Re: Death of the English Language

[flash flash@xxxxxxxx]

Having had a technical training in philosophy, which included both
mathematical and symbolic logic, I was less likely to succumb to the
misuse of "beg the question" than some others (not on this list). See:

http://begthequestion.info

I have given up trying to convince people that "lowest common
denominator" is never what they mean (unless they are doing
mathematics), as in "television programming caters to the l.c.d." What
they mean is "highest common factor" (which is depressingly low, as even
the grammatically untutored instinctively recognize), but unfortunately
"lowest common denominator" has established itself in the public
unconsciousness and will not be dislodged even by determined pedants
(such as myself).

I think the claim of prescriptive/normative grammar is as valid as the
claims of prescriptive/normative ethics or aesthetics, provided one does
not expect the rules--whether grammatical, ethical, or aesthetic--to
look like rules of chess or computer programming. That is, the rules
need not be formulable as unambiguous, finite-state machines capable of
resolving every conceivable variation in less than an hour and a half
(those are the tournament rules for chess-playing programs). Surely
there are canons of beauty without there being 'rules' in the sense of
an idiot-proof (i.e., computational) procedure for generating beauty.
Just as surely, there are rules of grammar, though not in the sense of
an idiot-proof procedure for generating meaningfulness. The rules of
grammar are general and it is this generality which give them their
power and applicability. For a rule to be general does not mean that it
is optional or subject to change at a whim; descriptivist grammar gets
it wrong if it claims that whatever anybody says is okay, so long as he
thinks he means something by it. Synchronic deviations, even widespread
ones, are arbitrary and therefore rightly condemned as solecisms.

The claim of prescriptivist grammar must not be conflated with
immutability, however. Usage drifts over long periods of time (sometimes
at the expense of precision); that is an undeniable fact, and it is here
that the claim of descriptivist grammar gets its purchase.

≪it is well-known that such "rules" as never ending a sentence with a
preposition and prohibitions against split infinitives are simply
nonsense.≫ Which is as much as to say that they never were rules; they
were hasty and incorrect conclusions drawn by the semi-ignorant
(pseudo-grammar nazis) who mistakenly believed the rules of grammar to
be like those of chess or a computer program.

"The ability to think precisely, and thus to write precisely, cannot be
achieved without observing grammatical rules." --Rand. It is certainly
true that thought is hobbled without language, but not altogether
impossible. My former professor, Anscombe, related the following:

She owned a farm in Shropshire, and in the village there lived a man,
named Dummy Locke, who was deaf and dumb. He would come round to the
farm and offer to do work in exchange for pay. One could, for example,
point to a pile of wood and make a chopping motion with both arms. He
would understand the task to be performed, and then hold up his thumb
and forefinger making a circle; the size of the circle indicated the
amount of pay he expected for chopping the pile of wood. He liked to
spend his coins on ale at the local pub. One day, the price of ale
increased, and Dummy Locke's price for chopping the same amount of wood
increased proportionately. The man was clearly in possession of several
pretty sophisticated concepts, including those of wage labor,
negotiating for a price, and inflation--and he knew precisely what a
pint of ale cost--, although, of course, he had no words for explaining
these things to anyone else.

≪I draw the line at actually dragging offenders off to prison, though
sometimes I wish I could. After confiscating their earphones.≫
We should absolutely _not_ confiscate their earphones! _They_ are what
keep them from noticing, and therefore interfering with, _our_ work. I
would gladly donate earphones to the cause, if I but knew where the free
earphone distribution centers were: walk in, plug in, tune
out--scientifically proven better results than methadone.

Yours, hopefully [sic],



PS Thank God for archivists. The three Golden Rules of disaster recovery
are: backup, backup, backup-- on three different media in three
different locations. I once held a network training course in which the
members of a network team assured me that they had multiple copies of
all their files on separate servers, but, as it turned out, the separate
servers were buried in the same cellar of the same building. That was
the year the Elbe River overflowed and half of Dresden was underwater,
including that server room. Duh.

Fire, flood, war -- those are the three threats you have to protect
against. (I suppose one might add "stupidity," but that comes under the
third category.)