Geoffrey Pullum can be a bit harsh for my taste when he rails against non-experts who make pronouncements about language (though it's almost always deserved), but he's just written an article which is if anything far too understanding. He's annoyed at people who consider vocabulary size and speed of lexical access to be measures of intelligence.
To me, this has always been up there with that mythical cousin or uncle who can tie his shoes, chew gum, find the cube root of 543 and play the star spangled banner on kazoo, as the story goes, all at the same time!
The lore surrounding intelligence is another way that people try to differentiate themselves and feel superior to others, that's clear. But it is interesting to wonder, since most of it is baseless, why it takes the particular forms it does. In most cases, I suppose, these supposed indexes of intelligence are in fact more directly indexes of group membership, whether via education level (vocabulary size, the memorization of arbitrary rules of usage, bibliophilia), or class linked cultural trappings (a taste for classical music, or expensive taste generally).
In some cases, such as standard language usage rules (in English, the injunction against split infinitives, etc.), the more arbitrary the rules the more valuable they seem to be. Such rules cannot be derived in any way, they must simply be memorized, and further they can only be obeyed, if at all, through constant practice, which means that they are products of long term cultural training (in the case of usage rules we call it education). Since they cannot be acquired through reason, the one thing you can be certain of is that they will not be learned through intelligence alone, which keeps them out of the hands of anyone who is not properly acculturated.
Another beneficial aspect to arbitrary standards of this kind is that, in obeying them, one is granting ultimate authority to the person(s) who think them up. It is one thing if I can convince someone to do something logical, which clearly benefits them in some obvious way. It is quite another to convince someone to do something which makes no sense while insisting that it does make sense, and, what's more, to get them to pretend they understand just how it makes sense.
In accepting and attempting to follow such rules, an individual is signaling their willingness to deny their own capacity to reason and make up their own mind in exchange for being granted some level of access to a socially privileged group. The more obviously illogical the rule, the more submission to group norms is signaled by this obedience.
In general, this seems to be a feature of all social groups. The difference is that the dominant groups claim that their particular markers of group membership are logical, intelligent, and so on. Come to think of it, maybe even that is not peculiar to dominant groups.
Why people do this is something of a mystery to me. I suppose it proves something any scientist probably knows through somewhat bitter experience: people are not naturally rational creatures. Of course there's no reason to expect we would be.
Posted by Alan Hogue at December 31, 2006 05:17 PM | TrackBackAlan, your post is both harsher and better than Geoffrey's, which seems more like a quick rant. :)
I wasn't familar with the term lexical access, but it's a good one. It seems to me, however, that fast lexical access depends on what I would describe as locality.* In descending order of importance:
--how recently you've used it in conversation
--how recently you experienced the thing
--how often you use it in conversation
--how often you experience the thing
--how often you read about it
--how often you write about it.
The best vocabulary is words you've learned by hearing and using them in conversation -- Eskimos and snow are probably the classic example. But if you don't have the locality -- say you've lived your entire life in Texas, like I have -- the only way you have to learn these words is by reading them in a book. As much as I love reading, words on a page simply don't impress as much as words spoken and used.
Which implies that a large vocabulary comes from experiencing a lot and spending time with other people who have experienced a lot. Seems like a class issue to me.
*resemblences to the LIFO/last in first out algorithm in computer data storage are not coincedental.
Posted by: Sara Brumfield at January 3, 2007 02:13 PMThanks, Sara. Good point. I'm not sure that particular algorithm is the best analogy, though. Sounds like you are talking about something similar to lexical priming (can't find a good link right now), which suggests that the lexicon doesn't really work like a stack.
As anyone who's learned a second language knows, there's a difference between passive recognition and active recall. In part for this reason, reading new vocabulary won't be as useful as encountering it in everyday discourse.
Oh, and by the way, beware of the eskimo-words-for-snow meme.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at January 4, 2007 10:43 AMI don't think Sara was quite falling for the Inuit language vs English language comparison, but the Texan vs Inuit comparison. I, for example, have no idea at all what a "drift" might be, nor how it's different from a "powder" or a "blizzard", despite an occasional white Christmas when visiting relatives. I have personally witnessed Sara and her sister walk through three inches of freshly fallen snow unaware that it was "the kind you can make snowballs out of".
The thing about woodworking or homebrewing is that often the first time you hear a word is when you have to use the object/concept for the first time. I only learned "kerf" on Monday night, about a minute before I made one.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at January 4, 2007 07:13 PM