Linguists?

Sep. 5th, 2008 11:24 am
undyingking: (Default)
[personal profile] undyingking
From the BBC news magazine:

"Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer". But it's not just huge, multinational supermarkets that get confused about this grammatical point. The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years."

I see two errors in this excerpt.
  • First, it would be more accurate to say that Tesco has come under criticism not from linguists, but from pedants. (Some of whom may also be linguists, or at least think of themselves as such, but that's not what characterizes them in this context.)
  • Second, plain English speakers couldn't give half an etiolated toss about fewer vs less, because they care about clarity of communication rather than smug pseudo-intellectual one-upmanship about fanciful and arbitrary grammatical "rules".
I've never understood why so many English-speakers seem keen to stifle their language -- the most versatile, flexible, powerful and expressive in the world. I'm pretty sure though that it is a social / intellectual insecurity thing -- if you know a bunch of made-up signifiers by which you can claim that you are "right" and lots of other people are "wrong", you mark yourself out as somehow better than the norm.

(Please note that I'm not saying that there should be no rules in English; that would be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that some of what are claimed as rules -- like less vs fewer, not splitting an infitive, not ending a sentence with a preposition, etc -- are meaningless, hallowed neither by usage tradition nor by innate sense, and frankly pathetic.)

Re: Points granted but

Date: 2008-09-05 04:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] a-llusive.livejournal.com
But usage defines whether a word is still part of the language or not. Tipping words towards obsolescence eventually tumbles them out of the thesaurus.

Recognition is vital. The OED is full of obsolete words poets would no longer choose to use because readers without the OED couldn't understand their meaning.

Re: Points granted but

Date: 2008-09-05 04:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] undyingking.livejournal.com
True: but no-one's crying out to bring all of those back into usage. There's a whole slope of depth of usage, from supermarket signs at the top end to obsolescence at the bottom, with poetry somewhere inbetween. All those obsolete words at have made that journey downwards, whether quickly or very gradually: it seems quixotic to want to prevent it ever happening again to any other word.

Re: Points granted but

Date: 2008-09-08 11:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] onebyone.livejournal.com
I think the idea that poets only use words which none of their readers will have to look up is optimistic :-)

Even authors - I've given up on R Scott Bakker despite liking the plot of his first novel and the rest of the trilogy being strongly recommended to me because (along with many other similar cases) he feels the need to use the word "marmoreal" where "marble" would have done fine.

Re: Points granted but

Date: 2008-09-09 07:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] undyingking.livejournal.com
Stephendonaldsonitis, I think it's called.

Profile

undyingking: (Default)
undyingking

March 2012

S M T W T F S
     123
4 5678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 26th, 2025 02:13 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios