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i was traveling and happened to tune into the show, not realizing it even existed. i was, for a moment, pleasantly surprised --we need an engaging way to clue people in to some of the ways in which we make language meaningless. i had no sooner trained my ears on the speakers than droshka (spelling?) called in to tell you about a bet he had with co-workers over the phrase "expensive prices." he very logically --and totally correctly-- explained that he considered this phrase ungrammatical. prices can be high or low, gas can be expensive or cheap. but prices cannot be expensive. to my astonishment, you pleasantly condescended to this man, suggesting that because something is logical he thinks it is grammatical. but not so! if people say gas is expensive, then that is a fine thing to say.
absurd. and disappointing, since we do not need a program to put the stamp of approval on language use which deprives expression of logic, precision or meaning. we need encouragement --all of us-- to think about the degree to which we preserve the purpose of language by preserving its ability to convey meaning. a paid price, as a matter of fact, is an expense. it is not only ridiculous to say that expenses are expensive, it is ungrammatical in an obvious, elementary way. words would, in a better word, be modified only by adjectives describing attributes they can actually have. droshka was fighting the good fight, and you threw nails under his tires.
droshka, despite his surprise, good-humoredly agreed to lose a bet with his ignorant co-worker on the basis of your vapid judgement on the dispute. you owe him his money back!
Welcome! We're always glad to welcome new listeners. I'll take a chance that you are persuadable, though your user name gives advance warning of recalcitrance.
You are misusing "grammatical" and do not understand what grammar is. English grammar allows the adjective "expensive" before the noun "price." It has a meaning that is not misunderstood by any English speaker. Some may choose to pretend to misunderstand in order to feel smug or superior by positioning themselves against the behavior of most of the rest of the English-speaking world, but that is their own affair, and is false behavior.
Something becomes normal in English, and therefore acceptable to most of its speakers, when it is widely done, by many people, over a long period of time. "Expensive prices" and similar constructions have been used in this way and have been for a long time.
English does not work on logical principles and never has. It works on practical principles. As an accreted language, one that was not invented out of whole cloth in a single effort by some august body of logical linguists or anyone like that, it has many features that are odd, inconsistent, idiosyncratic, confusing, and redundant. Many of those features are not logical. All languages have a core consistency fringed by a ridiculous number of irregularities, outliers, and exceptions. The only approximately logical languages are programming languages, which are indeed wholly invented languages, and many of them have illogical features, as well.
"Expensive" frequently modifies nouns which are not being bought, in a way that indicates they involve a high cost. "Expensive restaurant," "expensive store," "expensive neighborhood," and other forms are widespread. When we say "that's an expensive neighborhood" we are not considering buying a neighborhood! We understand this to mean that there are costs involved beyond what we would consider it normal to pay. Same for "expensive price": the price is higher than what we would expect to pay. These are very precise meanings that are widely understood. We know this because have at our disposal giant corpora — large bodies of text in the trillions of words — which show how language is used. We can go right to the uses, some which are transcriptions of speech, and see if there was a need to explain or reframe the statement "expensive price" so a hearer could understand. There isn't, ever.
So what's at work here is the practical, purposeful usage of English. Arguing that it is not logical is arguing against English itself.
Would you also argue with "old age"?
that sure is a more interesting answer than what i head on the air. robert lane green just had an interesting column on exactly this --the clash between the "descriptivists" (you) and the "prescriptivists" (me on the odd numbered days of the week). i take it that the basic philosophy here is captured in this sentence: "It has a meaning that is not misunderstood by any English speaker. Some may choose to pretend to misunderstand in order to feel smug or superior by positioning themselves against the behavior of most of the rest of the English-speaking world, but that is their own affair, and is false behavior." ? i have no problem with you pouring this on somebody like droshka so long as you follow it with the comment: "This is our house dogma."
the high tide of descriptivist "anything that can be understood (by x percent of listeners) is grammatical" and "native speakers make no mistakes" (at least you didn't throw that one at droshka) is over; you are fighting a rear-guard action. i respect that. left to their own devices the prescriptivists will always go overboard. the all-[understood]speech-is-grammatical potion is a necessary antidote to fatal prescriptivitis.
