You! Off My Language!

[thessalian]

"Possessive apostrophes aren't necessary", states Kate Burridge in her new book.

What the unholy fuck is this woman talking about?

Take the sentence, "I am going to my boyfriend's house this evening", just as a for-instance. This woman is suggesting that it should (or at least could) be written as "I am going to my boyfriends house this evening". Yes, eventually you would work out that the person writing is going to the residence of her (or his) boyfriend this evening, but there's an awful lot of room for ambiguity. Perhaps s/he has several boyfriends and is going to a shared house where a number of them are currently living. Fine, not a likely situation, but not impossible. See, with the apostrophe, you know exactly what it means -- if this person is going to a house peopled with his or her boyfriends, the apostrophe placement tells you that too: "I am going to my boyfriends' house this evening".

Plus, it just looks tacky. It looks like your apostrophe key is stuck. It looks like you wouldn't know grammar if you fell over it. It looks appalling. This woman is a writer and she thinks it's okay to just randomly ignore rules of punctuation that you don't like, no matter how bad it looks or how much ambiguity it adds to a sentence. A writer doesn't care about verbal ambiguity. That's just inconceivable. If you're published, you're usually published because you can write well, and it does not count as 'writing well if you do not use the goddamn language properly.

I believe that languages can and should change. I do not believe that change equals bastardisation and dumbing down. I hate the Franglish that seems to be springing up in places ('le weekend', for example, grosses me out completely -- that should be 'la fin de semain', lazy motherfuckers), and the way that English is creeping into other languages. I'll make a vague exception for Japanese loanwords, because there's no way of producing a word or phrase that means "CD player" in Japanese without them. But 'l'ordinateur' works perfectly well without having someone throw 'le computer' at you.

And I do not believe that you can just randomly ignore rules of punctuation without looking like a fucking idiot. Language evolution is one thing. Language devolution is something else again. It makes me not want to read things. I have a hard enough time reading some of my friends' journals (see? There's that possessive apostrophe again) because of bad spelling, odd sentence structure, misused punctuation and crappy grammar. It's not all of them, we all have our bad days and I'm not pointing fingers anyway. But it's there, and I don't want to have to give up reading for pleasure altogether because the rest of the world wants to hit their apostrophe key a little less often.

Argh. Nothing is sacred. As a wise man once said, "The English language may be your mistress, but that does not give you the right to tie her up, sodomise her and then beat her with a rubber boot".

Comments

[geoff-death.livejournal.com]

You're a stop on my livejourney. Huzzah!

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I always found it ironic how the French look down on the Quebecois as speakers of an "ugly version of french", but in the meantime they are completely guilty of using "stop", "le weekend", etc, while the Quebecois are not.

We have the problem of English words invading our language in Brazil. People have started using it as a means to elevate themselves, make them seem wealthier. So stores, if they want to look cooler, will say "Sales" instead of "Desconto". It's the encroaching monoculture...

[aberrantangels]

So stores, if they want to look cooler, will say "Sales" instead of "Desconto". It's the encroaching monoculture...

It's the War of Verbals!

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Argh! Just when I thought we were getting back into pedantry and education as a nation. I now want my icon to have flashy writing AND SOUND.

(Having said that, I don't mind loan words at all, especially given the mongrel language that is English. If loan words were banned, we wouldn't HAVE an English language.)

[lokean.livejournal.com]

"Take the apostrophe, there is so much confusion over how to use it you have to wonder if it has become dysfunctional," he says.

Or, to put it another way: "The confusion over the apostrophe arises from the dysfunctional education system, which allows students to leave at sixteen without any grammatic education whatsoever."

Seriously, the emphasis in English Language classes is now placed on creative writing; students are never formally taught things as basic as the parts of speech...

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Um ... I never learned the basic parts of a sentence, really -- not in English, anyway. I started learning grammar etc in French but then had a teacher in a US high school who hated me because I thought Shakespeare should be considered entertainment media of its day rather than some lofty classic to be taken apart in bite-sized chunks and examined for meaning that it couldn't have had given that Shakespeare was in the habit of rewriting various bits of his plays from performance to performance based on audience reaction mid-play. So he refused to teach me English grammar, flunked me for no good reason and I learned squat.

Irony? I know how to write a well-constructed English sentence. Why? Because I read. No one who pays an iota of attention to what he or she reads, or indeed reads anything more challenging than J17 or the Metro comics section (hell, more challenging than the Metro itself), can escape learning how to string a sentence together. It's all there, and just because a teacher isn't spoon-feeding it to you is no excuse to not know.

