When it comes to language, a listener from Dallas wants to know, as a fellow Texan might put it, “who’s the decider”? Grant explains that nobody makes the rules about language, and everybody does. For those seeking professional guidance, a whole community of lexicographers, dictionaries, and style guides offers rules and provenance on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. However, on a daily basis all the users of a language implicitly write the rules by choosing words and syntax that have semantic clarity for the people they’re trying to communicate with. You could go to a reference book, or you could say something to your neighbor, then judge by their reaction whether or not you made sense. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Who’s The Decider”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Grant, we got a letter from a listener in Dallas who wants to know who’s in charge, who decides when it comes to the English language, who decides official word spelling, who decides official word pronunciation, that a word belongs in English, and who decides punctuation rules. Grant, who’s in charge?
You and I.
Okay. All right. There you have it.
I’ll solve. Thanks, listener.
Call us with your language questions, 877.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
There’s a little more to be said about that.
Okay, all right.
I’m going to lay this out pretty simply.
These are all one question. Who’s in charge?
And the answer is nobody.
Oh, no.
But the answer is also everybody.
Nice.
Yeah, I need some explanation here.
In English, we tend to, and I say we meaning you and I, Martha, and people who are like us, educated to a degree, interested in learning more. We are curious about the world. We welcome new ideas. We tend to look for authorities.
The same way you do for movies.
Sure.
You find a movie reviewer you like.
Sure.
You begin to trust them.
And so when they say a movie is good, you feel like you can go see it without worrying about wasting your money, right?
Right.
We do the same thing in language.
We count on our dictionary editors to take up some of the tasks. We also count on our style guide editors. Sometimes we count on our radio hosts, our language columnists. So we have these reference works and we have these people that we look to to help us make these decisions.
And we begin to trust them.
We find maybe it’s Merriam-Webster that works for you as a dictionary, or it’s American Heritage, or Collins, or Chambers, right?
There are a lot to choose from.
Right.
Maybe you prefer to read Ben Zimmer’s stuff in Language Log, or in the New York Times, or there’s somebody else that you’re interested in because they have a lot to say in it, and it strikes you as true because it confirms what you already think.
Right.
That’s the important fact, right?
Right. So not just one source, for sure.
Right. But to each authority, we leave a different task.
The dictionary editors, for example, they’ll decide if a word is common enough, whether it’s useful enough. And they’ll find out how it’s pronounced most of the time, what it means most of the time. And if they get sufficient evidence, according to their own internal rules, they’ll put it in a dictionary.
That is as close as we get to a word officially entering English.
There is no official body that decides these things for English.
French has a body, or at least French in France does.
Hebrew does in Israel.
The Russians have one.
There’s nothing like that in English, which is why we grow our own authorities.
We are allowed as thinking individuals to pick our own experts to advise us.
So what this means, if you turn that around, beyond the authorities, we are our own experts.
We learn to trust our own experience with language.
It is a self-correcting system.
If I’m speaking to you, Martha, and you make it plain that you misunderstand, I’m probably not going to make that mistake again.
I’m going to try something different.
And in this way, we improve.
And if we’re thinking about it, we’ll go to an outside resource, find out what their opinion is, and incorporate that into our speech.
And in that way, we develop a language expertise that is at one time independent of anyone else, but at the same time reliant upon everyone else.
All of that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in rules.
I believe in rules, but we’re all making them together.
I’m down with that.
All right. Here we go.
Yeah, with that, and I’d just like to say for people who are just becoming familiar with our show that Grant has worked as a dictionary editor. He’s been one of those people analyzing the evidence and deciding if words should be in the dictionary or not.
For better or worse.
Thanks for your email.
If you’ve got any questions about this or if you’ve got some comments about how we make stuff official, I’ll take your emails, send them to words@waywordradio.org, and Martha and I would love to answer your questions about any aspect of language, communication, linguistics, and so forth.
Give us a call, 877-929-9673.
