Tech Therapy: Should You Outsource Your Technology Services?

I disagree on two points:

“Less legitimate were complaints that The New Yorker had the temerity to allow its dance critic to review a book about language.”

I took the criticism as not that it was the dance critic who wrote the review, but that it was an ignoramus (at least on the topic being discussed).  That she is the dance review was raised by way of giving her background.  Were she a dance reviewer who was also knowledgeable about the topic at hand, that would be lovely.  The suggestion, however, was that the editor assigned this review not to someone knowledgeable, but to someone readily at hand:  in this case, the dance reviewer.  This suggests a lack of seriousness.

“…there is disagreement over the pace of change. Some people think it
should be relatively swift, and others think it should be relatively
slow.”

Eh?  Who argues that this change *should* be relatively swift?  Descriptivists describe it as relatively swift, but don’t have a rooting interest in its speed.  Prescriptivists, it is true, argue that it should be slow, but to therefore suggest that descriptivists argue it should be swift is to fall into the false equivalency meme.  The two camps are in fact holding entirely different discussions:  not merely rooting for different teams.

Oh, and in reply to Rob Fuller, many excellent beers are only readily available in six- (or four-) packs.  Draft might be the Platonic ideal, but in this vale of tears we must make do.

“Amongst”: it’s ALL OVER my students’ papers: why/how?!

Here is a striking example in which a word is replaced by its opposite to mean exactly the same thing.  It used to be that things were based on other things.  Now, according to nearly all of my students, things are based off other things.  I mark it wrong, but it is pervasive and it may win.

I think it is important to note that your point that “some people think it [linguistic change] should be relatively swift, and others think it should be relatively slow” applies more to editors and teachers of linguistic etiquette than to linguists. Linguistics is concerned with the scientific study of language, and in science a “descriptive” approach is the only valid one. However, people outside of linguistics seems to have a rather hazy idea of what “descriptivism” in a linguistic context means. A linguist is not saying that change in language should be relatively swift as opposed to slow (as your characterization of descriptivism would seem to imply). Rather, linguists are “descriptive” in the sense that they attempt to estimate which percentage of a population under which situations select a particular linguistic form out of the many that are available to them (such as “amongst” versus “among,” or singular “they” versus the other alternatives, etc). This is a much different sense of “descriptivism” than the one you provide, since the question of whether change should be “swift” or “slow” doesn’t enter into the analysis. Rather, descriptivism in a linguistic sense means describing the linguistic forms that are available to speakers of a particular dialect and the principles and factors that may lead a language user to choose from among these options a specific form in a particular context. Acocella was pretty obviously ignorant of this notion of “descriptivism.” I’m sure you are aware of what linguists mean by “descriptivism” but your post may inadvertently lead non-linguists astray.

I saw it so frequently I had a class discussion about it.  I drew something literally sitting (based on) something else.  Students immediately said “but it, like, jumped off from it. ”  Some students on further thinking about the examples said, no, well some things are still “based on” the original thing, but some are, “like, tangents” which came from something prior.  So the moral of the story was to think about the relationship and describe it as accurately as we can.

And then I got the post-discussion papers where “coming off” was the new “based off.”   eeeei.  I told the students what happened, everyone laughed.  I handed back all the papers, had everyone circle all the “relationship descriptors,” and in groups articulate the relationships and redescribe, with each other’s help as needed. 

We put a list of the new descriptive phrases on the board:  came from, came out of, originated from, derived from, based on, jumped off from, and the one that got a round of spontaneous applause: has almost become an analogy for. 

With respect to your second point, jffoster, I must disagree.  Let me see if I can express this without getting type-tied: elements of the expected ought(s) are part of the is(es), since language is a medium rather than an exercise in solipsism.  The determining question seems to me to be to what degree must idiolect bow to expectation in order for interlocutors to participate fully in a linguistic exchange.  It’s not that descriptivists don’t make that distinction and prescriptivists do, but they differ at what social layer that point is established.  I agree with you that ideology plays a role, but I would say its role is in shaping people’s perceptions of where that point is best understood to lie, not that prescriptivists suffer from it while descriptivists don’t.

Can’t we use both ‘based on’ and ‘based off’, but with different meanings? For example, when we say X is based on Y, we may be saying that it is X is an extension of Y. But when we say that X is based off Y, we mean that X is a corruption of Y. I know a lot of movies that are based off books.

Ah, but in my student papers, it’s everywhere.  Students from the Caribbean have told me it’s standard there.

Prescriptivism versus descriptivism may be ‘boring’ but it is not insignificant since there still seems to be many who consider natural languages to be like mathematics: a human construct in which precision if not correctness is important and common usage mostly irrelevant.

Incidentally, isn’t ‘in order’ redundant in ‘in order to’ and ‘in order for’?

Your axiom no. 4 misidentifies the source of the tensions between the pre- and the de- scriptivists. The problem isn’t a disagreement about the pace of change.

The problem is that the two groups fundamentally disagree about who should codify what the “shared understanding” is, and how that should be done. Prescriptivists believe in principle that language norms can be decreed. Their Bibles were written by Strunk & White, Fowler, etc., and their present-day prophets are professional editors (or anyone else who wants to affect an air of knowledgeable conservatism, as cheaply as possible), tossing off the odd usage column in their spare time.

