Re: On prescriptions and misunderstanding: was can/may

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>


> MJR = Mark J. Reed (me)
> SC = Sally Caves
> SC> Of course!  The split-infinitive is one of the rules I break all the
> time.
> SC> Efforts to avoid it sometimes produce barbarous results:  "He was
> quick
> SC> vehemently to deny..."
>
> I pretty consistently move the adverb after the verb rather than in
> front of it in those cases; "to deny vehemently" sounds better. :)
Right, so do I, but I've SEEN worse in formal writing.

> SC> But I don't break the double negative, which was also, probably, a
> SC> decided upon rule.
>
> It's very situational, but I do break it.  Especially in conjunction
> with "ain't".
Okay, here's a case in point.  Was "ain't" part of your "native language"?
Or was it acquired?  In my case, it was acquired, because no one in my
family used the word "ain't."  I didn't even know what it meant when I
encountered it in Mark Twain.

> SC> And I do think that in the long history of a language's development
> SC> that there are many cases where a group of (or even single)
> individuals
> SC> have consciously shaped the language, as in Turkish for instance.
>
> No doubt!
>
> SC> Prescriptively or not.  Shakespeare is a good example.
>
> Hm.  When I think of literary coinage I tend to think of Carroll, not
> Shakespeare.  I had no idea that he invented the word "obscene", for
> instance.  Very interesting!
He appropriated it.  He appropriated and adapted over a thousand words that
have become standard in the English language now.  Other writers were doing
the same, but they didn't have the popularity that Shakespeare did.

Some of Shakespeare's inkhorn terms:

agile, antipathy, apostrophe, assassination, catastrophe, critical,
demonstrate, dextrously, dire, emphasis, emulate, expostulation, extract,
frugal, hereditary, horrid, indistinguishable, meditate, misanthrope,
modest, obscene, prodigious, vast (I quote from Baugh/Cable, _A History of
the English Language_).  Also, from the Romance languages: armada,
barricade, cavalier, mutiny, pell-mell, etc; and this is just the tip of the
iceberg.

From Thomas More, a century earlier, we get:

absurdity, acceptance, anticipate, combustible, compativle, comprehensible,
damnability, denunciation, detector, dissipate, exact, exaggerate, and so
forth.

Rejected or now discontinued neologisms:

adminiculation (aid), attemptate (attempt), cautionate (warn), demit (send
away), difficile (difficult), eximious ("excellent"--I've seen this as a
name for a British catalogue), exorbitate (stray), illecebrous (alluring),
ostent (show),  and a host of others.

Some of these I think we should bring back!  I'm especially fond of
"temulent" (drunk), and mansuetude ("mildness").  Adminiculation has a
certain ring to it, too.


> MJR> I would, in turn,  disagree that mastering English discourse is in
> the
> MJR> same category as learning English as a native language.
>
> SC> I would say, rather, that it occupies different parts of a continuum,
> SC> because we often "master" English discourse through reading, which has
> SC> components in it of the intuitive process of language we get at an
> earlier
> SC> age.
>
> A good point I hadn't considered.  The early intuitive acquisition method
> does
> continue to be used over time.
>
> MJR> As with any other second language, it can cause interference with
> MJR> the native language,
>
> SC> How?
>
> By bleeding over.  I often find myself automatically doing things like
> avoiding split infinitives and dangling prepositions and whatnot even when
> making casual office banter.   To some extent those rules have taken
> over and applied themselves to my "natural" native English as well.
Well what IS that?  I'm curious.  I was raised in a middle class midwestern
family with a mother whose roots were in the uppercrust Episcopalian South
(Georgia).  She actually did have to make a violent adjustment when her
family moved to northern Indiana.  She was rapidly socialized out of saying
"rayed hoss" ("red horse") within a few weeks, and over the years she
adopted a nearly flawless Radio Announcer Standard Received American English
which she passed on to me, along with a formidable vocabulary that I started
learning at an early age.  That was my "native English."  I never said
"ain't," I never used double negatives, "ain't got no," I never said
"mischeevious," and I never said "rayed hoss."  I never learned any of
those.  And of course I watched Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans on TV,
so I knew about "grandfather clocks" and "Tom Terrific."  I listened to
records of musicals, so at five I was able to say "Why cahn't the English
teach their children how to speak"?  (Now there was a prescriptivist!)

