Said the poster in their last words before mysteriously disappearing in a hail of punctuation.
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I might disagree with you to a certain degree there. Language encodes culture, and the classroom and the workplace are two places where a diversity of cultural backgrounds should be celebrated and encouraged. You’ve gotta write a report that the teacher or manager can understand, yeah, but no child should feel the need to quash their own cultural background just to appear more acceptable to (white) authority figures, and a room full of (white, male) people in suits could stand to at least INTERACT with the idioms used among their Latino customers.
I mean, hell, a report on the Age of Exploration delivered in a Hatian patois that used the language to understand and reflect what that meant…that’s a damn fine lesson.
There’s places where that ambiguity isn’t as tolerable, and those areas have their own artificial languages (“jargon”). For instance, a contract, where the language needs to adopt its own special legal-ese to be clear to people of different cultural backgrounds who can both understand the same thing from the document. Mathematics is another one - it is its own language, and it’s predicated on removing cultural influences.
But the fact that we whitewash so many linguistic quirks in the interest of a monolithic language of economics or education is, in fact, very harmful to both of those things, and to the people who must engage with those systems in order to live a stable life.
Heck, I noticed it in my Day Job today. Intern looking at resumes passing judgement on people who don’t begin with “strong verbs” on their bullet points. Oh hey, yeah, if you want to only value masculine language and erase the value of a clever person with considered word choice in favor of someone who is “strong,” yeah, sure, lets rule out everyone without “strong verbs.”
Or we could do something less arbitrary and evaluate people based on the intent of their language and not the presentation of it.
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That’s not what the colloquial use of the word “literally” means. It emphasizes what is being said. If you say “I am speaking literally,” it still means the same thing it always did. But if I say “I am literally not interested in whether my use of literally is correct or not,” you know what I mean. There’s literally no confusion. So stop pretending there is.
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Grazie, but that’s also not ‘a Melizmatic original.’
IIRC, the first time I heard it was on the Simpsons, in reference to the “inevitable” & hereditary diminishing mental faculties of the males in Homer’s family as they age.
At some point, I co-opted it to mean the covert & nefarious efforts by the real powers that be who are hell bent on making the masses as ignorant and complacent as possible; a sinister plot that has been in motion since at least since the end of WWII.
Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating probably isn’t paying too much attention (shocker!)
We can effectively thank the Dumbening for:
- “Reality” tv shows
- Video game addiction
- White-washed textbooks in public schools
- Anti-intellectualism
- Mass misinformation/ cognitive dissonance
- Apathy or a lack of empathy for others
- Excessive materialism/superficiality
Feel free to add more; that’s just what I can come up with off the top of my head…
As always, YMMV.
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I’m a fan. I like how it makes lists clearer. By no means am I about to jump down someone’s throat for not using it, since I’m aware that there isn’t a consensus on its correctness. Nonetheless, it gets used regularly in my writing unless it’s viewed as a problem by the place my writing will be published.
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Yes, this is exactly what she is talking about: silencing people from speaking out on “serious” topics because their grammar isn’t good enough to pass muster.
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Sure, but can you see how grammar empowers the already-powerful while marginalizing those who have less power? The harm that does is very real, and worth being aware of, especially if you’re going to continue to critique others’ grammar as indicative of something about them. If you’ve got a powerful weapon like that, and are willing to use it, I think it’s important to be aware of the collateral damage it can cause!
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But there you’re using “literally” in its literal sense, so of course there’s not.
Unless you meant you were figuratively not interested in whether your use was correct, in which case I suppose there’s figuratively no confusion?
This is all getting a bit meta. Paging Douglas Hofstadter, could Douglas Hofstadter please come to the semantic quagmire …
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Really? Because one of the things she harps on is whether or not it matters whether a grocery store express lane says fewer or less. That really isn’t a racist or oppressive use of grammar snobbery. Her examples don’t prove her thesis.
I wonder what her position is on unnecessary apostrophes? Is it racist and oppressive to point out that grocer’s apostrophes are superfluous?
