Scrabble: Out to piss off grammar nazis

I look forward to the day when the English language is comprised of nothing more than a bunch of guttural utterances because we just can't be bothered to give a shit about spending all that time and effort to to form our mouths to pronounce our words. And what is written language if not a series of letters jammed haphazardly together to get us somewhere in the vicinity of the sounds of those words. Forget that Scrabble is a game about "spelling" and embrace making noises that get you close. That way everyone can be a winner and no one has to feel bad about being uneducated.

innt bewtiful?

@gakushya said:

@AlexW00d said:

@gakushya said:

Tell me, are you people even aware that the field of "linguistics" is the scientific study of language? Do you not consider at all the fact that smarter people than you are making decisions on things that they understand better than you do? Why do you trust an astronomer when he tells you what is or isn't a planet, but when a linguist tells you what is or isn't a word, you are incredulous? I think I'll follow advice on what is or isn't a word by people who can at least define the concepts involved.

Thanks for bumping a 15 month old topic to be a condescending jerk buddy.

You know what, you broadcast your uneducated oversimplified views on language, you promulgate myth and miseducation, and so, yeah, you deserve to be scolded. If this were a discussion about numbers, we would be using the methodology of mathematics, if this were about javascript we would be asking the programmers, if we were discussing diets we might ask a nutritionist. But when it comes to language, things are suddenly right or wrong, and suddenly everybody knows why. Don't see why this is a social problem worth addressing? Well, fine. It's not like anything I do is going to convince you.

Well that was hilariously self-fulfilling, lmao. Can we get a lock, please?

@Ulain said:

@gakushya said:

@Ulain said:

I think we are aware "people" (read: morons) use words like innit and grrl, but are they really used commonly enough to be included in this?

I never said people who use the word "innit" are morons. That's harsh. No I don't think that. I've studied the history of two languages, Japanese and English, and also historical linguistics, and the pattern always repeats; some group of pedants protesting and bitching against some emergent word or colloquialism demanding that we use something this way or that. ALWAYS. Seriously. Since the emergence of language, there has always been some person bitching about how others speak. I'm not kidding. Every point in time in the history of the English language, someone has identified a specific trend that somehow represents the downfall of the language. If these morons took some time to study how language works in a technical and social sense, they will realize that language will never devolve and loose the beauty or sophistication they identify. Barring the fact that these claims always evaporate the moment you ask the accuser to form their proclamations in a technical way that can be verified, language just doesn't work that way. It's not a system that becomes simpler or less expressive over time. No. How can you possibly claim that English has declined and devolved since the Shakespeare days when you don't even know the basic methodology for analysing languages to begin with?

Most of the time Grammar Nazi's do not have a linguistic rational for their accusations, its just norm enforcement. You are grossly offended by someone doing something that appears to be breaking the conventions and customs that you have internalized. You think someone gets angry over "youre" because there is an inherent linguistic mistake? No. They get angry because you are violating what they take to be a cultural law (manifested in language in this case), and humans always instinctively react to these sorts of transgressions with indignation and aggression.

Tl;DR. No, seriously.

How's that for proper linguistic skill, bud?

19 Posts and you're using it to undermine and insult your fellow forum-goers. You're off to a good start :)

@PeasantAbuse: My thoughts exactly.

Insult? No, I don't think anyone here is an idiot or inferior in anyway. Saying that "someone is smarter than you" is not saying that the person is dumb. Einstein is sure smarter than many other smart people I have met in my life. It is saying that you need to concede questions on these matters to people who are experts and know what they are talking about. I don't actually think you or the OP are idiots, how could I know that? But what I do think is that what is being done here is idiotic.

@melcene said:

I'm... just dumbstruck. Grrl? Thang? INNIT?! Now granted, I haven't played Scrabble in forever. Still, I think one of the reasons people play Scrabble is simply to show how much smarter they are than the other person. But adding words like those certainly aren't going to help anyone feel smart. Part of me wants to see the official word list, after they add 3,000 more words including those above. Part of me is scared to even look.

As a semi-grammar-nazi myself, this does irk me, even if I don't play. It's like sacrilege.

You're right I was being a bit of a jerk here, I apologize. You actually seem way more sensible than many other GN and have passable intentions. I try to target just the hardcore GNs. The ones that travel into schools and have meetings with students and teachers about the "proper" use of grammar. The people who think that because they can write a novel, they can then write a book on English grammar.

