#prescriptivism

[prokopetz]

People are always complaining about shifts in grammar feeling wrong to them, but when I was a kid it was still considered an error in formal English to apply the possessive pronoun to inanimate objects – i.e., you couldn't say "any die whose value is X", you had to say "a die the value of which is X" – and people pulling the stick out of their collective ass over that one is literally the best thing that ever happened to me.

[allthingslinguistic]

But by the end of my five years [as a copy editor], I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.

Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]

I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.

It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.

*

Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.

A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.

In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]

Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]

There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.

I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.

I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]

It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]

Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

--- Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? Helen Betya Rubinstein on Having Power Over More Than Just Commas

[cynthicaster]

hey cuties!

i noticed @headspace-hotel expressing surprise at how elementary and high school teachers are banning aave from schools under the pretense of "preventing gang activity", something that has bothered me for over a decade. personally, I have also heard teachers refer to it as "gibberish" or "incorrect" and uh ???? especially when the same students who used these words followed all of the "rules" in essays and presentations and even interactions with the teachers, only switching dialects with friends.

i was wondering, do any of you have experience with

1) an (english) dialect being erased or banned in an american school

2) an (english) dialect being erased/banned in an (english-speaking non-american) school

3) a (non-english) dialect/language being erased/banned in a (non-english-speaking) school or

4) a (non-english) dialect/language being erased/banned in an (english-speaking or american) school

this includes calques, loanwords, creoles, pidgins, etc.

ofc i do not mean curse words, which schools pretty universally ban.

some examples i have heard are aave, malayalam, and various indigenous languages from the americas.

these do not have to be your dialect or language, they can be any you have noticed. i do not speak aave, and am asian/white, but i have just noticed it in my schools until late high school.

please rb for sample size, cats and robots!!

do reblog or reply with experiences if you have em, i would like to hear, and will rb yours if you want!

this includes if you have no experience with this, why do you think you haven't?

if this happened to you, that is truly awful and i truly hope that that person or administration or government gets fired 🤭

love y'all! 💚

(side note: why would anybody ban "y'all" it is the most useful piece of nonacademic language ever istg)

[ithoughtiwasthegayone]

i biggest question to people who say there is a correct way to speak english

why do you care

why do you care so much

dont pull the its wrong or its not how its always been done

do you speak how shakespeare spoke?

do you speak like anglo-saxons?

if you don't youre speaking wrong

do you see how stupid you sound?

language is fluid and is in constant change

the next time you get mad about someone say don't instead of doesn't or aks instead of ask

ask yourself

why do i care so much

[bilingwistyka]

[bli-o]

Hey hey, im an (unfortunately) female presenting enby ace who is aroflux, occasionally being romantically attracted to women and enbies(you could call me acearoflux demineptunoromantic but thats a damned prescriptivist mouthful)

i face homophobia in my day to day due to romantic attraction to women, I have an opinion to share!

cis heteroromantic aces are an entirely valid part of the LGBTQ community who go through some of the worst aspects of aphobia, especially women.

in hetero relationships allonormativity is ESPECIALLY common. I am so glad I’m not attracted to men because straight men just have sexual expectations so much more than women.

i dont ever want to be in a relationship where the other person is disappointed that I dont want sexual activity. It would undoubtedly be harder to find someone when your dating pool is mostly straight men.

we need to suck up this “cishet aces are still privileged” bullshit. Maybe they are, sure, but everyone who isnt allo, cis, and straight goes through their own struggles, entirely individual to their own orientation. I don’t give a shit about whatever privilege meter people have made up for my fellow queers. Heteroromantic aces struggle too. That’s what the LGBTQ movement is about, fighting for EVERYONE’S equality. Everyone who is threatened can unite under our flag, even if they dont have it as bad as others.

A queer’s a queer and that’s that.

[defectivegembrain]

Yes words have meanings, words have meanings that naturally change over time. Some words have specific meanings that it's important to preserve for social, cultural and/or scientific reasons, but words don't get to have the same exact meanings forever just by virtue of being words. Humans have nature.

[disabledunitypunk]

If a community disability term, such as neurodivergence, contains diagnoses that in your experience are too different to be related, you can opt out of the term, but you do not get to disagree that the term still includes both for other people with those diagnoses.

I don't actually care what the coiner's intentions with a word were that much, beyond, "if even one person finds a wider or more inclusive definition meaningful, the definition expands to encompass their usage of it".

That's descriptivism, the idea that words only exist to be useful to us and that we shape their meaning to that end. It is the counterpart to prescriptivism, the idea that words have concrete, strict, static definitions and that we have to use the right words as accurately as possible and can't use words if they fit badly enough.