> SC> I don't find that the one register interferes with the other at all.
>
> Maybe it's just me, then. :)
Rather, I find that the affectations I've adopted (the foul language, for
instance), along with the seepage into my grammar of expressions like
"there's dogs at the vet" and "he laid on the bed" interfere with the
"native" language I learned from my mother's lips.  (Actually, I never
consciously say "he laid on the bed"... but it's so prevalent that it may
affect me eventually).

> SC> What I disagree with is the identification of preschool English as the
> SC> authentic one ("English itself").
>
> What I was trying to avoid is the notion - which I am, again, not
> attributing to you! - that people who have little or no education (and
> therefore, presumably, only speak the English they learned intuitively
> starting as babies) speak "bad" English.   Indeed, as you inferred from
> my earlier message, I think you can make a case that what they speak is
> instead, in some sense, a more authentic "English", as it is the living
> language of a generation, relatively unencumbered by rules left over
> from prior generations.
But what if your prior generations spoke the "King's English," so to speak?
Something I've been apologizing for all my life.

> Being more authentic doesn't make it "better",
> any more than uneducated doesn't make it "worse".  Nor do I think
> those leftover rules are a bad thing - but whatever their value, they
> are in some sense artificial add-ons to the base language.
This is something we all agree on.  With as much mansuetude as possible, may
I remind you that I am arguing something a little different. And that is
that in the interests of making this point that we all agree on, Marcos,
over and over again, you are perhaps associating, a little too glibly,
"native" or "authentic" English in *all cases* with language that some
schoolmarms cautionate us against.  It is actually the case, and I pointed
this out in my last post, that we all come from different backgrounds, slide
into different registers that we learn as we grow up, and that "native" is
relative; and that you are making perhaps too simple a demarcation between
what we learn before we go to school and what we learn in kindergarten,
first grade, watching television, reading, going to college, and so forth.
Parents and their backgrounds count.  You also seem to be assuming that all
native English is of the type that schoolmarms school us out of.  That was
one of my points.  My other point had to do with backgrounds and identities.
What is my "native language," I asked you in a part you've snipped,  if I
come from the background that I do?  So for you to tell me (speaking
generally of course) that my "native language" is something that I had to be
schooled out of feels false to me.  Rather, my education--from many many
different sources--augmented my native language.  It didn't replace it,
another notion of yours that I took issue with.  My point is that "enhanced"
language ability is something that everyone, educated or not, acquires as
they become adults.  I live in a very urban neighborhood, and I chat with
people who say "he ain't got no."  But I can assure you that they also have
acquired vocabulary like "tsunami," "voter registration," "social security"
and other learned, latinate terms that affect their adult lives.

I spoke of a "continuum."  I'd rather offer a different metaphoric
adminiculation.:)  The English language is like a globe.  We all start in
different places on that globe, but it's still the same planet.  Where we go
on that globe differs as well.  Some stay in the same city.  Some go to
other cities and pick up the argot there.  Some return to their home town
and find that everything is changed.  Their language has changed with
experience, and so has that of their parents.  Mothers and fathers who used
to say "what the heck" are now saying without blinking an eye "what the
fuck," and "there's dogs at the vet" and "he laid on the bed."  They've also
picked up "pdf files," "stem cell research," "global warming," and are
praying for the people in Asia who've been devastated by a "tsunami."
Aren't they all still speaking a moving, living, turning English language in
all its registers?  And where and when did they depart from their "native"
language?  Hasn't it evolved into a new "native" language?

> SC> Perhaps we agree more than we differ, actually.
>
> I suspect so.  :)
We agree that making class judgments is a bad thing.  An eximious
achievement. :)  But the new question is whether you approve the metaphors
I've presented above.

Sally

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