TL; DR Files - Word Geekery Edition

This has been a point of contention in Da 412 for a while, so it seems perfect to introduce so early in the blog's history.

The ever-awesome Arts & Letters Daily linked to an article, "In Defense of Common English" by U. of Delaware English prof Ben Yagoda. Yagoda springs to defend the supposed abominations that get injected into our language on a daily basis. As an example he cites the complaint of a grammar snob on the abuse of the third person plural (they). Yet when the grammatical grumble is offered to a panel of linguists and lexicographers, the response she receives is unexpected:

"My thing is when people use 'they' as a singular — like, 'Everyone should have their eyes examined once a year.'" Actually, there was no question: The audience member merely stared at the panelists, expecting universal tsk-tsking and rueful shaking of heads. But she wasn't about to get any love from this group. One of the linguists pointed out, as gently as possible, that there was nothing wrong with using "they" that way, that in fact it made perfect sense — as writers from Jane Austen to the authors of the King James Version of the Bible had realized — and that the prohibition against it was the legacy of a small group of nitpickers who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, basically invented a bunch of usage rules that unaccountably persist.

The stare turned into a glare.

BA-ZING! YA BURNT!

Srsly tho, Yagoda's piece gives voice to my position: contra many traditionalists, there has never been a period of halcyon homogeneity (I'll stop with the alliterations) in the use of our language. We're a mutt tongue, stitched together from the words of dozens of languages and cultures. Rarely do you see a language that coins neologisms and technical vocabularly as easily and quickly as ours (coughcoughblogcoughsnarkcoughcoughdownloadcough). We have so many linguistic forefathers, each of debatably-sized heredity, that we could be on Jerry Springer.

So when an educated grammarian, whether he be professional or amateur, comes out strongly against a modern phrase that breaks all the previously established boundaries, I can't help but shrug. I just can't seem to gin up the passion to defend my language from the Attacks of Rubes.

I'd also like to post that I think this blurb is particularly insightful:

A sizable group of people is partial to attending discussions and reading books about language. But what this group wants to hear is antithetical to what scholars of this subject want to say. [emph. mine -- S] Thus the most successful language book of the last decade, by far, was the journalist Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which took, in the words of the subtitle, a "zero tolerance approach" to misused punctuation.

By my lights, most of the people who are insistent upon manning English's ramparts are the type who feel their input is underappreciated by the Boorish Public. Books like Eats, Shoots & Leaves give these men and women affirmation that they are the elite, the self-anointed few who have been self-intrusted with the knowledge of True English. Were they to ignore their jobs, goes the grammar snobs' thinking, our Glorious Tongue of Shakespeare would devolve into so much Neanderthalic "gur-gurk ooga-ooga" patois.

And to that I say: whatevs.