what the cure is for fatal descriptivitis? anybody who lets n-grams of known word occurrence determine whether something is semantically coherent (as contrasted to observable or definable) is deep into a dogmatic morass. i think your should stick up for your dogma, but it would help the public if you made clear that there is an existing and growing opposition, and not only from those ignorant of "what grammar is" or guilty of "false behavior." you'll notice in your n-gram (which includes "expensive costs" even though the semantics of "cost" and "price" are hardly equivalent) that the instances of "expensive prices" (and "similar" --in your opinion-- phrases) have always been miniscule, even if existing. and since about 2003, it looks like, the instances are dropping. i don't know why that is. it could be because prescriptivism is on the march again and editors are doing their jobs. i don't want them take over the place. but they have a role, if only to suggest that nobody, not even you, can foresee all the possible combinations of words that are possible and all the ways there are to construe them; a little bit of thought about the "logical" relationships (assuming nobody cannot understand that) between words might reduce ambiguities and is therefore worth considering --or, in your case, permitting.
"English does not work on logical principles and never has." if you mean formal logic (which nobody does in everyday speech) i certainly agree. english has always had cases (and retains a very few) and tenses and sentence structure, all of which work on principles that everyday people mean by "logic" (it almost entirely lost gender --dare we suggest, for "logical" reasons?) thus, english can be learned by speakers of other languages --like droshka, in fact. your approach is merely based upon the assumption that there will always be sufficient redundancy in semantic strategies that the niceties of case, in some circumstances tense, and, yes, "logical" relationships between adjectives and nouns will not be necessary to make the language understandable. if you were able to foresee every instance of possible use in the illimitable future and know (as you already know so absolutely the unambiguity of every instance represented in the n-gram) that ambiguity will never be possible, you would be justified in suggesting that grammar is whatever people say that is understood by everybody except those engaging in "false behavior." how you foresee that is not clear to me at present; the best guard against ambiguity has always been the establishment and reasonable observation of basic principles that most of us would call "grammatical."
as for making a parallel between "expensive price" and "old age" --really? the two words "old" and "age," even singly, have such a multilayered resonance in our language, and together have a history from the fourteenth century. there isn't comparison, in the world of language use, to "expensive price." try an n-gram on "old age." you will see that the instances are dropping steadily since the earliest nineteenth century, i would assume because it is considered poor form to refer to people as "old" when they can be called "senior" or "retired." but "old age" tops out (round 1805 i would guess) at .0015 percent of corpus. "expensive price" topped out c. 2003 at .0000014 percent of corpus. in the real world of language use where you live (and i am right there with you), the intelligibility and credibility of any word or combination of words has a direct relationship to frequency and breadth of use. no phrase that is thousands of times less frequent and hundred of years younger than another has a claim to the same semantic standing --by your own standards. it just hasn't proved itself in all the semantic arenas you are giving it credit for.
at the top of my composition window here it says "above all, be courteous!" good words, i only wish the response that on the basis of nothing at all condemns me of being totally ignorant of "what grammar is" and implies that i am guilty of "false behavior" (that certainly sounds serious) was as courteous as the exhortation suggests. technically grammar doesn't mean anything but that which can be written by those educated enough to write it. yes, from the very beginning the whole concept of grammar was based on the ability to discriminate between the writable and the unwritable. nowadays, we all mean by grammar what droshka means by it --basic rules of behavior between signifiers and the signified, in order to reduce (not eliminate) possible ambiguities (since only the descriptivists know the construability of every instance of every word past, present and future).
keep fighting for your side, i think it is an important one and the world would be a terrible place if the prescriptivists ruled. i would like it better if you acknowledged that you are working off an ideology and that it is not the only one controlling the current field of applied linguistics. and i regret the condescending treatment of droshka, a dedicated and accomplished student of our language, whose success in studying it is, manifestly, a challenge to your way of thinking. and i'll be scratching my head for a long time wondering what "false behavior" is. grammar cannot be false, but behavior can be? will continue to turn that one over...
I'm in the middle of deadlines so I can't reply in full but a few points and responses:
• Radio requires abbreviation; nobody would listen to even one full explanation of any of the questions that are asked, nor would it be any fun to do. Unscripted radio is often semi-structured. So, yeah, what I wrote above is more complete and more structured.
• Like every dictionary editor and linguist I know, I am indeed a descriptivist. There's more about that here. I would not call descriptivism dogma. It is based in the study of empirical data, which is part of the conflict between descriptivists and prescriptivists, since the various language fields all together tend to straddle the humanities and the sciences in an awkward way. The humanities tend to allow for emotional, intuitional, and even woo-woo conclusions; the sciences do not.
