely ceremonial.
b) English has a particularly bad case of prescriptive grammar being based on the grammar of some [mildly] distant language, eg. Latin. Take, for example, the law against split infinitives. The only reason it exists is that in Latin, it is impossible to ever split one due to it being comprised of a single morpheme. No reason to be so against it in English! Often, it's less awkward to simply ignore such relics of the medieval days of Latin scholarship.
Prescriptive grammar (and to some extent, prescriptive style) isn't particularly productive in helping people write better. Even linguistics background can get in the way sometimes -- I've encountered several linguists who...erm, don't quite put it into practice very well <_< style="font-style: italic;">The Language Instinct. (Great book, btw, highly recommend reading it!)
Prescriptive grammar does play a fairly important role, however: it prevents languages from dissipating into thousands of tiny dialects by setting up an arbitrary standard dialect one must aspire to. Otherwise, linguistic speciation likes to happen at an astounding rate, and 'in nature', languages tend to be rather small and ephemeral entities. They are very much like bacteria, in fact! Loanwords (plasmids, if you will) are exchanged on a regular basis; even grammatical structures can be borrowed from the neighbour (LGT, if you will?).
And they can 'conjugate' too, and create offspring via creolisation -- a fascinating phenomenon where multiple unrelated languages are mixed into what is called a pidgin, and the children growing up listening to this artificial language modify it to conform to natural linguistic laws -- regular grammar, complex sentence structure, etc. I don't even think there is a strong equivalent to that among biological organisms!
I must take issue with the notion that prescriptive grammar advice is necessarily a big wad of fail. I mean, is it possible to give grammar advice that is not prescriptive? If so, is it really desirable? Keep in mind how the people who are most in need of grammar advice tend to write....
ReplyDeleteAs for the article itself, it does not say much at all about the value of any kind of grammar advice. Rather, it asserts (and demonstrates) that the most-used style guide in the US discusses grammar at least as much as style, and discusses both poorly.
Sorry for jumping on that so hard. In other news, the Language Log rocks my world.
The issue with prescriptive grammar is that:
ReplyDeletea) to linguists it tends to be of little interests as it does not reflect the innate tendencies of language speakers, which is what the study of language mainly focuses on. Prescriptive grammar is largely ceremonial.
b) English has a particularly bad case of prescriptive grammar being based on the grammar of some [mildly] distant language, eg. Latin. Take, for example, the law against split infinitives. The only reason it exists is that in Latin, it is impossible to ever split one due to it being comprised of a single morpheme. No reason to be so against it in English! Often, it's less awkward to simply ignore such relics of the medieval days of Latin scholarship.
Prescriptive grammar (and to some extent, prescriptive style) isn't particularly productive in helping people write better. Even linguistics background can get in the way sometimes -- I've encountered several linguists who...erm, don't quite put it into practice very well <_< . Of course, that may just be my luck...
Good writing comes from reading good writing, and reading critically. Critiquing other people's essays, I believe, is a good exercise -- you really start thinking about WHY a certain sentence is awkward, or difficult to read. You then make generalisations that make sense to you. And hopefully learn from them.
Not something you can put in a book, but I don't think it's really something you can shortcut around. Language is simply too complex an organism (I like the language symbiont theory... should blog about it, eventually...) to explain in a series of books. Even modern theories of linguistics don't quite capture it entirely just yet. Especially for non-IndoEuropean languages. That's why many linguists get so annoyed by grammar advice: first off, the self-proclaimed guardians of good language tend to fail at comprehending the very thing they profess to be experts at; but most importantly -- language is an organism, even to those who don't acknowledge it explicitly. There's no right or wrong way to be, and selective pressures generally keep it functional. Languages change. Traits that are susceptible to neglect are lost, while others persist. (There was a Nature paper where they actually measured that an irregular verb was far more likely to be regularised if it was seldom used!)
To linguists, prescriptive grammar is much like 'primitive organisms' are to us!
But the point was to demonstrate the superiority of Reddit. Actually, that's irrelevant -- the point was to publicly announce that my friend was wrong. Just for kicks. He deserves it =P
Once again, I can comment in better detail than I can blog... WTF. I should just post my comments instead, or something...
-Psi-
In fact, I'm gonna go 'enhance' my post with parts of my comment there... otherwise it looks devoid of any real content. <_<
ReplyDelete