Why Do Experts Always Defend Language Mistakes

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So often linguists seem to be defending language errors simply because they’re all ‘woke’. In this video we look at prescriptivism and descriptivism, standards, language ‘rules’, arbitrariness and the way emotions can control our thinking about language.
0:00 Quiz and introduction
1:50 Broad perspective & Ground News
3:30 Ferdinand de Saussure & arbitrariness
4:51 Standardness
6:13 Prescriptive & descriptive
6:44 Unconscious complexity
8:50 The value of standards
9:40 Language is rule-governed
11:10 Precedents
12:11 Covert and driving
13:16 Mistaken reanalysis
14:20 Emotion
16:17 Evidence against them
18:04 The power of association
22:56 Lingerie

Ferdinand de Saussure https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_de_Saussure_by_Jullien_Restored.png Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Before we begin, a little quiz. Just two questions: What is the correct pronunciation of this word? And which is safer, driving on the left, or driving on the right? No checking online. I’ll give answers later. Why do experts, linguists, always defend language mistakes? Well, let’s be clear, there are language mistakes. I’ve recently made two videos about things that American and English actors sometimes get wrong when they attempt each other’s accents. If you’re attempting to sound American and you pronounce this word as carm, you’ve got something wrong, even if you’re a brilliant actor like Gary Oldman. Barbara, calm down. But there are language behaviours that drive some members of the public to rage, indignation, disgust and contempt, while language specialists like me, experts if you like, don’t join in. Not only we are not outraged, we often claim that the offence is reasonable. To the outraged, we may seem to be leaping to the defence of whatever social groups are perpetrating the outrages. The language offences seem so obviously bad that our tolerance can only be motivated by adherence to a critical social justice perspective, or wokeism for short. Later in the video I want to acknowledge and explore the outrage and other negative feelings about language that can come to us so readily. But first I’ll try to show how much linguists’ attitudes to these language offences are not about wokeism but are just a function of a descriptive, analytical approach, a much broader exposure to data, and awareness of linguistic arbitrariness. That broad exposure to data is vital, to form an all-round picture and to fight confirmation bias, the tendency to see what we want to see, and this is certainly true in the modern echo-chamber world of social media that present us only with what they think we want to hear. The only reason I found this interesting research from Finland which examines the association between ‘woke’ attitudes and other factors like unhappiness, was that I have a subscription to today’s sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers thousands of news stories from around the world and classifies them according to their political leanings. For each story you can see the number of sources, their right or left orientation, their factuality and ownership, and quickly compare headlines. The Finnish research was all but ignored by the Left, but seized upon by right-leaning sources, from relatively sober coverage to claims of a woke mind virus. And I was really impressed that Ground News linked me directly to the original paper. The Ground News Vantage plan has a Blindspot feature that specifically alerts you to stories that are being ignored or neglected by one side of the spectrum or the other. So I think Ground News is not just a good way to get your news but a pretty valuable educational tool. To subscribe as I do, and support this channel, and get 40% off the Vantage plan, just use the link in the description below, ground.news/DrGeoffLindsey This is the widely acknowledged father of modern linguistics, the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure. The fundamental principle of language from which Saussure began was l’arbitraire du signe, the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. He meant that linguistic forms by default don’t get their form from their meaning. It’s what makes language possible. This meaning has all these different forms in different languages. Dog, chien, Hund, perro and so on. There are some onomatopoeic words like crash and tweet, but if all form followed from meaning, we wouldn’t have linguistic diversity, or infinite expressive power. What would most meanings sound like? Street? Finger? Download? The fact that forms are not anchored to their meanings also allows them to change over time. And although language change exhibits regularities, overall things are so complex that we can’t predict how languages will develop. We’ve all heard of the butterfly effect, tiny differences at the start leading to hugely different results. This pendulum can only move in certain ways, but look how much variation there is. Linguists are always aware of how things in language could so easily have ended up some other way. There’s also arbitrariness in the conventions of standardness that become established. Standards of spelling, punctuation, grammar, pronunciation, these are all man-made, they didn’t come