Language Module

Every profession has its bugbears - those bits of “common sense” that fall into its domain that the public earnestly believes in but which are totally incoherent when examined. For Economists, it’s the make-work fallacy, for Astronomers, it’s the idea that proximity to the sun causes the seasons, for Statisticians it’s likely to be cum hoc ergo propter hoc. For Linguists, of course, it’s prescriptivism.

But click on the link and you will read a good argument that sometimes people take the hunt for Prescriptivists too far.

There are some things that look superficially like prescriptivism but aren’t. One of these is lamenting the loss of a useful distinction. For example, a pet peeve of mine is the incorrect use of abbreviations in footnotes in scholarly writing. All too often nowadays I see v., cf., and viz used as if they all meant “see”… Now, why is my dislike for the conflation of these three abbreviations not prescriptivism? It is because what I decry is not deviation from a standard merely because it is deviation but because it results in the loss of a useful distinction. When I encounter cf. in a recent paper, I can no longer assume that the author is pointing me at a view differing from his own or a study using another methodology. If that is what I am looking for, I may waste a trip to the library. Furthermore, the loss of this distinction is not really a natural linguistic change. After all, the whole system of scholarly apparatus is specialized and artificial. The reason that this distinction is being lost is that those responsible for training scholars have largely ceased to teach it. Students are expected to pick it up, and all too often they fail to pick up on some of the details.

I’m not sure I agree that this isn’t prescriptivism. Specifically, I don’t follow the argument that the fact that a particular linguistic use is “specialized and artificial” absolves it from all such associations. I would have preferred a wording where we acknowledged that this was “prescriptivism” in the broad sense of the term (making normative statements about language use based on a listener’s ideal rather than patterns of popular use), but that it was a permissible example because this is a context where we are outside the normal domain of popular use. Yes, in some sense there is such a thing as a “popular use” of an academic formalism among academics, but using it as a standard is nevertheless linguistically inappropriate because academic discourse was designed with precision in mind and is not meant to be ordinary linguistic communication. By refusing to label anything as “prescriptivist” that is not intended negatively, Poser is, in fact, skating dangerously close to being found guilty of his own accusation: he’s blurring meaning distinctions.

Prescriptivism for me is any time when someone elevates wishful thinking about how language “should” function over evidence of how it actually does function. In most cases, this will be a bad thing for all the familiar reasons. But there are some times when it is not, and Poser’s example of chiding people about “incorrect” use of cf. qualifies as one of them.

An even more intersting example that has been in the news recently: Joe Klein’s quizzical assertion that Palestinians cannot be antisemites:

Here we have the McCain campaign’s execrable Michael Goldfarb slinging around accusations of anti-semitism–a favorite pastime, as we’ve seen this year, among Jewish neoconservatives. I’ve never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous. (empahsis mine)

Here’s an example of prescriptivism gone mad, obviously - and yet I think there’s an important point to be made about what Klein is saying.

Clearly, on the face of it, Klein is being ridiculous. In popular parlance, “antisemite” means “someone with an irrational prejudice against Jews.” Being a Palestinian actually makes Khalidi more likely than average to suffer from this malady from a purely statistical point of view. So it’s unfair stereotyping, perhaps, but it’s not “fatuous.” Klein’s assertion here is particularly ridiculous becuse the reader can be reasonably sure he doesn’t believe it himself. People are not commonly in the habit of analyzing the constituent parts of words and using the inferred meaning in all contradiction to the way people around them use them. Such people exist, of course, (Bill Buckley springs to mind), but they are generally ridiculed as pretentious. No, Klein knows he’s making a mistake here - he’s just angry enough at the time of writing not to care, I assume.

Notwithstanding, I think he (unwittingly) raises a legitimate complaint. Namely - there IS some sense in which the word “antisemite” should mean [opposed to] + [semites]. Here’s why I think so.

Language IS a compositional beast. If I give you a new word - say wug - and tell you it’s a verb and ask you to use it in the past tense, you are likely to come up with wugged, and I am likely to agree with you. There is, of course, some debate about whether that’s really a rule application or just by analogy with “hug” and “tug,” but the debate becomes less accuse the longer the word in question. Longer words are generally highly infrequent, and so it begins to stretch credulity that anything other than rule application could be involved. Wugged may well come from hugged and tugged, but wugulforentised? Hardly.

Antisemite itself is a pretty obvious construction from anti and semite - and it helps that anti- is so superproductive in English nowadays that you can apply it iteratively almost without bound (the infamous “anti-anti-anti-missile defense system system system”). This is a word that simply MUST be the result of composition. And so it apparently is. According to the article, it has its origins in German racialist writings of the mid-to-late 19th century. That it rapidly came to be directed exclusively against Jews is simply an artefact of the fact that Jews were common and occupied positions of power in Europe whereas there were few, if any, Arabs about, and what few there might have been would not have been in a position to be seen as politically threatening. But the productivity of “anti-” and the general familiarity with the broader use of “semite” to include not just Arabs but some other races as well means that the compositional meaning of the word is still available in the system. So there is a real tension there. “Antisemite” does mean “anti-jewish,” but it’s still easy for us to see how it could have been otherwise.

I would insist that the key points here are two. It isn’t merely that “semite” is available in its broader meaning, it’s that “anti-” is as productive as it is. Consider another recent controversy - the use of niggardly - meaning “stingy” - which some misinterpret as a having a racist etymology. In fact, it comes from Norwegian and has nothing to do with black people. But the sound association with “nigger” was too much for some people, and so David Howard (a mayoral aid who used the word in a press conference) had to resign his position. Since the word “nigger” is available as a racial slur and since “niggar” sounds like “nigger,” and since “niggardly” seems a plausible adjectival inflection of “nigger,” etymologically uninformed people easily got the wrong impression. In this case that impression was mistaken, but it is important because it illustrates that meaning-building mechanisms for unfamiliar terms do exist. It is because of this that people like Klein are able to exploit the compositionality of “anti-semite” to suggest that it means something other than it does.

