Trying to freeze language in some perceived perfect state is like trying to stop continental drift.
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Computers are smart idiots. Siri notwithstanding, they break if you get a single character wrong in your programming. Humans are more flexible and can udderstamj virds fi deyâs al oer de plaice or een compitly haddock.
Itâs an insult to human flexibility to treat our language abilities as though we were machines.
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As my lecturer used to tell me, obfuscation is to be eschewed!
By the by, if your words are costing you ten dollars, you might consider
buying a dictionary and ditching your subscription.
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There are online tutorials that can help.
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Parent is right, maintaining the structure of language greatly aids parsing of the messages. While human error-recovery abilities are somewhat higher than machine ones (so far), I donât think it is a good idea to strain them just because you can.
We live in a multilanguage world, many people are ESL, and broken English with bastardized words that can not be looked up in a dictionary is Greatly Unhelpful.
âŚand then thereâs the issue of data storage, where properly spelled keywords are essential for later retrieval and processing. A human may understand a screwed-up English, but the same human will then be unable to find the same piece of text for later handling because the machine wonât be able to locate it.
Canât we just agree that at least somewhat proper English is rather essential for communication?
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So now this is a discussion about the portrayal of lower-class people on English television?
Right, and as I said above, Iâve witnessed first-hand people using extreme local dialect for exclusionary, xenophobic, even racist reasons.
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Itâs surreal to me that every time I read a screed against mindless adherence to hidebound grammatical rules, itâs always, every time, written in a near approximation of good olâ Strunk & White. The people complaining about the marginalization of dialect are never the people who actually use dialect.
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Guys. Guys!
I think I realized how we can sum all of this up.
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Is that because it has been trained out of them though?
I know that the most dialect I use now is aye, yan instead of one, gan instead of going and owwer instead of over. I havenât used most of the rest of my dialect in years.
(This list is actually about several different dialects mixed up, but I used to use some of those words when i was growing up)
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Me either. Canât say I use too much of this any more:
Havenât given anyone a croggie up the jitty in years, mi duck.
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I have no problem with the bastardization of English, but if I could regulate upspeak and vocal fry I would slam a lid on that shit so fast it would make your uvula rattle for a week.
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Proper English
Formal English isnât all that helpful for communication, though.
You mentioned keywords and searches. I think there are several problems here.
First, todayâs search engines often yield results which donât include the keywords.
Second, todayâs search engines often yield results which are horse-seo.
Third, todayâs search engines often merge superficially similar names and words, such as Arimer with Larimer, or Germanic with German, even with quotes.
Fourth, the same word or phrase may have different meanings in different places and times, such as population and estimate, so that searching for these two words might yield sources which use estimate to mean commentary on someoneâs awesomeness, instead of informed opinion of somethingâs size, scale, and/or number.
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Is something wrong with Received Pronunciation?
Itâs an interesting fact (for which I have no citation to hand) but since the BBC dropped its standard English and let presenters use untrained accents, dialect and accent diversity in England has waned substantially. I think it comes down to people viewing RP as something it was not desirable to emulate (to avoid a beating from peers), whereas the new BBC âstandard Englishâ blend of accents with all its glottal stops and so on is much more attainable and stealthy.
Anyway I think that itâs all very well to say that we shouldnât judge lower classes and foreigners for their use of English, but itâs another thing entirely to make your kids the martyrs of this sentiment by not at least teaching them whatever it is we can come to agree on as being acceptable English.
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Formal English is incredibly useful for tertiary education though.
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I was just about to say that Coryâs screed against classist linguistic prescriptivism was clearly a product of classist linguistic prescriptivism.
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About da kine speak: if can, can; if no can, no can. Boddah you?
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My position is this:
A common dialect allows two speakers, or alternatively a writer and a reader, to converse at a fast pace. Knowing how to read standard written English allows an interested party to take advantage of a rich corpus of English Prose at a fast clip. Practice in writing this dialect reinforces this sort of familiarity. I speak of Prose, not Poetry, since Poets frequently use devices to control the pace of reading or recitation for various effects. Some things cannot be fully appreciated when speed read.
But for a large class of communication, meaning is paramount, If style obscures meaning, communication fails.
