Language Log

Ceci n'est pas une comment.

Firstly, congratulations for allowing readers to post comments.

I find it strange that normative concerns occupy very large spaces in your blog. And, of course, as linguists currently do not work with the notion of error, it surprises me that someone wants to discuss what is error and what is dialectal variation. (OK, choosing issues is a matter of personal taste!)

Nevertheless, the problem with what a journalists says about language and grammar is that he is a mere journalist, and is not aware of the implications of the things he says for Linguistics. And that is not a grave problem.

It is by far graver when, for instance, someone, who is an editor of a journal of Linguistics, claims that a paper is written in bad English because the author uses 'complicated' instead of 'complicate'. (*). Or, else, when some linguist advises not to use 'he/him/his' as generic pronominal forms in standard English, because 'that is not gender inclusive'. (**)

Those were just thoughts.

* Both forms exist and are given in dictionaries.
** I try to imagine what Italians would do with the pronoun 'lei', which is lit. 'her' and is used as the respectful form to address either a man or a woman, if such nonsense was transposed to their language.

Ooh, comments! Pretty!

"...as linguists currently do not work with the notion of error..."

??

"It is by far graver when, for instance, someone, who is an editor of a journal of Linguistics, claims that a paper is written in bad English..."

Did we, um, just have a paper rejected?

Anyway... Safire has always had a strange dichotomy; he mixes the Usage Poobah persona with a genuine fondness for colloquial, lively turns of phrase, so that he sometimes seems about to bite his own tongue. And he does occasionally check with real linguists, even if he rarely seems to understand what they're talking about. I think I'd actually miss the old codger if they stopped running his column, as irritated as I am by his misunderstandings and relentless joviality.

[On preview: dammit, no HTML. Well, never look a gift comment box in the mouth; I'll just use quotes instead of italics up there.]

The appearance of comments on this post seems to be a fluke, I don't see them on any other of today's posts... To bad, because it would be great to see comments introduced as a regular feature of Language Log! I recommend upgrading to Movable Type 3 to prevent comments SPAM, or else installing one of the many plug-ins available for MT 2.x.

There seem to be questions in reaction to my comments.

Well, I cannot reply to double ?s, because I do not know what is asked.

Anyway, there is an explicit question after it. I do not know who you call 'we', and do not know if you had a paper rejected or not. But I was not talking about you or anyone in particular. I just gave two examples of the kind of things that usually happen, without naming any person or journal.

In relation to newspapers, I recommend 'Le Monde', 'The Age', 'The Times', 'The Globe and Mail', 'L'Express', 'The Guardian', 'Le Figaro', 'Libération', 'Ha Aretz', 'El País' and the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'. The US mainstream newspapers used to be very good, but, I don't know why, are becoming very old-minded and loosing analysis capacity. Maybe it is just a bad phase.

Kerrim Friedman,

I have to disagree. David's decision to allow comments makes the world of difference, at least for me.

I cannot, for instance, reply to Pullum's remarks and tell his readers that Lula da Silva's peasent Portuguese of Northeastern Brazil has been used over and over as argument not to vote for him in past elections.

Tony Marmo: You can e-mail Pullum and other Language Loggers. Often they respond, either by e-mail or on LL. I haven't found the lack of comments on LL a great handicap.

Also, the fact that you can find a word in a dictionary doesn't mean that it's something native English speakers actually use or will be familiar with.

I've enjoyed reading the comments above and the meta-comments.

Tony Marmo's observation that for a bunch of linguists we're very concerned with normativity is apropos. Similarly, we've spent a higher percentage of our time on eggcorns as bloggers than we ordinarily would as researchers. To some extent this is just the ebb and flow of the blog. But it's also a symptom of the LL team as a group searching for topics which are of both scholarly and general interest, which are easily communicated to a general audience, and which we know something about.

I agree with Hat's finely nuanced comments about the tensions inherent in being Safire, tensions I could not live [P with]. I realize that most of what I said wasn't really all that much of a newsflash, but I did like the Safire reference to hardwiring, which I hadn't seen before.

As regards the comments on comments, I'm happy to see so many positive reactions. Keep 'em coming! The LL team has been throwing about the idea of adding comments for ages, and is acutely aware of the comments on our lack of comments that have appeared on other linguablogs.

And thanks also to Kerim: Mark is busy preparing an LL software upgrade, and I'm sure wouldn't mind helpful techno-feedback. If you've seen a fluke, I suppose the body of the whale can't be too far ahead. (But the OED does not connect "fluke" in Kerim's "one-off piece of luck" sense to any of several other "flukes": it is apparently a billiard term of unknown etymology.)

Dear Keith Ivey,

Yeah, I have already sent Pullum some e-mails on other occasions.

Well, you are very optimistic assuming that English native speakers are the ones who want to correct others' English. It is often the case that non-native speakers, who have heard the sentence 'you speak English very well', want to make the most absurd corrections. Most English native speakers accept the use of new words and of expressions they are not familiar with. They do accept it if you show them the dictionary, and that is something positive.

Traditional grammars and even dictionaries have been used in the past to maintain normative attitudes. Now, it is the converse: you fight normativism by showing the normativist his ignorance, as many of the linguists here have done on more than one post.

Anyway, I talked about a very specific and special case of normative attitude by linguists, who, claiming that someone's English is bad, demonstrate not to know basic facts of English Grammar or Vocabulary. It is just like you wrote a paper giving the following examples:

(1) Many ridings in Alberta returned Liberal MPs.
(2) He is support by the People of his State and the Legislature thereof.

And you send this paper to a country whose language is not English and the editor is not an English native speaker, but is a linguist. Suddenly you get your paper back, with remarks like:

a. 'Ridings' do not mean anything in this Context.
b The use of the verb 'to return' is wrong.
c. Alberta is the name of a woman.
d. 'Thereof' does not exist/ is not used.

Those are obviously very stupid remarks and reflect the ignorance, the arrogance and the autocratic behaviour of the 'remarker'. Ok, when the person, who makes such remarks, is not a linguist, he or she may be somehow 'excused'. But when a linguist incurs in this type of arrogant demonstration of ignorance, he or she ends up in a very embarrassing position.

I shall not claim this sort of thing is frequent, but it is not rare either. One way to fight it is to be humble and think 'here is a word or construction I am not familiar with. So let us be rational and take a look into the dictionary and learn it.' This much more appropriate for a true scholar, specially if such scholar is a linguist, and by far more civilised, polite and open-minded.

PS:

Of course, I meant

(2) He is suported...

Or,

(2) He is supported...

Hahahahahaha

:>

(Can we re-start this joke with 'they're', 'there', 'their'? J.k. :P)