"hair did" and "bad grammar"

[Portia]

In the future start all critiques of my answers with a long winded complimentary paragraph about my beauty, charm and incredible amazingness. Soothe my ego.

This is why I chose Concorde as my spirit animal.

I feel like I need to make a testimonial video for Katya. "I'm a reformed prescriptivist. THERE'S HOPE."

[Concorde]

I dunno. I wasn't offended I was just surprised that you were irked and confused that my off the cuff response had inspired a response, but now it makes more sense.

[Portia]

So back on topic, I thought of a comparable situation for the college-educated white kids. A guy I've had an on-off fling went to college within spitting distance of your hometown and his mother grew up in that state. So it's safe to say his dialect is Midwestern. One time he asked if we should get "eye-talian food." I thought he was joking. He is probably the most socially-conscious person I know, but to him, that's just how you say that word in that context. Being something of a snob, I teased him, and it became a running joke, but it wasn't wrong—again, I was the snob.

His saying that was no more "wrong" than the fact that I have a serious case of the fill-feel and fell-fail mergers when I speak quickly. So do a lot of Utahns.

Probably everyone here has the cot-caught merger. I bet there are old East Coast people who would be shocked and a-PAHLED.

[Concorde]

But that's more pronunciation vs word usage.

Also I've never heard anyone say Italian like that before. I did get mocked for using "pop" for soda. I blame Canada.

[mic0]

Concorde, beautiful lovely talented interesting smart Concorde. You are a great person and writer. You do wonderful things. I wish we could hang out and talk about stuff and life because you sound like a great person with whom I could be friends. (And most of the people on this board, TBH, you're all cool.) (Was that complimentary enough or did it sound sarcastic? Writing is hard. It was all honest!)

I grew up in Detroit at a majority black school and I remember my black English teacher lecturing us one day about saying things like "got my nails did" and things like that. I was just basing my comments off my experience in a community that said things like that.

English teachers are really good at teaching the more conservative and prestigious ways of speaking. This is good in some ways because it helps people get a leg up when they enter the workforce where most employers don't care about the linguistic nuances I've been discussing here. This is bad in other ways because it teaches students that their at-home ways of speaking are wrong. Just something to think about. Most linguists wish that English teachers would give a lesson on dialect, registers, prescriptivism. I personally think it would be awesome if high schoolers (or elementary students, even) learned about sociology and linguistics, because both of these help us understand our prejudices and how society and different cultures function.

[Concorde]

Oh stop I'm blushing...

That makes more sense and I honestly do see the faults in my response now. It was rather elitist.

[Concealocanth]

Sorry for thread hijacking/hopping on a tangent, but Mico, I SO AGREE WITH YOUR PROBLEMS WITH "Word Crimes." I mean, I generally dislike Weird Al's humor, but I was definitely like when "Don't be a moron...You dumb mouth-breather" escalated to "That really makes me want to literally/Smack a crowbar upside your stupid head...Go back to pre-school/Get out of the gene pool/Try your best to not drool." My mom is really sensitive about offending people and being mean, but she LOVES the song. It drives me up the wall. Not to mention the innuendo... "Some cunning linguist"???

SINCE WHEN IS PUTTING AN "X" IN "ESPRESSO" A CRIME? It's literally just an alternate pronunciation asasfidsijfklsdjfkdlsf

My boss is a literal scientific genius and can't remember "it's" vs. "its" to save his life. Nobody cares because he's helping eradicate disease in impoverished areas I suppose. But bad "grammar" (lol) is no reason to judge somebody's intelligence or wish them "out of the gene pool" even jokingly.

Okay, apparently I've been waiting to spring a rant on this.

[Portia]

Oooh, more fun. The Internet thinks that "eye-talian" can be meant as a racist or disparaging term. (Can you be racist against tasty lasagna?) But he grew up in Texas and the Internet also thinks it's a Southern thing.