[lokean.livejournal.com]

My point was more that the English language education in England focuses on things like creative writing to the point where it's okay to write garbled and incoherent sentences as long as you're 'creative'. Students are taught that clarity is less important than intention and that it's okay not to write 'formally' (i.e. well). The attitude towards written language in schools is the reason so many simply never bother learning how to string a sentence together.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

It is still no damn excuse if you read enough. You can work out how to formulate a proper sentence if you do the first thing creative writing teaches you to do, and that is to read the writings of others for inspiration and to see how it should be done.

[lokean.livejournal.com]

Ah, but that would a separate subject, English Literature. Heaven forbid that students take something they learned in one class and use it in another...

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

"As a wise man once said, 'The English language may be your mistress, but that does not give you the right to tie her up, sodomise her and then beat her with a rubber boot.'"

Was that a wise man who said that, or was that me? I'm just asking, because I'm constantly commenting on the people who have vowel movements instead of conversations.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I think it may have been you, actually. However, that does not invalidate the "a wise man once said" part of the statement.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Ooooooooh, YES it does.

I used to wonder what would happen someday...

[beepbeep.livejournal.com]

...when I was in school, really trying to STUDY English grammar while the other kids ignored it and were happy to fail the class.

Now I know...they are just taking over the newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. with their "majority rules" messed-up usage of apostrophes et. al.

It drives me mad.

They didn't learn much arithmetic, either, so now our change gets handed to us in stores in a lumpy bundle dictated by the cash register instead of being counted back.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Ugh. What is so damn hard about punctuation? How can it be so difficult for people to learn how to speak their own language? Loan words: fine, yeah, whatever. Everyone always enjoys ripping off the dominant language at any given time. Heck, most Western languages still have a plethora of phrases we lifted from French when it was the lingua franca.

But, apostrophes. Commas. Do you realize there's an entire movement of teachers over here who tell their students, "Commas are more or less optional, use them as you like?" It's disgusting. I can tell when I'm talking to a fellow English-native online because I can't understand what they're saying.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Do you realize there's an entire movement of teachers over here who tell their students, "Commas are more or less optional, use them as you like?"

*shudder*

Mark me up as another one that says that language changes over time, but that's no use for unnecessary ambiguity and sloppiness.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

You've got two gape-mouthed stares and one bout of incoherent babbling (from me) in our house about use of commas. Where? What? HOW?

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

You missed WHY???

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I know why. Why is because more people than I could have possibly expected have the mental capacity of dryer lint.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. It's apparently a source of argument among grade school and high school teachers. Some insist (quite sensibly) that commas aren't confetti to be sprinkled randomly on a paper, while others say that commas are so flexible anyway that they're practically a matter of personal taste as it is--and besides, it confuses the kids.

I seem to remember reading a news article about it, but most of my knowledge of this comes from the kids I know who're currently in school, and a few of my old teachers whom I still talk to occasionally--and a rant that one of my college English professors cut loose with one day after he learned that half the people in my English 202 class didn't know what a semicolon was.

And they wonder why so many Americans are choosing to homeschool their children.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

It confuses the kids. Right. And having various teachers throughout your educational career telling you different things about the rigidity of rules for comma use isn't confusing? Standardisation is the key to lack of confusion -- either have everybody say that the rules for punctuation are important and have them taught properly across the board, or have everybody refuse to teach the set rules for punctuation and turn the entire English-speaking world into a bunch of barely literate animals. Hell, why stop with punctuation? Why not just stop teaching proper grammar because the rules for conjugating a verb are too confusing? Or spelling? Deity knows that's confusing. And if it requires any thought at all, it's obviously no good to anyone, so why not just go back to pictograms? Let's all communicate on the base level of scrawling paintings on cave walls.

If we're going to devolve so far that a simple concept like linguistic rules eludes us, then we should go find Deity and hand in our thumbs and forebrains. Millennia of evolution and all we have to show for it is declining linguistic standards, pollution, waste and the Internet, where all most of the people on it seem to do is jack off to porn and abuse their right to free speech, thereby pissing off the maximum number of people in the minimum time-frame with only a negligible chance that someone's going to bust their arses for being narrow-minded, flame-warmongering, trolling whorebags with the common sense of cottage cheese.

I hate people.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.