More From My Honored Mother With Two English Degrees
"I'm not really sure what you hope to accomplish by destandardizing the language, but if it is to make your mother gnash her teeth, you are successful every time I read "me and Allen" instead of "Allen and I" as the subject of a sentence."
Thank you for your comment, Mom! You see, I believe you are something like a prescriptivist, and thats why using langwidge wrongly gets up your nose. But I am closer to being a descriptivist - although I believe I have left the plane of that spectrum.
But that's why I feel less compunction to follow/know the rules, but rather to observe, anthropologist-style, how language is used. I believe that cultural norms of use are more legitimate than the official grammar textbooks. I know you understand all this, I am only using the occasion of your well-recieved comment to elucidate this subject and tease apart the threads which are so interesting to me.
Where I have left the spectrum of prescriptivism/descriptivism is that I want to actively sculpt and play with language as an artist and a writer. I want to get under the hood.
(Prescriptivism and descriptivism covered in the post "Language Hackers Unite!", linked above [click title of this post].)
posted by Jim Richardson at
11:08 PM
2 Comments:
A language with rules does not inhibit creativity; rather, it enhances it. If you don't believe it, do a quick review of Shakespeare's sonnets to see how he used the container of the sonnet form to hone his words. Of course, his spelling was a little weird.
By
Anonymous, at 8:22 PM
Good point Mom!
To this I would reply that you are correct. The rules however should be optional, certainly for the spoken word where everyone ignores the rules anyway as any descriptivist can tell you. And if I had my druthers the written word would also have its "rules" be optional. Poetic license rules this roost.
In addition I would argue for a few rule changes, like the i before e rule and the placement of commas in regard to quotation marks, as I have argued in previous posts. There are other rules too which, if we're going to have them at all, we might as well change to makle more sense, and I will elucidate those in this forum. So stay tuned!
Your readership is important to me! Thank you Mom!
By
Jim Richardson, at 11:45 AM
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