A word for it
This morning, Dennis Preston wrote on the American Dialect Society
mailing list:
Funny how people talk ways they claim
they don't; I've even had them deny stuff I've recorded (or even shown
them on spectrograms).
Well, not too funny when you consider the reasons.
To which I replied:
Probably everybody who's collected data
systematically or taught a course in which variation played a role has
come across this phenomenon. Does anyone have a name for it?
(A related phenomenon -- Do As I Say, Not As I Do -- is familiar to
anyone who's looked at the advice literature. An adviser will
sternly proscribe some variant -- restrictive relative which, for example, or logical
rather than temporal since,
or a pronoun with a possessive as antecedent -- and then use it, often
within sentences of the proscription's formulation.)
But a label, doctor, a label!
So I answered my own question:
If we want a suitably scientific-sounding label, we could base it on
anosognosia (coined by Babinski in
1914, as French
anosognosie),
which the
OED defines as
'unawareness of or failure to acknowledge one's hemiplegia or other
disability.' (It's usually the result of right brain injury of
some kind. In my partner Jacques's case, the cause was
radiation.) The word has the parts:
negative a- + noso- 'disease' + gnos-(os) 'knowledge' + -ia
We can then replace the Greek stem
noso-
with some more appropriate one, like
praxi-
'performance, practice'. Ta-da!
apraxignosia
'unawareness of or failure to acknowledge one's actual practice'
Spread the word.
(Oh yes, the Babinski of plantar reflex fame.)
[Addendum: Roger Shuy writes about another kind of case:
I've found over and over again that
people who have been surreptitiously tape recorded in sting operations
often refuse to admit that they said the inculpatory stuff on the tape
in spite of what the recording clearly shows that they said. They
usually claim that the government tampered with the tape. In rare
occasions, the tape has been tampered with, but 99% of the time it
hasn't.
This looks like something a bit different from Dennis Preston's
observation, where people don't seem to believe that they sound the way
they were tape recorded (usually their phonetics, I assume, although
perhaps grammar as well). In the sting tape cases, the person denies
the CONTENT of the statements, claiming that they never
could have said such things.
Your suggested label, apraxignosia, seems to fit both categories.
Preston was talking about phonetic variation, but the observation
applies to all sorts of variants.]
[Further addendum: for those not inclined towards Greek-derived terms, Alex Baumans suggests calling it the Bart Simpson Syndrome: "I didn't do it!" Meanwhile, Suzanne Kemmer suggests a name for the study of apraxignosia, a.k.a. Bart Simpson Syndrome:
denialectology. Wonderful.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 29, 2007 12:06 PM