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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Sophomores And Their Dictionaries
  • Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 11:04:06 -0800

Finally we've arrived at my favorite month. At last there's plenty of time for posting, building cage frames, and smelling the flowers (if there be any).

Occasionally you'll meet people with a few college courses under their belt, who become regular authorities on everything. One of the things these people often love to do will be to go around bopping other folks over the head with their mighty Webster's, declaring that some word doesn't exist or is being used incorrectly. Of course, it's just another refuge of the clueless. The word used to describe this behavior is "sophomoric"; _sophomore_ is literally Greek for "wise fool". Apparently this tradition of kids becoming self-styled know-it-alls after just one year of instruction goes way back.

On the first day of the first upper-division linguistics course I ever took, the teacher said something that really shocked me. He said that no complete grammar has ever been written for any language. This means that the ultimate authority for what is valid in the language, and what is not, lives in the heads of the speakers of the language and nowhere else. Think about all the nuances of meaning that exist in English. For instance, "would you...?" does not mean literally "were you going to...?" as you might expect, but is used to ask a favor. Likewise, "couldn't you..." doesn't mean "were you not able to...?" but is used to suggest an alternative course of action. There's just no book where I can go to look up all the things that native speakers of a language know in their heads.

Language is also changing so fast that no book could ever keep up with it. If I use the word "blog" in a way consistent with common usage, and a dictionary head doesn't understand it, it's the fault of the dictionary or the listener and not the speaker. There is no patron saint of language out there, no deity authoritative enough to declare that "'ain't' isn't a word" and bop others over the head with it.

Sometimes these "errors" are so sweeping and cumulative that a new language results, complete with sophomoric academicians of its own. For instance, if I really introduce a lot of errors into my Latin, I can easily end up with French. That's right, those kooks at the Academie Francaise are actually worshipping a collection of errors, as Cicero would declare if he were around today. If enough people fall in love with their "errors" it creates a language unto itself.

That's why tasteful postors, those who really have something substantial to contribute anyway, refrain from making comments about people's grammar or usage.

Bill




  • [Homestead] Sophomores And Their Dictionaries, Bill Jones, 12/04/2004

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