Oh Hey There

this actually is aimed towards any linguistic folk who read my tumbly

i found myself in an embarrassingly long argument last night with a rather genial fellow from my dorm, who, like so many before him, called himself a “grammar nazi” and sent my brain twitching.

descriptivist/prescriptivist arguments are the only ones i ever pursue, if only because of the fact that outside of linguistic circles, descriptivists are a tiny minority and no one really knows the philosophy exists, or anything about linguistics for that matter. and i live in a dorm that houses a writer’s program, which means that i live exclusively with people who know a lot of rules about writing but have never had to think about the rules themselves. which isn’t to say that i’m an authority; my education is extremely elementary, but even an elementary education in linguistics is more than what most people ever attempt to possess.

anyway, he was a worthy adversary, and he brought up a lot of questions i didn’t have a good answer for. the main questions — largely centered in standardization in american schooling — were as follows:

should public schools devote time towards educating children about various widespread minority dialects. (we both eventually agreed on this)

regardless, should all students be forced to adhere to the merriam-webster standard? is it possible to have a fair grading system if students have free reign to write academic papers in different dialects? does forcing standardized language on children not put minority-dialect speakers at a disadvantage?

and if a standard should be forced, why one dialect over another? “we’re the majority,” he says, to which i say “what about when our dialect becomes the minority?” if AAVE (for example) became the most-used dialect in the country, would papers have to be graded by the AAVE “standard”? why the hell not?

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what about actually significant academic papers in the fields of medicine and science? should a scientific journal be allowed dialectal freedom? what about medicine, where situations can be “matters of life and death”? he brought up a hypothetical: a patient needs to take their prescribed medicine lest they die, but because the doctor writes it in a minority-dialect, the pharmacy misunderstands it. though i realize now that it’s kind of silly when doctors stereotypically have incomprehensible handwriting as it is, airline food.

with many of these, i’m still not entirely sure what to think. so i’m gonna do that question-box thing and let everyone else think for me?

David Foster Wallace wrote an article about descriptivism vs prescriptivism, and while he mangles some of the finer details about descriptivism and strangely argues for prescriptivism while writing in his characteristic verbose and gymnastically non-standard style, he crystallizes what’s at stake. In the relevant section, he discusses how he makes his students go through grammar bootcamp:

The real truth, of course, is that SWE [Standard Written English] is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as “Standard” by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a Privileged WASP Male and the Teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment. This reviewer’s opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority.

There is nothing innately superior about Standard Written English except that not using it certain contexts hamstrings you, marking you as one who doesn’t speak the establishment’s language. Crucially, language educators need to tell students this fact.

More compellingly, DFW reproduces a spiel he claims to have given to some of his black students (who did not speak in the prestige dialect), and DFW “let’s get real” attitude is revealing:

I don’t know whether anybody’s told you this or not, but when you’re in a college English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called Standard Written English. … From talking with you and reading your essays, I’ve concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official Teacher-voice: The SBE you’re fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical — for example, double negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE [tristan: It’s concord negation, not a “double negative”. The latter term is “loaded” and inaccurate.], and SBE and SWE conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with style — for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early subordinates with commas, and, under SWE rules, writing that doesn’t do this is “choppy.” There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE: some variation on “I know from the grades and comments on my papers that English profs don’t think I’m a good writer.”] Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. There are some otherwise smart English profs who aren’t very aware that there are real dialects of English other than SWE, so when they’re reading your papers they’ll put, like, “Incorrect conjugation” or “Comma needed” instead of “SWE conjugates this verb differently” or “SWE calls for a comma here.” That’s the good news — it’s not that you’re a bad writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in. Maybe that’s not such good news, that they were grading you down for mistakes in a foreign language you didn’t even know was a foreign language. That they won’t let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you’re not going to like this news: I’m not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your own dialect and its rules and history and how it’s different from SWE, fine — there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In class — in my English class — you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES by this point vary too widely to standardize.] I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to itself. African Americans who’ve become successful and important in U.S. culture know this; that’s why King’s and X’s and Jackson’s speeches are in SWE, and why Morrison’s and Angelou’s and Baldwin’s and Wideman’s and West’s books are full of totally ass-kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people grew up in homes and communities where SWE was the native dialect, and these black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn’t grow up with SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write in it, and so they did. And [INSERT NAME HERE], you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you.

Obviously, DFW is brutally honest and kind of insensitive here, but compared to many language mavens, he’s quite progressive! He acknowledges how SWE is not inherently better—he’s not saying it’s more rational or clearer or more logical—and this is a good thing. He says point-blank that it’s a pay-to-play system, and yes it’s not fair to non-standard (better: innovative) dialects.

I once wrote a paper about an approach to teaching writing style that’s informed by descriptivism. My main argument was that we should downplay the importance of the codified “rules” of style and acknowledge that style manuals have very little to do with the real rules of grammar and actually serve more as “style” guides in the sense of a guide for business attire and etiquette. Continuing this “fashion” analogy, we should tell our students that there are advantages and risks to individualized style, even though what we wear for work and what we wear in informal settings may be quite different! Generally, we ought to dress for the occasion according to the standards of the vocation—at some point I will have to learn to tie a tie. Does this crush or smother our identities? I’d have to think more about the anthropology of business attire. But let’s not underestimate a language speaker’s power to code-switch or accommodate their interlocutors.

With respect to (7), doctors wear labcoats or scrubs or whatever—it’s a uniform that they wear and the uniform means that they are not being themselves but are serving a specific role. I expect the language of a medical professional to be similarly uniform—certainly, they can level with me and get real and talk my language—but for profession-internal communication and information recording, it needs to be intelligible for their peers, some of whom may not speak English natively. That said, I do hope that people like Dr House who get all non-standardy and metaphorical and speak the language of primetime television-viewers do exist IRL.

Posted September 19, 2009 at 2:33pm in language grammar scriptivism david foster wallace | Comments || home