"Words have meanings" is a prescriptivist take, but so is "I don't feel neurodivergence includes xyz".

I mean this in a way less aggressive than it sounds, but quite simply, neurodivergence doesn't revolve around your experience of it.

I also find it symptomatic of the extreme cartesian dualist bias most people haven't actually examined that "physical disability" can include everything from neurogenic pain to irritable bowel disease to limb deformities to cardiac issues to asthma to paralysis to visual impairment and more, but neurodivergence and neurodisabilities are often limited to, if not the more palatable and less disordered forms, even just things that are primarily cognitive or emotional in nature.

To explain, cartesian dualism is the idea that there is a separate, nonphysical "mind" from the physical neurological structure of your brain and body - and that therefore essentially mental illness and neurodivergence are sicknesses and differences of an abstract consciousness that is little more than a different word for the idea of a "soul".

It's very disturbing to me that people think that, because we don't fully understand how bioelectrical and chemical processes or neurophysical structure inform the phenotypical presentation of disorders and neurodivergence with an array of cognitive-emotional symptoms, that we can simply just say "eh, it's not physical in the same way physical neurological symptoms are.

Okay, that's a mouthful, but basically, our entire consciousness - emotions, thoughts, the places in our physical bodies we feel our emotions (and store trauma), the physical symptoms of our mental illnesses, and so forth - they all are caused by one of essentially three categories of things.

Either the electrical signals passing between neurons in a certain order and direction, hormones and enzymes and proteins being chemically processed by receptors in brain and other bodily cells (which, it's important to note, mental illness and neurodivergence exist as a conversation between brain cells and other bodily cells), or the actual physical shape of the brain.

From what little we do understand, we know that electrical activity, chemical activity, and physical differences in the brain are responsible in some way for the psychological phenomena we study. We mostly just don't understand exactly HOW.

The similarities between primarily physical neurological conditions and primarily mental neurological conditions is that they are both a result of what is occurring in the neurological system (and to a lesser extent, in where the neurological system interfaces and communicates with other systems).

Migraines, nerve pain, epilepsy, bell's palsy, Parkinson's, tremors, stroke, lateral sclerosis - these are very different from things like bipolar, anxiety, OCD, NPD, AvPD, SzPD, PTSD, DID, autism, schizophrenia, ID, and so on, for many people.

It's why you can opt out of labels like neurodivergence for conditions you don't feel it fits.

But, crucially, you don't get to make that decision and universally define the word for others. The most inclusive definition of the word prevails, because there are people who do find that their experiences with things in each of those category are similar, or so closely related they can't be separated, or simply worth grouping together for the fact they occur in the same bodily system via the same or similar mechanisms.

For me, my chronic pain, my gut health issues, my MCAS, my autism, my anxiety, my PTSD, my DID, my chronic fatigue, my brain fog, my schizophrenia, my ADHD, my tremor, my dysautonomia, my balance issues and struggles with spacial awareness and lack of awareness of my physical body, the alexithymia that I've worked so hard to manage, my language and sensory processing disorders... it's all closely and heavily interrelated.

Some of it causes or worsens other parts (or in some cases is minimally suspected to, but I'm mainly focusing on the ones that inarguably directly cause the others here). My anxiety and PTSD trigger my gut issues. Inflammation from my MCAS triggers my chronic pain and brain fog and POTS and makes my anxiety, depression, and DID worse. My dyspraxia and sensory processing are worse when I'm brain foggy or in pain. Getting excited about special interests can make my tremor worse than anxiety can. This is kind of a weird one, but self-injury from BPD has caused nerve damage. Autism and ADHD cause a large portion of my chronic fatigue.

That's without even getting into where the symptom sets overlap.

Anxiety comes with tachycardia, shortness of breath, feelings of dread/doom, stomach upset, tremors, dysregulation of my sense of temperature, flushing, and more.

POTS comes with... tachycardia, shortness of breath, stomach upset, tremors, dysregulation of my sense of temperature, flushing, and more. And MCAS covers the "feelings of dread/doom", so when they are flaring up together...

Chronic pain is a symptom of depression and PTSD as well as fibromyalgia and nerve damage. Chronic fatigue is a symptom of just about every disability that exists.

Food sensitivities are as likely to be from neurodivergence as from eating disorders (which can be considered neurodivergent) as from GI issues. I see an allergist for my condition which is caused by dysregulation of gastrointestinal cells, which is suspected to potentially be related to trauma, which is also suspected as having a relationship with the dysautonomia present in my POTS, trauma for me which is as much a result of my neurodivergence and the casual ignorant and often nonmalicious ableism ingrained into every facet of society I faced as the abuse I went through. (And some of the abuse was a result of my disabilities, both primarily physical and primarily mental!)