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I would argue that when people say “I told you literally a million times,” they AREN’T using the word literally to mean figuratively. It’s NOT clarifying that this is not a factual statement. Nobody believes that is is. Rather it just adds to the hyperbole. So it doesn’t really MEAN “figuratively” in that sentence. And I think that for the most part that is exactly how people understand it.
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I miss my grammar and my grampar.
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I like grammar more than most people.
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Um… methinks you may be over reaching a bit here.
I already stated explicitly that the context, venue and audience matter quite a lot.
Take this site for instance;
I’ve often seen many members here make excellent, poignant and thought-provoking commentary, which contained multiple minor grammatical slip ups; and even though it makes my inner logophile cringe a tad, I generally just ignore it… because in those cases, mentioning it would not bring anything productive to the conversation, and I know it.
In fact, about the only time I ever go ‘Grammar Nazi’ on someone is when they’ve deigned to be insulting and/or disrespectful to others; usually about the perceived lack of intellect… yet their own comments contain errors.
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eats shits and leaves
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And it’s perfectly fine to encourage clarity in writing and speech. OTOH it’s a poor idea to mistake a command of “formal English” as a sign of smarts. Arguably that is using a class marker a proof of intelligence, which I think is what she is arguing against. And I think that this is generally a bigger problem in England that the US.
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This statement implies that the most U.S. citizens see formal English as a sign of intelligence. Given the anti-intellectual sentiment here, I’d have to think about your statement. For now, I’m inclined to say that we have the opposite problem.
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Just because it’s a bigger problem in England, doesn’t mean it’s that big in America.
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Could be that my sarcasm detector needs to be re-calibrated. I’ll need a response from OP to assess that, though.
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That’s horse shit. Formal academic grammar needs to exist so that academics world wide can understand the technical basis of what everyone’s reporting. Particularly those academics not working with or in their native language. That is indeed important.
But its at odds with more casual, real world usage of language, regional dialects, and the way in which languages grow and develop over time. It’s reduces the utility and breadth of language. Especially in creative or cultural fields. By discounting and blocking things like figurative language, vernacular, and the ways in which we all modulate the ways in which we speak situationally. Which why you most often see grammartitians and linguists, the actual people who know this stuff best and study it for a living (especially linguists) come down against the grammar snob position.
More over the grammar snob position often misses the point or is out and out wrong. Just to use the video’s example of “literally”. The ironic use of literally as an enhancer is old. iirc it dates back at least a few hundred years. More over the usage is entirely in line with common conventions of language, including gasp grammar. It’s a word being deliberately used at odds with its established meaning to create hyperbole and humor through ironic dissonance. An awesome example of what I’m talking about with rigid grammar neutering figurative language. It may be annoying, it may be a joke that’s gotten way to pervasive as a spoken tick. But it’s not wrong. Likewise their, there, and they’re aren’t grammatical errors. They’re typos. Ones that are more visible today because spell check and auto correct like to toss out the wrong one in a given situation. Meaning, understanding and validity are not effected by this. Because just like in spoken language context will let you know what is meant
And the grammar pedant’s behavior is resolutely targeted based on class. Witness all the “hilarious” listacles out there featuring bad grammar. Who turns up most often in those. Teens, the poor, and non-whites. Most often from non-western, non-anglophone nations. Or those nations that speak a different dialect of english than you. And have since before you came along. The rage for improperly used quotation marks particularly pissed me off.
Almost all of the examples that would show up were from outside the block of western nations at the heart of the anglophone sphere. Most often various Caribbean and African countries. The native languages, and source languages for the dialect there often feature grammatical tricks to show emphasis and mimic speech patterns that English lacks or doesn’t use. If you’ve ever spoken to some some one from these places the language use there features radically different patterns of emphasis from British or American English. That emphasis encodes important contextual information, and local written languages account for that. English doesn’t. So they adopted quotation marks as a visual indicator for written English. In the same way we often use italics or bold text online.
The grammar pedant looks at that and says “oh look at all these improperly used quotation marks, those people are HILARIOUSLY uneducated”. Some one who knows and understands more about language, how it lives, changes, and works in the real world. Looks at that and says “that is god damn clever”
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