Posted on 09/12/2014 2:13:42 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Lauren Squires, a sociolinguistic professor at OSU, is distressed by the success of the "Word Crimes" parody from Weird Al Yankovic.
Professor Squires tut-tutted, “Many linguists are shaking their heads and feeling a little hopeless about what the public enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified in attacking those who don’t do things the ‘correct’ way.”
In his highly entertaining video, Weird Al does not hesitate to insult people who use bad grammar.
The professor thinks that Weird Al’s attitude “raises deep and long-standing questions of social equity regarding class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender, and how these relate to languages, dialects, and social registers….”
The professor is all aghast at Weird Al’s approval of grammatical absolutes. It’s almost as bad as being white. Clearly he’s going to hell for two reasons now.
I’d say the professor is running a scam. Every major language in the world has its high, middle and low variations, its slang, its regional variations. That’s a fact of life. Even semi-educated users of the language know about these subtleties. Many people shift their language depending on the people they are with.
But children do not know these subtleties, nor do they need to at the start. Here’s what they need: to learn Standard English as quickly as possible. Basically, Standard is what the media and publishers do; it’s what the majority of upper and middle-class people do. Teaching anything else is not fair to the child.
Suppose you went to Russia to learn Russian. The teacher tells you there are three ways you can express a thought. All are acceptable. Your reaction, if you are smart, would be: “I’m just learning the language. I don’t need to learn second and third choices. Tell me the one that will work in the majority of situations.”
Isn’t that obviously the more efficient approach? But of course professors don’t like the obvious. They like sophistries, especially if they sandbag anything Standard or mainstream.
They want to use political correctness to justify claiming that all linguistic choices are equally appropriate. Educated adults knows this is nonsense.
But a kid in elementary school does not. If you tell the child there are no rules and anything goes, then you are crippling that person. You are stigmatizing that person.
It’s as reckless as telling children they can drink as much soda as they want. Any amount is equally correct!
The professor is myopic. In real life, standards are NOT largely trivial. They are hugely important to anyone who wants to move comfortably inside a language, especially someone just starting out.
The public schools have stopped telling kids what’s considered the correct way. That leaves everyone adrift. Weird Al is defending common sense. If sociolinguistic professors are feeling hopeless, that’s a good development. Perhaps they’ll remain quiet for a while, having done enough damage.
There’s no philosophical justification for the relativity they promote. This whole descriptive versus prescriptive debate is just a cheap piece of bad logic. When anthropologists study primitive cultures, they’re supposed to observe and describe. They’re not supposed to dictate what the natives should do. The locals are of course the experts on their own culture. We outsiders are supposed to describe, not prescribe. Yes of course, as long as we’re in the jungle.
So then our far-left professors tried to pull a fast one, by blandly announcing that the same neutrality would be appropriate in New York City. We should ignore professors of English, editors, famous authors, literary experts of all kinds. Their opinions would be prescriptive and we can’t have that. Why? Because, you know, we don't do that in the jungle! This sophistry is so lame you would think these professors would be red with embarrassment.
After students have learned all the rules, they can start breaking the rules and choosing among the rules. But in the beginning students need to know Standard English. They need to know what the best and brightest do. Anything else is a war against children, and against the society in general.
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Weird Al video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
"9: Philosophy Weeps" -- see second sophistry “The Prescription is ‘No Prescriptions” -- http://www.improve-education.org/id13.html
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My speech, punctuation and spelling may not be perfect but it is understandable to English speakers around the world.
My achy-breaky heart...
A vocabulary is the tool used by your brain to form thoughts.
As an education institution has a responsibility to the child to prepare them for the REAL world...you want to be in business? Speak correctly. Dou want to work in science or technology? You’d better be able to articulate things extremely precisely.
...these idiots are the same ones complaining that there’s so few blacks in science and technology. We’re in a GLOBAL economy, I work with people in Romania that speak MUCH better English than many over here. It helps them be successful. We DON’T hire people we can’t easily communicate it, especially as much of it is over the phone.
Requiring correct spelling and grammar is just micro-agression.
^ ...excuse my typos!! lol
Based solely on the title, nothing is more delicious than the tears of fascist liberal control freak asshats.
Proper grammar allows for clarity of thought and meaning. It is a natural obstacle to those intellectual leftists who deliberately strive to dumb down our language by replacing English with gutter Newspeak.
That this man is a college professor is completely appalling.
I completely agree with you, but am constrained to point out that you should have written "there ARE so few blacks."
(Just messin' with ya, man.) But I do agree with what you are saying.
Those doing research into mind reading (Legitimate thought reading, not ESP) have found that our thoughts are very much word oriented. Individual words come from specific parts of our brains and follow specific pathways. Once those pathways are mapped, they can know what a person is thinking with a fair degree of accuracy.
In the science show I watched, they had a subject wired up with an EEG. A TV screen would show them photograph of something like a beach in Hawaii. In the next room words would come from a computer program that had mapped the subject’s brain. Words on the screen would be things like beach, sand, palm, hotel, mountain, tropical.
The progressive idea of manipulating language to manipulate populations is not new.
In “The Language of the 3rd Reich” Victor Klemperer speaks of his experiences in nazi (or is that nazil) Germany. He tells how the nazis manipulated the German language as a means of making German society more accepting of nazi goals.
Progressives have been at it in this country for quite some time. The word “militia” used to denote honor, patriotism, and duty. Today the word is often used in conversations about racism and anti government sentiment.
“Pro choice” is another good example. It means pro abortion but that isn’t acceptable to as many people as this vague idea of “choice”. After all, what is more American than choice? “Pro life” can’t be read any other way than what it is which is why the left calls us “anti choice” or anti woman’s health.
Can you say "First-world problem"?
I remember a time when using BAD grammar got you shunned. Now, thanks to the false egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, the opposite holds true.
Thank you, Post-modernists.
Now that's odd, isn't it? Because our good Professor appears to imagine that "social equity, class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender" have specific, clearly delineated meanings and are to be used in specific ways. Bit of a language fascist himself, isn't he?
I purposely include typo’s in my commentary, so as to confuse the grammar police, however sometimes the stupid auto correct tarts my efforts...er…thwarts my efforts.
I was going to post that exact picture when I read the same comment. :)
GMTA... 8^)
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