#prescriptivism

[cuttledragon]

I think we need to disambiguate "we." Here is my suggestion:

* We - The speaker and the listener

* Wu - The speaker, the listener, and someone else

* Wo - The speaker and someone else, but not the listener

* Wa - The speaker and Waluigi

[prokopetz]

People are always complaining about shifts in grammar feeling wrong to them, but when I was a kid it was still considered an error in formal English to apply the possessive pronoun to inanimate objects – i.e., you couldn't say "any die whose value is X", you had to say "a die the value of which is X" – and people pulling the stick out of their collective ass over that one is literally the best thing that ever happened to me.

[allthingslinguistic]

But by the end of my five years [as a copy editor], I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.

Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]

I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.

It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.

*

Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.

A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.

In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]

Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]

There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.

I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.

I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]

It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]

Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

--- Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? Helen Betya Rubinstein on Having Power Over More Than Just Commas

[ithoughtiwasthegayone]

i biggest question to people who say there is a correct way to speak english

why do you care

why do you care so much

dont pull the its wrong or its not how its always been done

do you speak how shakespeare spoke?

do you speak like anglo-saxons?

if you don't youre speaking wrong

do you see how stupid you sound?

language is fluid and is in constant change

the next time you get mad about someone say don't instead of doesn't or aks instead of ask

ask yourself

why do i care so much

[bilingwistyka]

[jan-silan]

hey, you, linguistic prescriptivist! yeah, the way you speak is sooooo much better than how everyone else speaks, i can't believe that everyone else is making mistakes while you're not. what a coincidence that it's mostly ethnic minorities who "speak wrong", isn't that funny? yeah, but your speech is perfect and you have a god-given right to correct them. twat.

[unpickled-olive]

whenever people notice a linguistic quirk, why is the first reaction always "what is wrong with people" instead of "how did this come to be?" you could be curious, but you have to belittle instead.

"why to people say 'ahh'? is it because they're too lazy to say 'ass'? is it because they're fake and trying to sound ghetto?"

wouldn't you like to know what social changes allowed that local variant to become more main stream? don't you want to know its history? don't you realize almost every word you've ever said is the mutated descendent of some utterance so ancient that we can never know how why or where it came to be?

[bli-o]

Hey hey, im an (unfortunately) female presenting enby ace who is aroflux, occasionally being romantically attracted to women and enbies(you could call me acearoflux demineptunoromantic but thats a damned prescriptivist mouthful)

i face homophobia in my day to day due to romantic attraction to women, I have an opinion to share!

cis heteroromantic aces are an entirely valid part of the LGBTQ community who go through some of the worst aspects of aphobia, especially women.

in hetero relationships allonormativity is ESPECIALLY common. I am so glad I’m not attracted to men because straight men just have sexual expectations so much more than women.

i dont ever want to be in a relationship where the other person is disappointed that I dont want sexual activity. It would undoubtedly be harder to find someone when your dating pool is mostly straight men.

we need to suck up this “cishet aces are still privileged” bullshit. Maybe they are, sure, but everyone who isnt allo, cis, and straight goes through their own struggles, entirely individual to their own orientation. I don’t give a shit about whatever privilege meter people have made up for my fellow queers. Heteroromantic aces struggle too. That’s what the LGBTQ movement is about, fighting for EVERYONE’S equality. Everyone who is threatened can unite under our flag, even if they dont have it as bad as others.

A queer’s a queer and that’s that.

[aglaxium]

whenever i see an expression that through its wording should technically directly contradict itself ("i could care less") a little descriptivist angel and a little perscriptivist devil appear on my left and right shoulder respectively

[ourtalechara]

"I let the intrusive thoughts win 😝" did you. Did you really. Did you really "let the intrusive thoughts win". Is that what you actually meant. Are you completely certain that that is what you did. Are you sure that you're not simply acting on impulse. On IMPULSE. Something COMPLETELY different from an intrusive thought. You know. Intrusive thoughts. Where a thought enters your mind. And it literally. Will not. Leave. You know. A thought usually containing some horrific, disturbing content that you do not want to think about because of how deeply uncomfortable it makes you. A thought named after the fact that you do not want it in your head. And it sticks around despite that fact.

I sincerely hope that you did not actually let your intrusive thoughts win, as my own experience with intrusive thoughts has been awful having them, let alone letting them win, which I can only imagine would end in social repercussions, legal repercussions, and/or breaking down on the floor crying, depending on what "letting the intrusive thoughts win" would even mean.

If you actually let the intrusive thoughts win, I doubt you would be so casual. And I wish that whenever my friends talked about their own experience with intrusive thoughts, I didn't have to check with them to figure out if they are using the word they are using to mean what it is defined as, or if they are simply using it as a substitute for another, already existing word. I wish that when I talked about my own experiences with intrusive thoughts, I didn't have to be concerned that the people I was talking to would misunderstand and downplay what I was talking about because they associate the only term I have to describe what I and many people go through with "I did something silly on a whim aren't I silly 😜"

Call it what it is. You acted on impulse.

[defectivegembrain]

Yes words have meanings, words have meanings that naturally change over time. Some words have specific meanings that it's important to preserve for social, cultural and/or scientific reasons, but words don't get to have the same exact meanings forever just by virtue of being words. Humans have nature.

[degengxrl]

theres no wrong pronunciation/spelling prescriptivist scum

[touchlikethesun]

sociolinguistics secret: it is impossible to learn how to "talk proper." the prestige speakers are constantly innovating new ways to differentiate themselves from non-prestige speakers, because the reason they discriminate on a linguistic basis has nothing to do with some notion of correctness and everything to do with social hierarchy.

[aibidil]

I didn’t realize that the pretentious Brit denouncing of Americanisms started this early 🤣 (from Mencken’s The American Language)

[mollyringle]

A thing I just said elsewhere, and to which I will not be hearing counterarguments: I copyedit and proofread as part of my job, and I HATE when people correct others' grammar/spelling online without being asked to. My clients have included people with dyslexia, brain injuries, vision impairment, or recent major stresses in their life, as well as people whose first language isn't English. You just do not know for sure. Judging them for a typo is not a good look. To the self-appointed grammar cops I say: if you're so good at proofreading, get paid for it. Don't just give it away for free. (Also, nothing like being assigned a big long document in which you HAVE to find and mark all the errors, by a certain deadline, to cure you of your enthusiasm for doing that kind of stuff in your free time.)

[asteroidfieldgame]

"What are your pronouns?" I'm not telling you, I'm a descriptivist not a prescriptivist