Linguistic Artifacts

This comes courtesy of conversation fragments from a Wednesday night sojourn up to Seattle. It originated in a heart felt disdain for grammar-policery (namely of the politically correct variety, but as I get back to it, I also have problems with straight up English style guide policery as well).

So to start, let's hit the English style guide bit. Steven Pinker had at least one chapter in The Language Instinct dedicated to exposing the fallacies of "grammatically correct" English composition. In many cases the rules and designations that inform us mentally of sentence construction have diverged from the strictures that the English grammar elite have set down for us. The problem here is that the Grammarati take as gospel the linguistic structures of the past with little appreciation for the organic, evolving nature of language. Language is a vector of information that constantly seeks to condense and simplify the essence of thought into a package that can be transmitted between individuals. If meaning is clear, then the technical aspects (as laid out in style guides, etc...) are unnecessary and in many situations contrary to current usage. Style and grammar have become something that is fixed - unquestioned. Some could make a point that its there to maintain the purity of the language. To insure a common ground to translate our thoughts. But we're still using some standards that have no relevance to the way that English is spoken today. Thought then goes through a game of telephone where our idea is pushed through a filter of rules that obscure meaning.

I've only recently cemented this notion in my head. To be honest, the bits and pieces of personality that surround the Grammarati always appealed to me. They were observant. They were meticulous. They were smart. You have to be to memorize and apply by rote the umpteen thousand rules. But the stand they take becomes less and less appealing to me. Perhaps the Internet ruined this. If you head over to any web site with user generated content (check out the rants and raves on Craigslist on any given day, for example), you can watch the arguments of individuals get lost as the vulture-like Grammarati swooping in to tear the linguistic aspects of a post apart without addressing the underlying ideas at all. Ideas become secondary to the rules for construction.

Language at its essence is a means of transferring information from individual to individual. It is by nature flexible, and is constantly adjusting to the ideas that it needs to embody. And in its spoken form we see this flux. But with written language, we have decided on standards of purity. Language is not pure though. It is hodge-podge. It is a simmering cauldron of alloy ready to be poured out into whatever shape is needed. Some of the strictures on written language are simply ornamentation. And in some cases, the addition of this ornamentation detracts from the functionality of the end product.

The second part of this post turns more towards PC language and the marginalization of language elements (which is actually a good thing). The conversation I had on Wednesday started with me expressing how much I hated the grammar police. What I actually meant at the time was how much I hated the language of political correctness. Words that are used all over the place that have adopted a meaning of their own, are stricken down in conversation as insensitive. One such offense I've been called on in this vein was in regards to the word "spastic". I used the word in a context that meant something along the lines of "uncontrolled awkward action". The immediate response from the PC police that was present was that the word spastic was hurtful and insensitive because there are people with actual spasticity issues. I shrugged it off, avoiding the word in future conversations with said person.

But why do we need to fixate so much on the potential meanings of a word vs. their actual/intended values. The context that a word occurs in does much to clarify the thought of the communicator. It seems like the people that subscribe to the idea of political correctness seek to pull words out of context and examine every meaning without regard for actual context.

To head back to some of the linguistics I've read, the human mind appears to work in parallel. When we converse or read, we don't parse serially. Each word is not processed from front to back, but as part of the cohesive whole of the sentence (again take a look at Pinker's The Language Instinct). It's this parallel processing that lets us do some pretty amazing mental gymnastics on awkwardly formatted sentences and words (as a few examples, 1) word order is less important then we think. Given a sentence where word order is garbled or backwards, we can quickly process the actual meaning. (*1) 2) The omission or disordering of letters in words. Dropping letters at the beginning or end of words, omitting vowels, backwards ordering - are all situations where we quickly process the whole from incomplete presentation. Some of these processes have an evident hierarchy. Consider the garbled sdrawkcab. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the word "drawbacks". If you look again, it also is the word backwards, backwards. So having a partial match to a word in the middle shapes our perception of the final product prior to hitting our internal rules for processing in reverse. 3) Filling pronouns. When we use he, she, it, they, etc... previous branches of the conversation are tracked and these place holder words are filled).

So all that said, the point is that we have a knack for context. It's part of our linguistic circuitry. Staking off certain words as off-limits because of a single-meaning (in some cases, an adopted usage - think of the words retarded or queer, where an existing word with an existing non-offensive meaning was conscripted into descriptive service to designate a group) is a self-imposed means of crippling our mental circuitry. Any arguments as to adopting this kind of handicap in order "to change the way we think, by changing the language we use" seems illogical to me. Don't we have to think about the word, and also explicitly assign it the negative connotation (and also destroy any semblance of an old benign meaning) if we're going to strike it from our usage? This seems more destructive then helpful. It enforces verbal stigma in its own way.

