Kodi Arfer / Wisterwood

Language

Topic List
#001 | BUM |
A college annually ranks a bunch of words they hate to see used, because of how badly they are misused, or overused, or just plain don't make no sense.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101231/lf_nm_life/us_banished_words

Anyways, my question is this. What's your opinion? Is the old-guard of the English language a good thing to support? Do we need to make sure words keep their meaning across the board, so that people can communicate more effectively, without a huge surplus of slang and misused words? Or are these stodgy bunch clinging to the old days of a constantly evolving language? Trying to tame a beast that can't be tamed?

Personally, I am fine with language evolving (or devolving, if you want to take that tone with the subject). Words are inherently meaningless, other than what they convey in context. There's no meaning to a word- it's made of letters, which are also inherently meaningless. They only have meaning in a certain context, as representatives of sounds. Attributing any meaning to them other than the context they are used in, to represent ideas, is folly. In this sense, ain't is as valid a word as any other, because it has just as much meaning, in the right context.

Admittedly, the more the language morphs, the less readily we can translate it to ourselves. We might all begin speaking our own languages, other than that media is prevalent in just about all corners of America, in a way disallowing a major "genetic drift" of language.

So does language need to remain completely static to make sure we all understand each other as well as we can? I dunno.
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#002 | DarthMarth |
I think it's more an issue of massive overuse of certain words getting really, really annoying.
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CSBE FTW!
DarthMarth - Better than a bowl of Cheerios.
#003 | AzumarillMan |
I usually don't gift the people who write about schlock like this with a pageview, but I thought for once the article would have something linguistically interesting to say. Turns out, of course, it didn't, because people's pet peeves like this are never actually about language at all.

I just wish people would consider a few simple maxims:
1. Words are very rarely "misused" on a large scale. As soon as as a speech community uses a word with a new meaning, that's all that's realy happened: that word has gained a new meaning. "Literally" now has an extra definition that's sort of similar to "figuratively." People use it to mean that and just as easily understand it to mean that, in certain context, with no trouble at all. Go figure!

2. "Grammar" refers to the process by which sentences are created. When someone utters a sentence in their language genuinely and tacitly, as a result of a subconscious syntactic derivation, that sentence is "grammatical." There's a reason why "me and him went to the store" is grammatical in many modern varieties of English, but "me went to the store" is not;and there's a reason why "me and him went" became grammatical while there's virtually no chance "me went" will in the near future. It's not just arbitrary.

3. There's nothing wrong with maintaining different "styles" of language that serve different purposes and evoke diferent moods and different contexts. No one is arguing that "the suspect didn't say nothing" should be considered equally viable as "the suspect didn't say anything" or "the suspect said nothing" in a piece of journalism; what they're arguing is that there's no appeal to logic or tradition or clarity that can be upheld to show that the former is somehow "better" or "more communicatively effective" than the latter.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
#004 | Kodiologist |
With respect to this banned-words list, BUM, you may be making a straw-man argument, since these college kids are complaining about particular words on mostly aesthetic grounds rather than resisting change in general as prescriptivists do. But I see your intended topic of discussion is more the particular questions you've asked than this banned-words list, so never mind that.

My position on this issue could be characterized as "descriptivist with hope for deliberate change". I believe that the rules prescriptivists cite are imaginary and the authority they wield is illegitimate. I explicitly acknowledge that Standard English isn't actually standardized and hence is only an approximation of how we write. At the same time, I see value in imposing some formal structure on language and being careful with word choice. For example, by using syntax that can be unambiguously interpreted and by preserving the specific meanings of uncommon words (particularly technical terms), we can express ourselves more precisely, thus forcing us to clarify our own ideas and helping listeners to understand them. And by avoiding constructions that are euphemistic ("pass away", "make love"), prejudiced ("man up", "childish"), or more subtly misleading ("It's just hormones"), we can avoid distorting how we see the world.

Putting it another way, I'm fine with "ain't", but I never use "literally" to mean "figuratively".

'Course, if I had it my way, we'd all be talking Lojban.

AMan, do you not see it as a problem when, for example, people use the phrase "negative reinforcement" to mean what psychologists mean when they say "positive punishment"? To give another example, isn't it a problem that the intelligent-design people have been able, by playing games with the word "theory", to hoodwink the uneducated into believing that the theory of evolution is a mere hypothesis?

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#005 | BUM |
Good discussion guys. I'll get back to it later. And you are correct- in a way I am kind of straw-manning their argument, but like you also surmised, it was the subject that inspired me, and the topic I made is not a direct response to the actual content of the article.
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