There is no separating it for me. They are not different enough to deny myself a label that acknowledges that and never will be. Neurodivergence and neurodisability (a term I coined) as well are as much for people like me as people who have fully discrete separate symptoms.

I even find the separation of disabilities into "physical" and "psychological" to be a bit of a misdirection. Psychological disabilities are physical. They manifest through physical symptoms. Even emotional symptoms are experienced by the body on a physical level, though a lot of us neurodivergent folks struggle with awareness of that (I know I did and often still do).

Anxiety is often a rapid heart rate and sweating and shortness of breath. Depression is pain and appetite suppression and often low blood pressure. Sadness can be chest pain and throat tightness. Excitement often has near identical physical manifestations as anxiety. Happiness is usually felt throughout the whole body. Sensations of different temperatures, breathing, pulse, and gut functions are most primarily associated with emotion.

"Trust your gut" even means "trust your intuition", meaning your subconscious mental sense of safety vs danger, for this reason.

"My heart plummeted."

"My heart was in my throat."

"My stomach was roiling with nerves."

"I felt a cold sweat on my neck."

"I knew in my gut I could trust her."

These are how people describe emotions.

Even where the symptoms are either not identifiably physical or not experienced as physical in the consciousness (such as thought patterns), they are caused by physical processes in an actual physical organ. Their cause is the same at a fundamental level as a primarily physical symptom such as pain - while they may occur in different locations in the neurological system, or may be triggered by different sets of chemicals, at a basic level they are both physically occurring in the same bodily system.

Even separating out the brain as an organ from the rest of the body has actively limited scientific progress. It's only as modern science has actually been analyzing it in concert with the other bodily systems that it is responsible for both controlling and processing feedback from that large advancements in our understanding of neurology have been made.

The organ responsible for telling every other organ what to do and understanding what happens in every other organ cannot be compartmentalized and analyzed on its own. At least, not if we want any actual useful data.

I often wonder, for people who do have discrete symptom sets, is there a reason other than simply "it doesn't make sense to group it with my other neurodivergence" for saying they "disagree" with the definitions of neurodivergence and neurodisability that they are allowed not to use for themselves?

Is it possibly that neuroableism is so rampant in our society and even in disabled spaces that they simply haven't examined their own internalized biases and bigotry and they don't take neurodisabilities, including their own, as seriously as disabilities they consider more physical?

Is the idea that they have been as physical as their other disabilities all along scary or threatening because it means that in shoving them off into the realm of "mental" disability they've been pushing themselves past their limits to "overcome" something that is just as painful, just as harmful, and just as concretely, profoundly disabling as their other disabilities? That they were just as unable to do the things their disability prevented them from doing and hurting themselves just as much by trying to and then blaming themselves on top of it for the ways they "fell short" due to said disability?

This is not meant as an attack. I sometimes have the people who say this stuff unintentionally stumble on trauma triggers, but I don't dislike them. I wish I was more capable of having these conversations without really essentially running and hiding. I try to use this blog for that because I'm able to ignore it more easily than my main blog when I'm in a heightened state, and because it's more of a controlled environment where these conversations are intended to take place.

These are questions I'm asking specifically from analyzing past attitudes of mine. I didn't necessarily share them publicly, but there was a time where I felt similarly. I'm not asking out of some concern-trolling, either. I acknowledge that what I talked about is only one possible explanation for that belief, and if that is the case, I'd simply encourage the people for whom it's true to be patient with themselves and let themselves be disabled, whatever that means for them.

I don't even think it's necessarily a super harmful belief, although I think it crosses a line when the belief goes from "that's not how I use neurodivergent for myself" to "I don't think it's useful for neurodivergence to be defined that way in general". I think it's one we should all interrogate, sure. Providing a possible explanation is my way of trying to open up a conversation about that. Eliminating a possibility as wrong still gets us closer to a more accurate understanding, even at an individual level.

I think put quite simply though, if that is the case, I don't feel condescending and patronizing pity. I'm angry on all of our behalf that we live in a society that so deeply ingrains those ideas into us in order to uphold the oppression of all disabled people, and especially to sow disunity between us to disrupt our efforts at organization and liberation. I'm angry that we've been taught to hurt ourselves in this way. I'm furious that we've been convinced that this is the right way of understanding and dealing with disability.

So, to loop back around and neatly tie this post off with my original point: I would like to motivate people to examine WHY they label certain diagnoses as neurodivergent/neurodisabilities and others as not. I would encourage them to remember that an umbrella label including diagnoses of theirs that they don't want to use that label for doesn't make the definition wrong. I'd remind them that they are absolutely welcome to use a more restrictive definition individually without challenging the general definition, because words can mean multiple things.