from god or nature. They weren’t always there — many date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, and when they arose they weren’t scientific discoveries, they were essentially just decisions. And as time goes by, standards may shift, or fade away. In the book Language Myths, James Milroy quotes this nice list published in the independent newspaper in the 1990s of “some of the most common grammatical errors”: We could easily devote the whole video to this list, but I suspect that for many of you, reactions to the different items vary massively, from that’s awful, to not seeing immediately what the error was meant to be. And to linguists, views for example on where this ‘of’ belongs, and whether it’s awful or perfectly fine, might seem quite arbitrary. Sometimes people will appeal to me to back up their views on non-standard forms, their value judgements. They’re sure that they know much more about language than the people who do the thing that don’t like, so if I know even more about language than they do, I must hate it even more. But linguistics isn’t generally prescriptive, in other words saying that you should do this and shouldn’t do that. Even the dictionary I co-edit, which is a long list of recommended pronunciations, is based on trying to describe how people do say the words rather than how people should say them. Linguists try to be like physicists and biologists, trying to describe the world, not tell it how to be. And in language there’s an awful lot to describe. In infancy and early childhood, we miraculously acquire, without being explicitly taught, not just lots of words but a vast network of regularities and complex skills, just as we acquire the incredibly complex abilities to stand, walk, run, pick things up and put them down, countless things that nobody taught us to do and which we don’t even remember learning. This amnesia means that people, even highly educated people, tend to be very unaware of just how complex their language is, let alone the complexity of all the thousands of other languages. Languages are icebergs, with most of their workings below the level of general conscious knowledge, and linguists try to analyse the icebergs. But non-linguists, perhaps especially the more educated ones, tend to have a rather exaggerated sense of what they know about their language. In fact, most know relatively little about the complex rules they unconsciously follow whenever they assemble words into sentences, let alone how they pronounce those words and how their vocal organs work. My videos on English Weak Forms are pretty popular, I’m delighted to say, and this is at least partly because native speakers seem fascinated to learn things they never knew about super-important words that they use all the time. What non-linguists are aware of, in particular the more educated ones, are all the things they did learn consciously, spelling and punctuation and not to do those things that appear on lists of most common errors. I think it’s quite ironic that if language conventions have to be consciously taught, they aren’t really what linguists think of as actual rules of natural language, which we acquire unconsciously. And yet it’s those man-made conventions, which have to be consciously taught, that non-linguists often think of as the rules of their language. Of course, conventions and standards have their uses, and can be hugely important, like driving on only one side of the road, which I’ll get to soon. Even language standards, which are hardly a matter of life or death, can make things more efficient, for example when writing for publication, having one agreed way of doing something rather than having to decide all the time between several options. I think this is particularly true for international academic journals, where we essentially want to factor out style and just present the content. Having a narrow, rigid set of conventions, rather than a relaxed, broad minded attitude to language, levels the playing field at least a bit for people from around the world who are submitting their research in a language that isn’t their own. So linguists describe regularities, in any data, not just what may be considered standard. And language is generally ruled-governed. There are regularities even in actual mistakes, like carm down. That’s what makes them interesting, unlike random blunders such as the countless wrong answers to some arithmetical problem that has only one right answer. Linguistic form, even if it’s non-standard, typically follows a logic of it’s own. D’oh! The fury that many people feel about this form might suggest that it’s just like a wrong answer to a mathematical problem. But on closer inspection it’s just the use of the possessive apostrophe S on… a possessive. You may say, ah yes, but it blurs a vital distinction between the possessive its and the contraction of it is or it has, a distinction that’s really important for us to make… except of course, in speech, where the distinction doesn’t even exist. /ɪts/, which one am I saying? Or take mischievious. The regularity here is that adding the I makes it more like a regular English word. Mischievous is an odd word in English. Nothing rhymes with it. Mischievious is more in line with rebellious and laborious and erroneous, and it rhymes with previous and devious. These parallels