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I'm with the guy from Denton. "15 items or less" IS wrong. But it seems that on A Way With Words, nothing is ever wrong. Now, I understand as well as the next person, including, no doubt, the guy from Denton, that languages evolve and that English is particularly fluid. But, is nothing at all sacred? I don't want "fewer" pollution. I want less pollution!
Now we're supposed to believe that just because some pre-teen somewhere want cream cheese on her baggle, that we all should eat baggles now. Why isn't it OK for her ostensibly educated parents to say, "no dear, we say bay-gul. (I grew up among many Jewish families on the east coast and ate thousands of bagels and I never heard it pronounced any other way than bay-gl.)
And now "I did it on accident" is OK, too. NO! The proper response to that is to say, "no, dear, we say BY accident." So, tell me, Martha and Grant, if some kid in Wichita decides that sentences are ended with a ; are we now able to properly end a sentence with a ;? Or let's start spelling dog "dgo", just, you know, like, because. What's the difference? If an individual (maybe an ignorant person who's mother has a telephone) can change the language in one way, what's to stop the language from being decided by 300 million people in 3 billion different ways? That ain't language, it's babel.
We have to improve education in this country, and English is a good place to start. I would hope you would promote standards as well as enlighten.
If not, I supposed I have to accept that "banana's" means more than one banana, and "it's" is the possessive form of "it" because, for all intensive purposes, that's the way things are going.
Stand with Denton and me!
Stevez, you've gathered enough strawmen there to feed the cattle through the winter!
Nobody says "fewer pollution" as a habit. Any native English speaker knows that you can't use fewer with a mass noun like that.
The other pronunciation of bagel is widespread and well-known. It's not just one kid!
Nothing stops you from punctuating or spelling things any way you like. If enough people do it, maybe dgo will catch on;
Your idea of improving education is to make everyone do it your way. Our idea of education is to teach how language works, how people speak and write, and why, and to bring to light the complexities and inconsistencies of this marvelous tool we all have.
Stevez, I get what you are saying (especially the misuse of apostrophes, that really bugs me) and I sympathize with you. The only thing is, there are probably many things that you say and write that you take as gospel or proper form that someone from a generation (or several generations) ago would find laughable, incomprehensible or a total violation of language rules as they knew them. As our world and language changes we tend to roll our eyes and say things like "kids these days!" I have found it quite humorous when I see the exact same sentiments conveyed by ancient Greeks! The only thing that is constant is change as they say.
I think you have to consider the notion of register in language in order to make some of these generalizations. "Language" entails a multitude of communication phenomena and can't always be examined as an indivisible entity: there are meaningful social borders within. While some registers of English are highly prone to change, others are much less so. There are various models of language registration that have been proposed. The five-register model by Joos is popular among sociolinguists. For the purposes of this discussion though, it might be easier to just examine some characteristics at the poles of register:
Most formal
-acceptability determined by code: language construction must follow rules
-communication success relies entirely on language
-highly resistant to change
-participation is unilateral: recitation, prepared speech and formal writing
-rooted in cognitive processes that develop after the onset of adolescence
Least formal
-acceptability determined by currency: if it's typical of what a native speaker would say, it's acceptable.
-communication success relies heavily on extralinguistic cues: body language, tone of voice, emoticons, etc.
-highly prone to change
-participation is usually interactive: oral conversation, instant messaging, texting, etc.
-rooted in cognitive processes that are in place prior to the onset of adolescence
So the issue is often one of misinterpreting the social venue that cues one register or the other. If a student walks into a classroom on the first day of class and greets the teacher with, "hey, dude!…how's it hangin'?" the problem isn't one of changing language or language that is entirely wrong, but one of inappropriate register (failure to code switch). Signage is customarily written in formal register so I think stevenz has a good point. Of course, we now live in a day when even U.S. Presidents use informal register at press briefings, so perhaps code-shifting for more appropriate register is, like so many other forms of etiquette, something that is in the process of falling by the wayside.
The one-way vs. two-way mode of participation is particularly important. It's common to see a justification of one-way language delivery constructed on an example of how two-way speech operates. That's getting one's register wires crossed.
EmmettRedd said:
Most formal
...
-rooted in cognitive processes that develop after the onset of adolescenceLeast formal
...
-rooted in cognitive processes that are in place prior to the onset of adolescenceHave we found the reason why we have said "kids these days" for these thousands of years?
Emmett
Not really. The cognitive processes that are in place prior to the onset of adolescence don't disappear with maturity, they're just layered over with additional more analytical processes. Even as adults we still construct most speech from a largely intuitive-holistic skills set that we acquired from about 2 to 4 years of age.
Not really. The cognitive processes that are in place prior to the onset of adolescence don't disappear with maturity, they're just layered over with additional more analytical processes. Even as adults we still construct most speech from a largely intuitive-holistic skills set that we acquired from about 2 to 4 years of age.
I was not only talking about speech, but, rather, about the existence of mature cognitive processes in adults versus their absence in 'kids'. That is, the elders do not notice their slow change into mature thinking but do notice its lack in the kids. Therefore, no matter what the epoch, kids think different from adults and that difference has been noticed for millennia.
Emmett
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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