There's a deeper issue here, which is that prescriptivism all too often relies on a systematic confusion of ethical and fact judgements. For example, if I'm writing some language, I could definitely benefit from a guide to the range of dialectal, sociolectal and stylistic variation that also described common attitudes towards the variants. If using, say, the word fuck in a public speech is going to offend soccer moms, then I definitely benefit from being aware of this.
The usual prescriptivist way of handling this, however, is to say that one should not use the word fuck, because it will offend people and indispose them toward you. But by putting it this way, the prescriptivist has prejudged the ethical issue: he has assumed an ethical rule, whose rough form is "you should not offend others or otherwise deliberately indispose them toward you."
This is an example involving vulgar vocabulary, but the general principle just doesn't rely on that detail at all; proscriptions are frequently couched in terms like that: "you should not talk that way, because 'people' (and I will not bother to state who these people are) will think bad things about you." I say that the prescriptivist, qua grammarian, has no damn business sneaking in dubious moral principles into his prescriptions.
Then there's the problem that the unspecified "people" in the formula above refers, usually, to one of two groups: (a) mainstream middle-class society (sorry for being so redundant), and (b) people who proscribe the usage that is being proscribed. In the first case, it's just reinforcing prejudice. The second one is the silly game where the "grammarian" proscribes usages that are in fact standard, and tells you that you should follow the proscription because people who have the habit of proscribing standard usages are going to think Bad Things about you (best illustrated by arguments along the lines of "yeah, there's nothing wrong grammatically with split infinitives, but you should still avoid them, because people think that there's something wrong with them").
And then, suppose I spend a couple of days writing an article for a general audience, and I give it to somebody to proofread. Here's a sample of possible things they could say:
"I did not understand such-and-such paragraph; when I read it, I thought this and this, and that got me confused." That's a very helpful sort of answer.
"You used split infinitives throughout." "Sure, but did you understand it?" "What? I don't really remember what it said, I just mechanically scanned it for grammatical errors." "I hereby request that you go introduce yourself to the Prince of Hell at his residence."
I'm not saying that all prescriptivists are bigoted against racial minorities.
The sociological theory of racism has nothing to do with "bigotry," doesn't hold any one individual attitude to be either sufficient or necessary condition for racism, and only touches on such attitudes indirectly. The basic fact of racism is that, for all kinds of measures, when one compares apples to apples (i.e. controls for variation in gender, income, education, etc.), racial minorities do worse than mainstream society. The big question then is what are the factors that cause and maintain this disparity; language variation provides one whole family of such factors.
One should not allow people to assume that "racism" means "bigotry against black people."
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 07:15 am (UTC)The usual prescriptivist way of handling this, however, is to say that one should not use the word fuck, because it will offend people and indispose them toward you. But by putting it this way, the prescriptivist has prejudged the ethical issue: he has assumed an ethical rule, whose rough form is "you should not offend others or otherwise deliberately indispose them toward you."
This is an example involving vulgar vocabulary, but the general principle just doesn't rely on that detail at all; proscriptions are frequently couched in terms like that: "you should not talk that way, because 'people' (and I will not bother to state who these people are) will think bad things about you." I say that the prescriptivist, qua grammarian, has no damn business sneaking in dubious moral principles into his prescriptions.
Then there's the problem that the unspecified "people" in the formula above refers, usually, to one of two groups: (a) mainstream middle-class society (sorry for being so redundant), and (b) people who proscribe the usage that is being proscribed. In the first case, it's just reinforcing prejudice. The second one is the silly game where the "grammarian" proscribes usages that are in fact standard, and tells you that you should follow the proscription because people who have the habit of proscribing standard usages are going to think Bad Things about you (best illustrated by arguments along the lines of "yeah, there's nothing wrong grammatically with split infinitives, but you should still avoid them, because people think that there's something wrong with them").
And then, suppose I spend a couple of days writing an article for a general audience, and I give it to somebody to proofread. Here's a sample of possible things they could say:
I'm not saying that all prescriptivists are bigoted against racial minorities.
The sociological theory of racism has nothing to do with "bigotry," doesn't hold any one individual attitude to be either sufficient or necessary condition for racism, and only touches on such attitudes indirectly. The basic fact of racism is that, for all kinds of measures, when one compares apples to apples (i.e. controls for variation in gender, income, education, etc.), racial minorities do worse than mainstream society. The big question then is what are the factors that cause and maintain this disparity; language variation provides one whole family of such factors.
One should not allow people to assume that "racism" means "bigotry against black people."