Descriptivists have a big beef with that. They think that in principle, empirical research should count more than dogmatic authority. And secondly they have identified a set of maxims, cherished by the prescriptivists, which are terribly wrong not because language has changed but because it never was the way these rules say it should be. But the prescriptivists as often as not reply to these findings with pure bluster.

That gets the descriptivists’ goats in the same way that creationism gets biological scientists’ goats. There’s the refusal to listen to empirical arguments; and then there’s the added insult of implying that the other guys are people whose heart isn’t in the right place – in this case, that descriptivists believe there aren’t any rules or shouldn’t be any rules or some other tripe like that. And all the while, in their own usage the prescriptivists blithely ignore their own rules.

There is also a practical consequence, which is quite simply that the youth of today, when they ask for help to write good English, are still being being given exactly these wrong rules, and then nothing. Talk about the son asking for bread and being given a stone.

And there is a wider context in that the prescriptivists’ maneuvers are reprehensible. Screwing around with facts, brazening your way through criticism, and making up arbitrary rules for other people which you ignore yourself are not good habits (in other fields they are the stuff of financial bubbles, environmental disasters and unnecessary wars). Language discussions offer as good a sandpit as any to cultivate better ones.

And is this a cause for concern? Amongst is more common in Commonwealth countries, and even in the US I don’t see it as something to worry about.

Thanks, Yabba. It was only one small example, and perhaps not the best. Yet I think it illustrates my main point that, for some people, the “personal opinions” are  beliefs in universal imperatives. It seems to me that the acquired brain wiring that makes someone speak a particular way and in a particular context also generates (in some circumstances) strong negative reactions to perceived violations. It’s perfectly common for a personal opinion to be shared in in such a way that it comes out as  a directive imposed on other people. It’s more likely, the stronger the beliefs. And though the rationales given for these rules may be irrelevant or factually wrong, what seems most important to me is the belief in these rules. (ou seem to be saying that you have a preference as to how they express their belief in these rules.)
This happens a lot with strong opinons in all social spheres, I think, and I am grateful that prescriptivists are not legislators– that their only power to change language comes from their power to persuade. And to the extent their power is strong at certain times, such as in school, that’s part of how formal written and spoken language is learned. Isn’t it the case that the “rules” you discern from an analysis of speech and writing are the largely result of a combination of “rules” we have been taught, and speech/writing that we imitate? (I know there are lively discussions about which language elements are innate, but is that discussion relevant here?) As such, do descriptivists want to get involved with the actual process of language acquisition by changing the way grammar, writing, and speech are taught in schools? 
When a prescriptivist says something about the permissiveness of some dictionary (or some descriptivist) and the decline of civilization and the like, it may be hard to avoid getting sucked into a debate. But within those pronouncements can also be found a window into the mental model of what language is to those speakers. It exposes a bit of the act of reading and listening, something that is otherwise hard to come by, and seemingly a valuable source of neutral study. No?

I think the problem is that you are thinking that descriptivism and prescriptivism are two different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, when, in fact, the concerns of each are radically different. Prescriptivists are concerned with relatively minor and arbitrarily selected points of usage and variation (say, whether it is acceptable to use “who” in place of “whom” in something like, “Who(m) did you speak to”). Given that the concerns of prescriptivists are so narrow and arbitrarily selected, the only insight into language you will get by looking at what prescriptivists say about language is the attitudes people have *about* language and the reasons they invent to explain why they have those attitudes: this will give you more insight into ideology than language (It doesn’t help that prescriptivists often have no idea what they themselves say. I remember getting into an argument with a prescriptivist about some usage or other, and showed him that he himself used the form he had said wasn’t proper English on numerous occasions. His response was,”The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”) 

As I said above, there is debate among teachers, copy editors, and other teachers of linguistic etiquette about whether to maintain a “conservative” style (whatever that means in a given context) or whether to allow a more “permissive” one (again, whatever that means in a given context), but this debate is not really what “descriptivism” means in a linguistic context. The difference between prescriptivists and descriptivists is not that prescriptivists are concerned with how people should speak whereas descriptivists are concerned with how they actually do speak. Rather, as jffoster says above, descriptivism is the empirical basis of linguistic investigation, whereas prescriptivism is a form of linguistic ideology.

(And I didn’t say this before, but it’s been bothering me. Trying to describe how language is changing based on selective attention to the behavior of students in your classroom is the equivalent of trying to describe climate change by periodically looking out your window).

to dancha,
    to the extent there is any scientific value in the observations you outline (and Im not clear on what the things you want to observe are), it would tell us about things like personal psychology, and how some people react to people doing something different from what they do or think people ought do.  It will tell us little or nothing about language. 
   
See also and particularly nodicexpat’s reply to you well down the thread and also his original to the original poster Yagoda not quite so far down the thread.

Not worried about it :) Just responding to the original article’s noticing quite a change over the last few years and wondering about how it is happening.

 Isn’t it supposed to be “based off of?”