So here’s the punchline. I think critique of “antisemite” as a confusing word is also legitimate prescriptivism. I’m not actually advocating that we change the term, of course. What’s done is done - the term exists in its present form and is clearly understood by everyone. What I am saying is that I have some sympathy with people who get fussy about these things as they’re forming. To cite my own personal pet peeve - it irritates me to no end that people call Democrats “liberals” when that term is at odds with how “liberal” is used in Economics. As if it isn’t inconvenient enough that learned people have to juggle two wildly divergent uses of the term in spheres that have a tendency to overlap (discussions of Economics often turn into discussions of upcoming elections), I think political neophytes are actually misled by them. On being introduced to Democrats and Republicans, they ask what each stands for, and a parent, who doesn’t really know, makes the obvious leap of logic and says “well, Republicans are ‘conservatives,’ which means they want to keep things as they are, and Democrats are ‘liberals,’ which means they want to free things up to change.” And if it even stopped there … but it doesn’t. Bill Buckley, on “founding” modern conservatism with the initial publication of National Review in 1955, subtitled his maiden column “standing athwart history yelling stop.” I think it was perhaps a bit too convenient a counterpoint to the then-fashionable Marxist historicism. The Marxists claimed that History was a science, that events were predestined to flow in their direction, and Buckley’s little quip about “standing athwart history yelling stop” then foreverafter confounded opposition to the pace of cultural change with opposition to socialism. They are not the same thing, and intellectual discourse has suffered for it.

Lest anyone think that these examples are only ever political, let me cite Noah’s favorite pet peeve on this front, which isn’t at all. Noah likes to complain that people mix up “linear” and “sequential.” It doesn’t bother me as much, since I don’t work as much with math as he does, but I can easily see the point. In Syntax, when we speak of “linearization” functions, we should really be calling them “sequentialization” functions - because it isn’t so much the lining up of morphemes that matters as determining their order (indeed, to get nitpicky about it, if you face a linebreak then the final words of your sentence will actually precede the first in left-to-right order). If this seems like splitting hairs - well, it is. But academic discourse, as strongly implied by Poser above, is all about splitting hairs. Academic discourse is artificial precisely so that we can speak with more precision than we do in everyday conversations. “Linear” in its ideal definition says nothing about order and everything about relations. The function that converts inches to centimeters is “linear” because for every one inch you increase length, you have increased it by a predictable 2.2 centimeters. The proportion of inches to centimeters never changes, though the quantity of each certainly does. This meaning of “linear” has to do with lines in that any plot of the function will be one. Of course it’s easy to see where the “sequential” use of “linear” came from: sequences are also easily (and therefore frequently) illustrated with lines. The trouble with this analogy is that it was unnecessary. We already had the word “sequential,” and there was therefore no need to sacrifice precision by expanding the coverage of “linear.” It happened, it’s done, and I don’t think Noah actually advocates for “correcting” people on this front, he just finds it all mildly frustrating.

So I think there is a place for what we might call “etymological prescriptivism.” We make normative statements about how people should use certain words in certain contexts on the belief that discourse would in general be clearer if people adopted our recommendations. If there is no need for two words that mean “sequential” and indeed using both of them interchangeably is likely to lead to confusion, then there is a case for moderating at least one’s own speech to try to eliminate the overlap. And it is on this basis that I make a point of avoiding using “liberal” to describe socialists. Since “socialist” is a loaded term, I am polite enough to say “leftist” instead - but the point is that I think political and economic discourse would gain by finding a more convenient way for people to separate classical liberals from contemporary liberals since the two are not of the same philosophy at all. And finally, yes, I think it would be worthwhile coming up with a term that means what “antisemite” originally meant. It’s not, after all, difficult to imagine people who are opposed to both Jews and Arabs, and for the same reasons. Perhaps it isn’t an anthropologically useful category, but there is certainly a political use for a term that means “people of the Holy Land,” regardless of whether they are Jews or Arabs. Certainly some will object that we shouldn’t be in the business of manufacturing politically uncomfortable categories. But I would respond that this is the same dodge that the politically correct crowd uses. Rather than dispute the ideas, they seek to change the terms, with the result that all the attitudes they oppose merely linger beneath the surface. If you want to fight something, it helps to be able to name it.

As for Linguists - I think there are many ways in which the crusade against “prescriptivism” has gone too far. It’s a bit like opposing “goto” statements in Computer Science. It isn’t that it’s not a good idea in most cases, it’s just that it’s impossible to do completely, and so a more open discussion of the topic wouldn’t hurt. I can remember a sly Dan Friedman in class saying “because a function call without any arguments is a goto” to gasps from the crowd, and it was really gratifying. The point was just that you can’t completely eliminate gotos from your semantics, even if you can stop providing the programmer with easy access to them in the way you style your language. Well, so it is with Linguistics. Saying that prescriptivism is always bad disempowers people from employing it in those rare cases when perhaps they should. Certainly it stops them from recognizing it in action in all its forms.

So let me get prescriptive about prescriptivism. I think we could do with a more honest definition of the term - one which means what it means now, but without the negative spin. “Prescriptivism” should go back to being an academic term rather than a value judgment, and people can state their value judgments independently of the term. And then we can employ “prescriptivism” in instances where it perhaps should be employed - for example, in lamenting the collapse of a distinction between socialism and classical liberalism in modern political discourse - or, indeed, in complaining that academics no longer know what all those Latin initials “really” mean.

In short, time for a breath of fresh crotchediness after all this stifling flower power nonsense.