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I really, really love grammar. Seriously. I grew up in a family that had more copies of Strunk and White than people. When I went off to college I was accompanied by a treasured copy of the AP Stylebook. I have gotten into shouting arguments about the Oxford comma. I take grammar seriously.
Which is why some people may consider it odd that I think grammar Puritans should shut up and fuck off.
Not everyone had the benefit of a house full of books and parents that encouraged the love of language and their very own copy of Strunk and White. Some people had to try to learn grammar from (gasp) English class. A lot of those people went to schools that were underfunded, overcrowded, and full of not-very-good teachers. Furthermore, there are lots of people with disabilities that make speaking with “proper grammar”– or speaking at all– extremely difficult, as well as people who don’t speak English as a first language. Nitpicking other people’s grammar is silencing.
And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. Textspeak is bad because it’s associated with teen girls! Appalachian English is bad because poor Southern people use it! African American Vernacular English is bad because poor black people use it! I cannot imagine how people who call themselves grammar nerds think that AAVE is bad, given its absolutely amazing tense/aspect system. Seriously, if you can read about tenses and aspects in AAVE and not die of joy, I question your commitment to grammar geekery.
Nevertheless, I think there are times that grammar really matters. For one thing, it is impolite to make your readers do a lot of work trying to work out what you’re saying*. (It also makes them less likely to bother to read your message.) Therefore, you should probably refrain from, randomly, putting commas in, where commas do not, belong because it slows down and confuses the reader. However, two people who both understand AAVE speaking to each other does not violate this rule, while Judith Butler does constantly, so I expect that people should be equally annoyed at Ms. Butler and at people, who put commas, everywhere.
Furthermore, I’m actually still more of a prescriptivist than a descriptivist by bent. I would prefer that people speak forms of English that have the most possible nuance, shades of meaning, expressiveness, logic, and beauty. For that reason, I’m overjoyed about the use of “he went” to mean “this is a paraphrase of what he said,” but displeased about the use of “disinterested” to mean “bored.” (It means unbiased! Bleh.) I also reserve the right to be upset about the abomination that is “irregardless” (irregardless and regardless mean the same thing! Christ, people, we just got the flammable/inflammable thing sorted out, don’t go adding more words that look like opposites and mean the same thing).
That rule is part of the reason I, as a grammar nerd, am endlessly in support of non-”proper”-grammar English: sometimes it has a beauty and emotional expressiveness than “properly” grammatical English does not. (I point skeptics to the Twitter of the incomparable quailitree.) To ignore that because of some bullshit rules that people made up in the nineteenth century is shitty as fuck.
*Unless for some reason trying to work out what you’re saying is part of the point. This is the James Joyce Exemption.
Thing of Things 
I consider myself a descriptivist. But just as a prescriptivist doesn’t have to oppose every change in how people use language, I contend that a descriptivist doesn’t have to support every change in how people use language.
And that is why, xkcd.com/1108 be damned, I am drawing a line in the sand over the word “literally”. I don’t care if Google now defines it to mean “not literally”; that doesn’t even make any sense! The sprawling horror of semantic decay ends here! You shall not pass!
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A descriptivist doesn’t “support” *any* change in how people use language. What a descriptivist does is report, not support.
(Also, do you feal about “really” or “truly” used in metaphorical or hyperbolic sentences?)
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You’ve already lost. “Literally” has been used as an intensifier for a long time now. To quote The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5: “He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”
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I really wish it was possible to edit. I messed up the tags. Everything after the comma should not have been italicized.
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Is there a difference between
1. the word “literally” gaining a new meaning of “figuratively”, and
2. the word “literally” often being used figuratively?
They seem equivalent to me, but (1) seems silly while (2) seems amusing.
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What I personally object to is people saying that the word “literally” gets used to mean “figuratively”. It does not. When it gets used figuratively, it means [intensify the following]. In many circumstances, it could not get switched out for figuratively while preserving the meaning of the phrase.
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Skeptics see the feed is private, and are saddened.
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I’m not aware of strong evidence that “he went” indicates paraphrase any more strongly than “he said” does. Are you thinking of “he was like” or perhaps “he was all”?
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I’ve never seen/heard “he went X” (or the narrative-present-tense “he goes X”) used for words at all, that I can think of. It’s used with sound effects or onamatopoeia, mostly – “the cow goes moo”, “he went AAAAARGH”, and such.
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Quotative “go” appears to be less common than it was 15 or 20 years ago, but it’s not gone from the system. Last year my students collected a set of quotations that was about 8% “go” (vs. 31% “say”, 39% “be like”; mean age of speakers about 28). Examples include “He goes, ‘You can’t work this weekend'” and “I went, ‘Don’t worry! You’re always so negative!'”