that I’m giving for mischievious are typical of another thing linguists do when we analyse, namely see how the given data relate to the bigger picture. It’s general scientific procedure to take a broader perspective, to spot parallels or precedents, other examples of the same thing or similar things in another place or another time. And this is very commonly the case with linguistic forms, regardless of whether they’re standard or not. Here’s possessive it’s with an apostrophe in a first folio of Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth part 2. And if you saw my video on out of date pronunciations in dictionaries, you may remember these old examples of mischievious in print, in Britain, America and Australia. I also made a video about aks, which whether you like it or not occurs throughout the history of English in various dialects. And talking of the history of words brings me back to the little quiz at the start of the video. What is the correct pronunciation of this word? And which is safer, driving on the left, or driving on the right? The correct pronunciation of this word is /kʌvə(r)t/. It has no link to the word ‘overt’. Covert is historically related to the word cover, and so just as we have spelled and spelt, dreamed and dreamt, we have covered and covert. Overt has a different history, being related to French ouvert meaning open. Moving on to question two, research has shown that driving on the left is safer. This is because most people are right-handed, and it means that for most drivers, being on the left side of the road in a right-hand drive car, the dominant eye is closer to the centre of the road and better able to see oncoming traffic. But on second thoughts… Of course /kʌvə(r)t/ isn’t the pronunciation of this adjective. Not any more. /kʌvə(r)t/ is still used for the noun meaning a hiding place in the undergrowth. But the pronunciation of the adjective, the one that I would teach, is now coVERT (or COvert, the stress is shiftable). But this is a reanalysis, based on the mistaken assumption that covert and overt are related by what linguists would call derivational morphology, and as I explained a moment ago, that isn’t true. So this is not entirely unlike the reanalysis by some speakers of would’ve as would of, which causes outrage in many people who say covert in blissful ignorance of its history. And what about driving? I really have no idea whether driving on the left or the right is safer. My quick internet search told me about some old and or tentative claims or suggestions about right-handedness favouring driving on the left. But as far as I’m aware there haven’t been any serious large-scale studies, not that we would switch sides even if there were. The reason I put this in the video, aside from it being an example of a vital standard, is to let you check your emotional reaction. When I saw the online material in favour of driving on the left, as we do here in the UK, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit pleased, and not because it made me feel much safer as a driver, but because it was a win for the team I happen to be on. How did you react to my answer? If you drive on the left, did it make you feel the same way as I did, just a little bit? And if you drive on the right, did my answer to the question make you feel a bit annoyed? Or defensive? I wonder how many viewers have already started googling about it. Perhaps there’s already a debate in the comments below. If so, my prediction would be that those arguing for right-side driving will be those who happen to be in right-side-driving countries, and vice versa. In other words, not dispassionate objectivity, but wanting your side to win. This is so easily how we feel about language. People in general don’t think much about their own language. What catches their attention is some other group of people doing something different. I rarely get inquiries from people asking ‘why do I pronounce this the way I do?’ That just stands to reason of course. The inquiries are generally ‘why do some people…’ We assume that we ourselves are reasonable, so our own use of language ought to be reasonable too. But if how we speak is reasonable, and others use our language differently, then their use may not be reasonable. And we have a built-in desire, not to be objective, but for our language forms to be better, or rather for their language forms to be worse. And our minds are super quick at spotting any potential evidence against what those others are doing. Maybe what they do is simpler than what we do. Maybe their pronunciation doesn’t match the spelling as closely as ours. Or maybe it seems further from the pronunciation in some other language. Maybe they’re blurring a contrast that we make. Their language use may even seem to violate basic logic. The classic example of supposed inability to think logically of course is multiple negation, like You don’t know nothing or I can’t get no satisfaction. Linguists of course know that multiple negation like this is standard in other languages, like Russian and Ukrainian. These bits of negative evidence can make us feel disdainful towards the other speakers. Linguists can have all these feelings too, but they’re in a better position to balance this with objective analysis and a broader perspective. My kind of non-rhotic accent