And on to the last part. The person I was talking to brought up the following example.

"To throw like a girl"

She used the above as a language construction that enforces stereotypes. So the first wave of attack on this. The actual meaning. When someone says something like, "Billy throws like a girl", the actual meaning is something more like "Bill throws in an awkward, untrained manner." Or (this was the description that I used on Wednesday), "Billy throws as if, he as a right-handed person, were trying to throw with his left hand". I got mildly ribbed about how this second definition would be offensive to left-handed people, as it doesn't take their "plight" into consideration. But back to the point. I think in the case of this phrase, that we are dealing with an archaic construction. If translated literally it portrays a gender stereotype. But how many people still see this as a literal rather then figurative? I grew up with an enormous extended family and none of my female cousins "threw like a girl" (one of them actually played baseball instead of softball in high school. Hard to imagine any of the guys on her baseball team thinking that as a literalism this makes any sense). When I think about the phrase I can see where it can be construed as enforcing a stereotype, but I think that the context has changed. The literal understanding does not align with the understood meaning of the sentence. Some people may still have the attitude that:

For all X=girl, X throws like a girl,
There exists some Y=male, such that Y throws like a girl

But I think that the word girl in the construction comes to mean something less concrete. And I think this is something that applies to figures of speech in general. When we look at the expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", we aren't typically talking about an actual horse. Horses don't have the sharp crackle of gender politics underneath it though. If a laboratory developed a breed of sentient talking horses who were given equal rights (all that language surrounding marriage would have to adjusted by the bible belt to further stake it out as a human institution, so as to prohibit horse couples from raising human babies, and such), the above phrase could find itself as a hot button issue about slavery. By acknowledging the political meaning above the intent of the speaker, we give greater credence to the politicized version (at the expense of the individual and the flexibility of the symbolic representation of language).

Figures of speech tend to last well past their expiration dates. As little nuggets of meaning, they will continue to be used until marginalized by either 1) the underlying idea losing relevance. 2) a more succinct means of saying the embedded idea comes into usage and becomes popularized. 3) Population extinction - if predominant usage is confined to a single population and that population dies out or branches off (thing language drift, tower of Babel style), then the artifact may be removed from the initial tongue by virtue of lack of propagation.

Did your family use the phrase "throw like a girl"? If not, then how did you hear it? Things of this nature are viral. They spread as long as their is a single vector of transmission. You might do everything in your power to insure that you never personally communicate this particular bit of language to any children you might have, but unless you isolate a child completely (which would be neglect and abuse of a horrific nature on your part), Mullet Steve down the street will, by proxy of little Mullet Billy, pass his language virus on.

Political correctness is just a distraction. Language springs into being to represent the realities around us. If we strike phrases or words from our dictionaries, others will spring up to replace them. The realm of political correctness results in soft indefinites. Our janitors become custodial engineers. Meaning becomes lost in the soft folds of a slow death - uttering ten syllables where one would do. And in the end, as the meaning of the unwieldy becomes the original, we have another word that has to be crossed off. We have to further ambiguate so that our minds can lose track of reality for a few more years without addressing the underlying conditions that created the need for that language in the first place. Language does not cause the structure of reality to change. We need to act against the institutions themselves, not the language of the institutions.


*1
A tangential question - are the portions of the brain that appear to be responsible for Dyslexia the same that are involved in the parallel processing? Or is the garbled interpretation of the visual language cues a pre- or post- processing deficiency. Pre- seems less likely if word order doesn't matter in the first place. It also would seem to indicate a level of processing and parsing prior to exiting visual vs. aural input centers. Which would indicate one of two things - 1) The input node (visual or aural) completely processes the information as it comes in, drawing on stored memory and creates the output conditions itself. This would also allude to additional units for other input vectors (taste/touch/smell). Would nature designate that X number of different structures can throw output conditions to the body's machinery without a gatekeeper? 2) The nodes parse incoming signals into a specific format and then feed the structured input into a processing unit which coordinates all input and generates output based on the combined input stimuli (this seems more likely to me). In any case, it provides an interesting example of where something in the brain appears to be broken and can give information about how structures interact. Something worth following up on at a later date.