Dun dun dunnnn.....
The annual Conference on World Affairs is going on at CU this week, and I FINALLY went to some talks today (Monday i was busy puking, Tuesday i had a Fiesta for the kids i teach spanish and then rapped in Chinese for Asian Language Night, and yesterday they all looked boring).
The End of Eloquence!!!! Such a dramatic title. The room was PACKED with middle-aged Boulderites and fleece-wearing retirees and like, 2 other college kids. I was interested to hear this talk because as a linguist, I have some very strong opinions (wait, are they opinions if they're Correct?) and know more about grammar than most Hoity Toity Non-Infinitive-Splitting College-Educated retirees. For example, I know that stupid grammar rules like splitting an infinitive are considered incorrect ONLY by snooty, ignorant prescriptivists who subscribe to the outdated notion that Latin is the Best Language Ever and English should be Just Like It. Just because something is impossible in an ancient language (and one that English is not even a daughter language of) doesn't mean it's wrong in our language---people just wanted English to be prestigious like Latin and so assigned Latin's grammar rules to English. Pretty silly, no?
So this one guy spent his entire allotted time quoting famous authors and bemoaning the lack of such eloquence in today's society. Apparently being a talented writer in the 1800s is analogous to being the average American of the 21st century. Wait, what?? Yeah, exactly.
Another dude blamed music and technology for the proliferation of 'like' and 'uh.'
One more bitched about how students in his writing class 'don't get laid' (HAR HAR) because they don't know the difference between 'lay' and 'lie' and pondered about where today's kids learn to talk like we do (which is, by the way, DISGRACEFUL)
So for the first time of all the talks i've been to at the Conference, i went up to the mic to ask a question. I started off by answering their question about where/how/why kids learn to speak like they/we do (over a hundred curious gray heads swiveled in my direction at this) and I talked briefly about how when i was in middle and high school, every paper i wrote was full of 'like,' 'frickin,' and cuss words---I wrote exactly how i talked, and every single time, i was praised for having Voice, and always got A's. Then the panel moderator stood up and said impatiently, "Do you have a question?" and got interrupted by about a dozen people in the audience shouting over him to me to "keep going!" so i grinned and kept going. I explained that with certain grammar rules such as the lay/lie dichotomy, there is no reason that English speakers would suspect which to use because transitive and intransitive pairs are so few in English, and asked the panelists if they thought that it was important or even valid to maintain such outdated, strict standards that don't represent standard English grammar. I then pointed out several valid uses of 'like,' such as as a quotative and an approximant, and that by saying 'you know?' the speaker is soliciting participation from the listener---so is it possible that today's speech is more oriented not only towards brevity in a short-attention-spanned world, but also in eliciting participation rather than showing off one's own smarts in soliloquies?
The audience applauded.
It rocked.
And then Steve picked me up on his way home from work--he left early because the ditzy intern was driving him INSANE by saying 'um' and 'like' loudly and repeatedly every few words while making phone calls to (possibly now ex-) supporters of the non-profit. So i thought about how i absolutely do agree that some people literally need to be slapped every time they say 'like' to stall and i HATE it when people use apostrophes incorrectly (PLURALS DO NOT NEED AN APOSTROPHE) and i LOATHE it when people use the POSESSIVE 'your' when they mean the contraction of 'you are'. But there are reasons for all of those things--'your' has a completely different meaning from 'you're' and apostrophes mean possessive, '-s' just means plural. Basically i just like pointing out to a room full of highly-educated bourgeois Boulderites bitching about Kids Today that a) we're not all dumb blondes, and b) don't follow the Rules just because your 3rd grade grammar teacher told you to--actually understand if they're relevant, useful, and valid for the structure of your freaking language.
Picture of the Day:
I literally laughed out loud (lloled if you're Hip) for about ten minutes when I saw this picture.
Opinions of interest to linguists/language nerds only:
1. I have no problem with the disappearance of the English subjunctive. ("If I were you" --> "If i was you")
2. I actively want English to adopt "they" as our singular neuter pronoun. We NEED it, and "Everyone must do his or her own work" sounds stupid.
Nerd out.