has lost the contrast between ‘father’ and ‘farther’, ‘calmer’ and ‘karma’. This is terrible, dropping a letter, being lazy, losing contrasts and simplifying the language. Except that R-dropping in Southern Britain created new vowels, complicating the language. Not to mention those unwritten R’s that English and Australian speakers may add. As I’ve explained in several other videos, these are highly systematic and well-motivated, though it never seems to stop American commenters calling them illogical or just plain stupid. Having assembled evidence for why the other guys’ forms are worse than ours, our minds are just as quick to find a reason for why they’re doing what they’re doing. And the most obvious reason is who they are. This is the power of association. It seems so obvious. Of course if a form is used by some group, then the members of that group are using it because of who they are. But the particular forms people use are generally not directly caused by who they are, they’re accidents of history. These associations are so powerful they’re pretty much impossible to turn off, even for linguists who are able to see through them to the arbitrariness. Say it again. –The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. The rain in Spain just feels so elegant and educated, and the rain in Spain feels so coarse and vulgar, doesn’t it? But how can the linguistic form Spain be intrinsically vulgar when it’s there in posh speech too, with this meaning? The tapped R of old RP, and some classically trained actors, which Americans sometimes indicate in spelling as ‘veddy British’, may seem to result from the very educated precision and clarity of those speakers. Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester But it’s also in Scouse, the working class speech of Liverpool with whom people have very different associations. That’s why these comedy Scousers were called Barry, Terry and Gary. A tap is just a tap. Look what’s all this about Gary? –You keep out of it Barry –Break it up, eh –Calm down, calm down One viewer emailed to tell me that he’d heard British people saying Byzantine and Nicaragua, and that I suppose it sounds educated to people in Britain, but to Americans it sounds like a semi-literate hillbilly talking. But of course Nicaragua is just nativizing the word, like arguable, following native spelling pronunciation rules, and Byzantine, which is one of several pronunciations Brits use, is just like Tridentine. People are very quick to reach for stereotypes in explaining why speakers use the forms they do. Brits nativize words because they’re imperialists with no regard for anyone else. Americans are stupid, Italians are emotional, etc. etc. One of my favourite examples of stereotyped language analysis is this, from a guide to France. The language they speak varies from north to south, being lazier in the south with words like douze (twelve) being pronounced dooz-uh rather than the Parisian dooze. Those aberrations aside… Of course this lazy aberration goes to the trouble of pronouncing the historic final vowel that those hard-working and conscientious northerners dropped long ago. Similar to this are y’all in the American South and African American English, and yous in some British and Irish dialects, which by association so easily appear quaint or uneducated depending on your stereotype, but which add to English a 2nd person plural pronoun, something the standard language lost. And when commenters explain that people use ‘aks’ because they’re idiots, I don’t think they’re talking about the white people who use it. And I bet at least some of them are themselves happy to mis-order the consonants in ‘comfortable’. Of course pointing out regularities and precedents isn’t declaring something standard, or cancelling your right to want non-standard forms stamped out, as authoritarian governments on both the right and the left like to do. It’s being descriptive rather than prescriptive, and it only gets accused of being ‘woke’ or ‘making excuses’ when the form in question is used by certain types of people. But linguists do this with all data and all speakers. Is it ‘woke’ to defend the poor oppressed British by pointing out that nativizing Nicaragua is regular and has countless precedents? And that whether you nativize words or not is somewhat arbitrary. Americans say lingeray but not patisseray. And is it woke to point out how an actual mistake just stops being a mistake when everyone does it, like covert. Or lingeray, which is in the dictionaries as the standard American pronunciation, but where pronouncing the final IE as AY, if it’s meant to be like the French pronunciation, is a fail, the same way carm down is a fail. But lingeray, like covert, has its own logic, and succeeds in sounding like French by analogy with cafe, ballet, negligee, gourmet, etc. In saying that, I’m not trying to make a ‘woke’ excuse for the entire American population. Nor, as it now seems to my surprise, for the British population. No matter what the out of date dictionaries tell you. 54. Lingerie. Lingerie. In these modern times, bathing suits also have become a bare necessity in any display of lingerie. Note that it’s very common to pronounce this as lonzheray. By the end of making this video I will have drummed into my dyslexic brain how to actually spell lingerie.