fast?
2—Same thing. Is Hericlitean flux as normal or desirable as gradual change? Do some changes serve the language’s overall pizzazz better than others? And how many people have to deviate from how many conventions before we say the language has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent? Where do you draw the line? Who draws the line?
3—This is an old claim, at least as old as Plato’s
Phaedrus
. And it’s specious. If Derrida and the infamous Deconstructionists have done nothing else, they’ve successfully debunked the idea that speech is language’s primary instantiation. 27 Plus consider the weird arrogance of Gove’s (3) with respect to correctness. Only the most mullah-like Prescriptivists care all that much about spoken English; most Prescriptive usage guides concern Standard
Written
English. 28
4—Fine, but whose usage? Gove’s (4) begs the whole question. What he wants to suggest here, I think, is a reversal of the traditional entailment-relation between abstract rules and concrete usage: instead of usage’s ideally corresponding to a rigid set of regulations, the regulations ought to correspond to the way real people are actually using the language. Again, fine, but which people? Urban Latinos? Boston Brahmins? Rural Midwesterners? Appalachian Neogaelics?
5—
Huh?
If this means what it seems to mean, then it ends up biting Gove’s whole argument in the ass. Principle (5) appears to imply that the correct answer to the above “which people?” is: All of them. And it’s easy to show why this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle. The most obvious problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Well, because you can’t actually observe and record every last bit of every last native speaker’s “language behavior,” and even if you could, the resultant dictionary would weigh four million pounds and need to be updated hourly. 29 The fact is that any real lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what gets in and what doesn’t. And these choices are based on … what? And so we’re right back where we started.
It is true that, as a SNOOT, I am naturally predisposed to look for flaws in Gove et al.’s methodological argument. But these flaws still seem awfully easy to find. Probably the biggest one is that the Descriptivists’ “scientific lexicography”—under which, keep in mind, the ideal English dictionary is basically number-crunching: you somehow observe every linguistic act by every native/naturalized speaker of English and put the sum of all these acts between two covers and call it The Dictionary—involves an incredibly crude and outdated understanding of what
scientific
means. It requires a naive belief in scientific Objectivity, for one thing. Even in the physical sciences, everything from quantum mechanics to Information Theory has shown that an act of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically inseparable from it.
If you remember your old college English classes, there’s an analogy here that points up the trouble scholars get into when they confuse observation with interpretation. It’s the New Critics. 30 Recall their belief that literary criticism was best conceived as a “scientific” endeavor: the critic was a neutral, careful, unbiased, highly trained observer whose job was to find and objectively describe meanings that were right there, literally inside pieces of literature. Whether you know what happened to New Criticism’s reputation depends on whether you took college English after c. 1975; suffice it to say that its star has dimmed. The New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove’s Methodological Descriptivists: they believed that there was such a thing as unbiased observation. And that linguistic meanings could exist “Objectively,” separate from any interpretive act.
The point of the analogy is that claims to Objectivity in language study are now the stuff of jokes
2—Same thing. Is Hericlitean flux as normal or desirable as gradual change? Do some changes serve the language’s overall pizzazz better than others? And how many people have to deviate from how many conventions before we say the language has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent? Where do you draw the line? Who draws the line?
3—This is an old claim, at least as old as Plato’s
Phaedrus
. And it’s specious. If Derrida and the infamous Deconstructionists have done nothing else, they’ve successfully debunked the idea that speech is language’s primary instantiation. 27 Plus consider the weird arrogance of Gove’s (3) with respect to correctness. Only the most mullah-like Prescriptivists care all that much about spoken English; most Prescriptive usage guides concern Standard
Written
English. 28
4—Fine, but whose usage? Gove’s (4) begs the whole question. What he wants to suggest here, I think, is a reversal of the traditional entailment-relation between abstract rules and concrete usage: instead of usage’s ideally corresponding to a rigid set of regulations, the regulations ought to correspond to the way real people are actually using the language. Again, fine, but which people? Urban Latinos? Boston Brahmins? Rural Midwesterners? Appalachian Neogaelics?
5—
Huh?
If this means what it seems to mean, then it ends up biting Gove’s whole argument in the ass. Principle (5) appears to imply that the correct answer to the above “which people?” is: All of them. And it’s easy to show why this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle. The most obvious problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Well, because you can’t actually observe and record every last bit of every last native speaker’s “language behavior,” and even if you could, the resultant dictionary would weigh four million pounds and need to be updated hourly. 29 The fact is that any real lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what gets in and what doesn’t. And these choices are based on … what? And so we’re right back where we started.
It is true that, as a SNOOT, I am naturally predisposed to look for flaws in Gove et al.’s methodological argument. But these flaws still seem awfully easy to find. Probably the biggest one is that the Descriptivists’ “scientific lexicography”—under which, keep in mind, the ideal English dictionary is basically number-crunching: you somehow observe every linguistic act by every native/naturalized speaker of English and put the sum of all these acts between two covers and call it The Dictionary—involves an incredibly crude and outdated understanding of what
scientific
means. It requires a naive belief in scientific Objectivity, for one thing. Even in the physical sciences, everything from quantum mechanics to Information Theory has shown that an act of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically inseparable from it.
If you remember your old college English classes, there’s an analogy here that points up the trouble scholars get into when they confuse observation with interpretation. It’s the New Critics. 30 Recall their belief that literary criticism was best conceived as a “scientific” endeavor: the critic was a neutral, careful, unbiased, highly trained observer whose job was to find and objectively describe meanings that were right there, literally inside pieces of literature. Whether you know what happened to New Criticism’s reputation depends on whether you took college English after c. 1975; suffice it to say that its star has dimmed. The New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove’s Methodological Descriptivists: they believed that there was such a thing as unbiased observation. And that linguistic meanings could exist “Objectively,” separate from any interpretive act.
The point of the analogy is that claims to Objectivity in language study are now the stuff of jokes
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