And I'd say that the most important thing is just to remember when discussing this is that other people may consider a shared diagnosis to be neurodivergent where you don't, and that "disagreeing" with them is fundamentally "disagreeing" with their identity and how they experience it, which however well-intentioned is still bigotry. It doesn't make you a bad person, but it is a harmful action and the right thing to do is whatever needs to be done to not continue to harm others. Whether it's as simple as just stopping or as complex as analyzing the entire lens through which you view neurodivergence, the important thing is respecting that neurodivergent identity means different things for different people.

And after all, at least in English, 95 percent of the 3000 most frequently used words have multiple meanings, as do 100 percent of the top 1000 most used words. Words like go and set have upwards of 300-400 definitions! Rather than treating definitions like a math problem, right or wrong, let's treat them as interpretive, and facilitate communication by asking people which they mean.

[dsm-wannabe-linguist]

not a prescriptivist nor a descriptivist but a secret third thing

[touchlikethesun]

sociolinguistics secret: it is impossible to learn how to "talk proper." the prestige speakers are constantly innovating new ways to differentiate themselves from non-prestige speakers, because the reason they discriminate on a linguistic basis has nothing to do with some notion of correctness and everything to do with social hierarchy.

[aibidil]

I didn’t realize that the pretentious Brit denouncing of Americanisms started this early 🤣 (from Mencken’s The American Language)

[kragehund-est]

if you ever feel stupid, remember that there are people who push standardized language, but swear they're still descriptivists because they're pushing a new standard instead of an old one.

[degengxrl]

theres no wrong pronunciation/spelling prescriptivist scum

[coquelicoq]

started on the french dictionary and so far i've only read the front matter and three pages of the A's and i'm already having so much fun. highlights:

the irony of the preface, which basically says, "this is an abridged edition. isn't that neat?", being at least three times longer than necessary

the list of 16 different symbols and their uses in distinguishing senses and introducing distinct usages within the same definition. because that seems like a large number of symbols, i have given myself permission not to comprehend the differences between any of them and just vibe

from the list of abbreviations:

"abusivt: abusivement (emploi très critiquable, parfois faux sens ou solécisme)" 😒 @ french lexicographers: have you heard the good news (of linguistic descriptivism)?

"recomm.: recommandation (dans recomm. off. « recommandation officielle » ; terme conforme à la loi française de 1994 sur la langue)" okay actually @ all of france: get well soon

"abdomen [-ɛn]" do you mean to tell me this vowel isn't nasalized??? sick. twisted. rebellious. can't believe la loi française de 1994 sur la langue has nothing to say about this !

"aber [abɛʀ]" this dictionary tells me when to pronounce the r in words ending in -er. my holy grail. crying and kissing its feet in gratitude

every time the definition includes a word i don't know i can just look that word up elsewhere in the same book i am currently holding!!!!

"abortif, ive adj. Qui fait avorter." told you b and v were related

"abreuver v. tr. 1. Faire boire abondamment (un animal)." this makes it sound like you're force-feeding animals water...on the previous page abondance is defined as "Grande quantité (supérieure aux besoins)" so like i'm getting the sense that you're leading a horse to water and not only making it drink but not letting it leave until it's drunk every last drop in the trough lol

"abribus [-bys] n. m. (nom déposé) Arrêt d'autobus équipé d'un abri" ok cute.

the example it gives for abruti is "Espèce d'abruti !" folks it don't get any frencher than that.

[possessivesuffix]

"Did you know this conservative did not use the term 'pronoun' in a technically correct way" is one of the most tedious ways these days that linguists / linguistics fans can pretend they're saying something useful or insightful

what if I told you anyone saying "my pronouns are in bio" or "X uses Y pronouns" is also not using the term 'pronoun' in a ""technically correct"" way? It's almost as if semantic drift exists and the term 'pronoun' (or 'using pronouns') is used in this discourse in a specialized meaning that is really pretty clear to most people involved on both sides

Actually insightful linguistic contribution examples shouldn't even be hard to think of! these would include e.g. talking about pronouns systems different from English or about semantic shifts in pronouns, or just a crash course against prescriptivism. 'They' is plural and therefore is Not Proper to be used of a singular referent? indeed, much as thou should never stoop to the vulgar practice of calling a single person 'you', which is inherently plural

but sure, prescriptivism is actually great if you can use it to annoy The Outgroup, right? I'm sure that has no problems whatsoever in providing legitimacy for the concept, or say for undermining your position of supposedly speaking from expertise rather than trying to claim authority