• This is not quite right: the high tide of descriptivist “anything that can be understood (by x percent of listeners) is grammatical†and “native speakers make no mistakes†(at least you didn't throw that one at droshka) is over. Instead, it should be descriptivist “anything that can be comfortably and unselfconsciously used by many speakers is acceptable†and “the aggregate or most common behavior of native speakers is not a mistake.†Of course, there are caveats. What is the context? What is the domain? Who is the audience? What is the register? Who are the speakers? What are the pragmatics? Good speaking and writing do not exist in a vacuum and it is a gradated scale of acceptability according to context.
• In fact, the armchair prescriptivists are a waning group, having lost many members who tired of flailing in the darkness because they refused to turn on the light. However, educated academic prescriptivism exists legitimately and will never die among those who teach (including parents and grandparents), edit, and copyedit — and rightly so because that is the place for such prescriptions, where we teach what is expected of good English speakers in a particular environment. Context again. They teach real grammar, real syntax, real spelling, and real composition, not some mish-mash of folklore, wishful thinking, and misapplied logic.
• This is wrong: no phrase that is thousands of times less frequent and hundred of years younger than another has a claim to the same semantic standing –by your own standards. It is not what I said, not what I believe, and not what I teach. I hope you don't believe it!
• Inventing one's own rules and forcing them on the speech of others is really the most condescending behavior I see.
I apologize if you find my words discourteous. I answer tone for tone, and with passion, because I have a desire to teach and explain what is true, and to dispel misunderstanding.
Grant Barrett said ... English does not work on logical principles and never has....So what's at work here is the practical, purposeful usage of English. Arguing that it is not logical is arguing against English itself...
You probably mean the argument is moot or misguided, because the whole language itself is not known for being logical.
Grant Barrett said "Expensive prices" and similar constructions have been used in this way and have been for a long time.
The entries in your ngram are expensive price,expensive prices,expensive cost,expensive costs. Fair enough. But put high price in there and it blows them all away. Now one possibility to account for that is that the majority of users still shy away from those usages.
That brings another point: suppose a great number of people insist on certain traditional rules, some strict viewpoints normally considered prescriptivistic, can these folks then constitute a descriptivistic mass and themselves become same as descriptivists ? I say yes, rightly so, by virtue of their large grass-root consensus and their deriving their senses of right and wrong from watching one another-- though they would be a kind of negative descriptivist, people who quietly say to themselves, no, that is wrong, don't do it. (How to account for their number is a whole other problem, I imagine, if linguists care to do.) If so, this means that a prescriptivistic viewpoint if influential enough can acquire the virtues of descriptivism too.
Regarding expensive prices, I would stay off it, because I am not convinced it carries enough descriptivistic weight, much less prescriptivistic, and because sorry I do buy the 'logical' point, pedant101's point above, plus (like you mention in a recent topic) why risk controversy and distraction from what you try to say, which is always hard enough without such.
False behavior? -- looks like a whole new discussion.
I was also taken aback by Grant and Martha's response to this caller. English is my first language, and I analyze the sentences in question exactly as the caller did. I can accept that colloquially, "The price of gas is expensive/cheap" might be common, but Grant and Martha should have assured him that logically speaking, this usage was imprecise, because the service station is not selling prices, so the prices can't be cheap or expensive, but they can be high or low.
But I'm used to Grant's advanced case of descriptivismitis, so I'll let that go.
However, what really disturbed me was Grant's suggestion that the caller was analyzing the usage in this way because his first language was not English. As I said, my first language is English and I would apply the same logic. And to me, bringing up the caller's national origin as the cause of his line of thinking was more than a little bit obnoxious and offensive. I think Grant could have made his point without saying what essentially amounted to "You're confused because you're a foreigner."
Shame, Grant!
I accept that someone's language background can be a factor in understanding linguistic artifacts. However, in this specific case, I don't think it was justified to conclude the call with that conclusion. As I said, English is my first language, and I would analyze the sentences the same way. My conclusion would be that this usage might be imprecise but nevertheless colloquial (although to be honest I haven't really noticed the usage "the price is expensive"). I don't think there was any need to pin the cause of this particular question as being the caller's Serbian background.
I just want to make it clear that I don't question the propriety of asking about the caller's background. I question only the way it was used in the conclusion. After all, as I said, I would make the same comment and I don't have a different first language. From the information given in the segment, the answer to the caller should have been no different than any hypothetical answer to me.
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