Pseudo-education & linguistic prescriptivism

It's really nice to find someone not only making points that I have every so often made in this blog, but doing so with the kind of passion I also feel about it: See here Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism | Metaphor Hacker: here are some bits I particularly liked.

“educated” people go about spouting nonsense when it comes to language. This nonsense seems to have its origins in half-remembered injunctions of their grade school teacher. And because the prime complainers are likely to either have been “good at language” or envied the teacher’s approbation of those who were described as being “good at language”, what we end up with in the typical language maven is a mishmash of linguistic prejudice and unjustified feeling smug superiority. Every little linguistic label that a person can remember, is then trotted out as a badge of honor regardless of how good that person is at deploying it.

It's that linguistic prejudice and smug superior feeling that gets me. I find galling the misplaced self-assurance of being 'right' about for example, so-called split infinitives. Misplaced becasuse it doesn't stand up to more than about 30 seconds of more careful thought about the nature of culture, language and the construction of 'authority'. So it's right that ...

those who spout the loudest, get a reputation of being the “grammar experts” and everybody else who preemptively admits that they are “not good at grammar” defers to them and lets themselves be bullied by them.

Quite so; I have people in mind who fit the loud spouting description ... So kudos to Dominik for calling out one of these spouters, here's a relevant excerpt:

People who spell they’re, there and their interchangeably know the grammar of their use. They just don’t differentiate their spelling. It’s called homophony ... all languages have some high profile homophones that cause trouble for spelling Nazis but almost never for actual understanding. Why? Because when you speak, there is no spelling.

And the real issue therefore is simply about efficiency and clarity in a visual medium which has fewer sensory channels to offer the message (pitch, gesture, facial expression, speed of delivery are all lost in writing). The point is the way that this kind of censure-ship is actually part of a sign-system which is about power and status and therefore has the potential to create feelings of shame or disempowerment and so constitue un-agapaic behaviour and even perpetuate hegemonic situations.

 when pseudo-knowledge about language is used as an instrument of power, I think it is right to call out the perpetrators and try to shame them. Sure, linguists laugh at them, but I think we all need to follow the example of the Language Log and expose all such examples to public ridicule. Countermand the power.

Amen. Amen. Amen.