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In order of degree of paraphrasing, in the way I use and have heard used:
He said
He went
He was like
He was all
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Where does ‘Quoth he’ go?
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Butler is perfectly readable, you’re just not initiated into Continental writing yet. Two Continental philosophers talking or writing to each other doesn’t violate your principle either. (Have you tried Undoing Gender? It’s her general-audiences book, as far as that goes anyway.)
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I find it interesting that you couldn’t just realize there is a difference of opinion regarding the oxford comma.
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Has anyone ever actually been confused by “irregardless”? I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how, if you break it down, it seems to mean “not regardless”, but I’ve never met anyone who thought it was an antonym to “regardless”
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The Twitter link in this post goes to an archive of a protected Twitter account, so it can’t be used to read his tweets.
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I always thought the word “homophobia” was a horrible smear on the language. It’s not a phobia! And now we have “transphobia” and “islamophobia”, and all the rest of it, and “phobia” doesn’t mean fear anymore it means intolerance or bigotry.
oh well. I guess we’re stuck with it now.
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Most intolerance or bigotry seems fundamentally based on fear, though. Even without that justification, there’s precedent for using “phobia” to mean a general aversion or avoidance in terms like “hydrophobic molecule.”
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“Most intolerance or bigotry seems fundamentally based on fear, ”
“Phobia” does not refer only to fear. that’s a common mistranslation and the result of assuming words in different languages are direct equivalents.” the best translation odf “phobia” is “fear and loathing.”
Homophobia certainly is the second part of that.
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“Phobia in Las Vegas” just does’ have the same ring to it.
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Islamophobia could arguably be caused by fear of terrorism. Also, I now have a mental image of a homophobe putting a giant glass over a gay then sliding under a piece of paper and putting it outside.
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I always thought that homophobia was because homophobes often have a weird fascination/hatred of sodomy – they rather irrationally worked up over the fear that some man, somewhere, might be receiving anal sex.
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i wanted to respond to the content of the post, but i can’t stop imagining
as a rallying cry to some sort of jonestown-esque grammar cult, whereby followers ritualistically read about tense/aspects in aave and then inject themselves with lethal quantities of heroin
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Read part of this to my boyfriend, who went “wait, we DID get flammable/inflammable sorted out!?”
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“And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. ”
Nowadays it is. When the conlang we call “proper grammar” was invented, it by was a rising class that had gotten rich off the Empire. Their new-fangled grammatical rules, to include all manner of random verb forms, were a ploy to shoulder aside the old gentry. It was on the level of those vulgar and ostentatious intricate sets of tableware whose only purpose was to show how posh and worldly you were. These people basically invented a new respectability and sneered down anyone who didn’t comply. This is a subtext in Jane Austen, and she’s on the side of the old gentry.
AAVE and Appalachian English are demonstrably more conservative than that conlang, as are most other American usages too where they differ from it.
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AAVE is definitely not more conservative than Standard English; as Ozy notes above, one of its most distinctive features is a collection of verbal aspects that are found in no other dialect of English and are demonstrably innovations. I know that Appalachian English is often held up as a particularly conservative variety, though I don’t know how accurate that is; in its vowel phonetics, anyway, it’s substantially less conservative than the dialect of, say, the Dakotas.
I don’t have a clue what you mean by “all manner of random verb forms”.
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“one of its most distinctive features is a collection of verbal aspects that are found in no other dialect of English and are demonstrably innovations.”
That’s true about the verbal aspects, especially the is/be aspect distinction, are found in Irish. Irish slaves were numerous in the Caribbean and also in the southern colonies as a result of the Cromwellian atrocities in eastern Ireland, and who are also ancestral to a lot of African Americans. African Americans with Irish surnames are quite often have Irish paternal and sometimes maternal ancestry. In the early years of the plantation system Irish slave owners were vanishingly rare.
The Irish character of especially Barbadian English is obvious, but there were adstrate effects elsewhere too. These are borrowings rather than innovations, on the order of the aspect system of common English, which also have clear Celtic parallels and perhaps provenance.
AAVE often preserves lexical material form the regional dialects the planters inherited. Their ancestors migrated before Standard English was 1) standardized or 2) had become anything like a universal standard. In Silas Marner, which is set in the early 1800s, the local gentry are still using quite non-standard forms of the language.
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Like AAVE, Jamaican Patois is also widely considered a low-status corruption of standard English, but actually has some really cool grammatical features:
– Correcting English’s stupid confusion between singular and plural you; in Patois, “unu” is plural-you and “you” is always singular
– An ungendered singular third-person pronoun “im”,
– Replacing a lot of English’s conjugation with much cleaner and more consistent particles, such as the plural noun marker “dem” (e.g. “the cars” == “de car dem”) or the present tense marker “a” (e.g. “He is going” == “im a go”)
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(And that’s of course not a complete list)
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