I suppose I could work out what
About da kine speak: if can, can; if no can, no can. Boddah you?
actually means, but only with some effort, and I question whether it is actually worth my time.
Of course, tying ones speech patterns to the requirements of the libraryâs corpus can backfire. I recall a recent review of Klingerâs Annotated Lovecraft in which HPâs tin ear for dialogue is blamed on the authorâs conscious decision to ape the stylings of a 19th century gentleman of letters.
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A dictionary attack?
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Has anyone asked for one? Iâm kind of afraid to google that, especially here at work.
Talk about privilege: growing up in Southern California (eastern San Diego County, specifically), I always felt that I simply had no accent at all, since most people I heard on TV or radio talked like my family and I do, whether they were speaking in commercials, news broadcasts, or whatever. Other than the occasional Mexican or even more occasional Texan, the only way I was even exposed to other accents was through television, radio, and eventually live theater, until I moved to Los Angeles. Possibly the most exotic accent of my younger childhood belonged to Redd Foxx, of all people. My older siblings remembered teasing our mother about her flat St Louis accent when they were kids (âHey mom, what comes after thirty-nine?â âFarty.â âHee hee hee hee hee!â) but by the time I was born my mom had lived in Southern California for over half her life, and sheâd lost that Midwestern accent almost completely.
It was only when I was in high school that it dawned on me that I thought of the way my family and I talked as ânormal American Englishâ since thatâs the way the weatherman talked, and the Marshall family on Land of the Lost, and both Gilligan and the Skipper, and Mister Whipple on the Charmin commercials, and Sprout in the Green Giant commercials, and Ronald Reagan and Jack Tripper and Cleavon Little (who, it turns out, happened to grow up in San Diego as well) and just about everyone who wasnât being portrayed as being From Somewhere Else. It was eye-opening to realize that to anyone who grew up in the Deep South, or the heart of Brooklyn, or Birmingham or Edinburgh or Dublin or Christchurch or Johannesburg or Honolulu or Calgary or Chicago or East L.A., I spoke with a distinct accent as funny to their ears as theirs was to mine⌠except if they happened to grow up watching the same programming I did in the 70s, in which so very many voices sounded a lot like mine.
I think thatâs what first made me aware of the overrepresentation of White People Like Me in the media: not so much the sea of white faces, but the portrayal of boring SoCal accents as the default norm, and every other accent being used to represent Somebody From Somewhere Else. I mean outside of Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard you couldnât find a southern accent in any context other than a deliberately southern character used to make a specific point (often no more than a gag at southern peopleâs expense). And British accents were used for particularly cruel villains (especially crisply uniformed ones who tended to sneer at âRebel scumâ), whereas seeing Barbara Billingsley âspeaking jiveâ in Airplane! really threw this whole thing into striking relief.
We lived in a trailer park, wore secondhand clothes, and paid our utility bills in person because we couldnât afford to pay them any earlier than the absolute last minute before shutoff, but the fact that Dan Rather sounded more like my dad than a guy who spent the first 31 years of his life living in Texas was kinda disturbing. What was so special about the way I talked, what made my trailer-park family so very vanilla, that it seemed to be the default ânon-accentedâ American English that was broadcast to the world at large? As a kid it seemed normal and comforting. Later I kinda resented feeling like I didnât have a distinctive accent of my own, especially when so many others sounded so cool to me.
But eventually it creeped me out. The fact that, any day I felt like it, I could go get a six-dollar haircut, borrow a shiny pair of shoes, step into any job interview I liked and not have to alter my accent at all to be treated like a respectable fellow was and is profoundly unfair. Yeah, I generally talk okay enough, but I have a high school education! Why should I be taken any more seriously (over the phone or in person) than, say, John Boyega or Desi Arnaz or Simon Baker or Cedric the Entertainer? Youâre right: I shouldnât. Outside of my fairly narrow specialization in my (not very demanding) field, Iâm not qualified to do jack shit. But somehow, nobody ever guesses my trailer-trash origins based upon the way I speak.
Iâve left out a lot of things that were much, much worse when it comes to sexism and racism in my life, but this little anecdote was somewhat relevant to the topic at hand. Please donât take it as the only thing that ever occurred to me as unjust in my life.
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