@CookieMonster said:

innit blad, am gunna murk you, yeh. fwagwan mandem.

Man, I was one hilarious mufucker.

Check this out, Margaret Carlson a journalist from Bloomberg news (at the time) giving a harsh critique of Sarah Palin's speech as discussed in the blog of Mark Liberman, a computational linguist at Penn:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1572

Here's the allegation on Palin:

Sarah Palin is very good at stringing words together
that don't have a subject, a verb and an object, they're just
present participles and prepositions and "I love the people of Alaska"
and "I'm quitting so I can serve them better".
It makes no sense!

Applying truly elementary logic:

I believe that Carlson means to claim that Palin speaks in fragments rather than complete sentences. But having "a subject, a verb and an object" is a poor diagnostic for this: for example, the very sentence that Carlson uses to make the claim appears to fail the test. And I don't believe it's true, by any test, that Palin's resignation statement contained an unusual number of sentence fragments, or was particularly rich in present participles and prepositions.

And the verdict?

Ms. Carlson's apparent attempt to characterize this as syntactic incoherence was analytically lazy and linguistically silly.

Carlson's argument, despite being totally incorrect and not even needing a linguistic analysis to realize, has the power to deceive people because people do not understand what is meant by "subject, object, verb, present participle, preposition". Technical vocabulary used for the sake of capitalizing on your ignorance, and this doesn't bother you?

@gakushya: You appear to be having an argument with year old comments and some nebulous entity that personifies the counter-stance to your linguistic sensibilities. Are you having a nervous breakdown for our amusement?

Always imagined that the internet must be kryptonite for grammar nazi's. While I appreciate good spelling, getting all stressed out about how someone spells a word seems the definition of pointless.

@Freshbandito said:

@gakushya: You appear to be having an argument with year old comments and some nebulous entity that personifies the counter-stance to your linguistic sensibilities. Are you having a nervous breakdown for our amusement?

Well, a little bit yes. Although, I actually didn't say anything specific to the original OP. I didn't address any details about what he said at all. But no one called me out on the fact that I belligerently chastised the OP without making any explicit reference to what he even said. Surely someone could have asked me "You aggressively accuse the OP of this and that. But how does this and that follow from what he said?" Well I suppose that's my mistake.

I am having an argument with a mindset. I don't think you will have read this far because you haven't read any of my comments yet, but it might be said nonetheless:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2623

Simon Heffer, a journalist and writer (not a linguist or educational scientist) has gone quite adventurously out of his way to a school in England http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Edward_VI_Community_College to demand from that school that more emphasis be put into teaching grammar. Emphasis means resources, like tax payers money. As the Language Log above shows, Heffer's rules of grammar are asinine and not even internally consistent. Imagine children being taken out of math for 2 hours a week to be drilled in grammar rules prescribed by a person who cannot even present a consistent well reasoned scheme for these rules . If enough people like Heffer protest the schools, then this will certainly happen. If the general public is not technically knowledgeable enough to refute prescriptive grammar, then it will become part of the curriculum by brute force. Is this not a threat?

Comments like this

@BrockNRolla

And what is written language if not a series of letters jammed haphazardly together to get us somewhere in the vicinity of the sounds of those words.

It's fine that BrockNRolla doesn't have any idea what he is talking about here, there's nothing wrong with trying to make a statement about "sounds" and "letters" without recourse to technical vocabulary or concepts, incoherent as it always is. He is overstepping his bounds on what he is qualified to say, but that has nothing to do with whether he is smart or not. Everyone loves to speculate and participate in discussion, and that's fine. What's not fine, and what BrockNRolla is guilty of, is the failure to acknowledge that he is overstepping his bounds on what he is qualified to say (you can accuse him of this because he is making an assertion and not in fact just a displaced statement), but more perilously, the attitude that we need not even consider science or rational method as a primary means of resolving questions of language. As a matter of course, grammar issues become things that are either correct or incorrect, and our authority on the matter is justified by our status as native speakers. This attitude is exploited by politicians to slander each other, grammar nazis to insult you and assert their superior knowledge, journalists to impose their pedantry onto others, and grammar advocates in demanding conformance to grammatical ideology and servility to tradition. And no one can defend themselves against any of this because they don't even consider language as something that is deserving of a technical quantitative description.