Horizon

Who are the language experts?

Ben linked to an interesting, though brief, defense of "Politics and the English Language" here.

But the key to Fish's comment appears when he calls the essay "philosophically hopeless." Of course Orwell wasn't a philosopher, and the essay isn't a philosophical essay, and one isn't supposed to judge it by Kantian standards. But Fish considers himself a philosopher -- a philosopher of language -- and he takes, I'm guessing, a somewhat competitive attitude toward the piece. Why should Orwell's underformulated propositions about speech command the world's attention, while an essay like "Is there a Text in the Class" (one of Fish's) moulders in obscurity?

This gets to the bottom of the acrimonious and overheated "debates" you see between prescriptivist grammar authorities and descriptivist linguists. Linguists tend to feel, on the whole, that they aren't given enough authority by the rest of the world. Generalist journals like Science are known to reject out of hand submissions by giants in the field. No one much cared what linguists had to say during the great Ebonics debate, either. And, of course, no one gives a damn what they think about the best way to write. Though your average linguist tears his hair out every time he comes across vapid injunctions against split infinitives, all the campaigning and the skirmishes won't cut the market out from under the feet of self-appointed grammar and style experts.

This seems very odd until one realizes that the fight between "mavens" and linguists is a fight for authority over language as much as it is about particular linguistic questions. And again and again, the snobs with their arbitrary, illogical rules win.

That's because language is not just a logical, abstract system. It is also an enormous part of humans' sense of identity. When someone comes along and says, "Don't split your infinitives," they are not making a linguistic claim. They are really saying something along these lines: "If you want to be like us, rather than them, you must write/speak the way we do, not like they do." As their eternal popularity shows, people love arbitrary rules by which they can differentiate themselves and feel superior to others, and so will collect them and follow them religiously no matter how irrational they may be. I believe that this is an inevitable consequence of being a social species.

This is why linguists are constantly ignored and their technical expertise counts for so little when they confront linguistic snobbery and totemism. It is not those who dream up such magical linguistic injunctions who misunderstand the nature of language; it's the beleaguered linguist who misses the point. It is not the linguistic claim, implied or stated baldly, that people care about, but the underlying motivation for the claim.

But then there are also works like "Politics and the English Language", which superficially resemble the work of the mavens. Orwell makes a moral argument for writing in this way and not that way. The mavens also frequently invent justifications for their rules: appeals are frequently made to logic, clarity, and sometimes morality. But unlike the snobs and totemists, Orwell makes convincing and solid arguments for the moral relevance of language and for his injunctions, and moreover he does not call for the usual kind of linguistic conservatism which your average language maven takes for granted. Orwell writes:

To begin with it [the defence of the English language] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’.

But "Politics and the English Language" inevitably encroaches upon territory which linguists claim -- the right to arbitration in all matters pertaining to language. And when one considers that PTEL perhaps overstates its case sometimes, it's not surprising that linguists might take an excessively harsh view of it.

Leaving aside the individual merit of the work, we still find that people care much more about morality than about the formal nature of language as an abstract system of rules. And so, once again, linguists who spend their professional lives studying language rigorously are left out of the great debate about the linguistic issues that really matter to the great majority of people.

Posted by Alan Hogue at July 20, 2006 11:12 AM