I had to laugh at this from the description of Inland Northern American English, in this case, film director Michael Moore. "a Flintoid, with a nasal, uncosmopolitan accent" and "a recognisable blue-collar Michigan accent." Hahahaha. That's exactly how this guy speaks when he's excited or lets his guard down ... and he already told me that he worked very hard to change how he spoke (he's a major geek and I think he probably had the lack of intonation and inappropriate vocal modulation of the socially awkward)!

[Concorde]

Michigan accents are ugly. I used to have a lovely Deep South accent from my time down yonder but then Michigan changed that and I'm quickly picking up a Utah accent.

[Katya]

ETA: That's not even grammar, that's palatalization and a stupid straw man to distract from many policy problems in the Bush administration.

Is "nuclear" vs "nookyular" really about palatalization? I've always interpreted it as simplifying the consonant structure from CVCCVC to CVCVC. (But then there is the question of why the /i/ turns into a /ju/. Hmmm.)

[Katya]

I wish we had l'academie francaise in the US to settle such things.

CEDILLE ALERT! CEDILLE ALERT! WE HAVE A CODE 0199! I'm pretty sure you're going to get Katyaed on this one. Going to just sit back and watch the carnage.

I love that you used the actual Alt code.

As for the Académie, I'm currently reading a book called The Story of French and one of the biggest things I'm learning is that the creation of the Académie française was much more about politics than it was about language preservation. (That and the dictionaries produced by the Académie have been almost uniformly regarded as terrible. Even if one likes one's language prescriptified, there are much better dictionaries to consult.)

ETA: CONCORDE IS NOT LINGUISTICS. CONCORDE IS BEAUTY.

[Katya]

"I'M NOT LINGUISTICS! I AM CONCORDE."

Board Board Editors, you know what to do.

Seconded.

[Portia]

It was rather elitist.

Michigan accents are ugly.

Bahahaha this is why I love you.

Yes, some of his Midwestern idiosyncracies are less than mellifluous and certainly not posh. But we're just a couple of blue-collar kids from flyover country trying to make it big. So in the end, I find it charming. Since you're studying French, I'd suggest you read about some of these arriviste characters, and how language plays into how society perceives them, and really, whether society is all it's cracked up to be.

I'd much prefer dating a guy who was a bit on the geeky side, and who had the nerd's tendency to go on (and on!) about things that interested him, rather than the smarmy self-conscious preppy talk of the squad of Young Republicans who seem to think I should become their respective arm candy. I've always had the vocabulary of a Princeton man of the 1910s, but I don't know how I'd feel if I no longer sounded like the Utah girl I am. I know I give an impression of really caring about being posh, and yeah, a life in Flint is not that, but really, I have a weakness for the poor-boy-made-good trope.

I don't have any experience, really, with urban communities of color, but if blue-collar white kids put this much thought into "passing," then I imagine the problem to only be more difficult when your way of speaking is viewed not just as "ugly" but "wrong."

[Katya]

I grew up in Detroit at a majority black school and I remember my black English teacher lecturing us one day about saying things like "got my nails did" and things like that. I was just basing my comments off my experience in a community that said things like that.

This is really interesting, because I think it's gets at the heart of the tension between how things are and how they should be. On the one hand, people who've studied linguistics (and especially sociolinguistics) are well aware of the inherent complexity of various dialects and that which dialect comes to be privileged or considered standard and which one doesn't can be largely arbitrary, and is certainly not based on one dialect being inherently "better" than another.

On the other hand, if you think that a woman who says "got my nails did" instead of "got my nails done" isn't going to be penalized for saying that in certain groups, you're kidding yourself. And if she's (unconsciously) penalized for saying that in, say, a job interview, that could have some pretty serious consequences for her ability to move ahead in life. And an English teacher in a majority black school is probably going to be pretty aware of that.

I definitely find myself on the side of "every dialect / accent is beautiful and we should appreciate all of them," but sometimes I have to remind myself that for some people, this isn't an abstract issue of truth and beauty, but a very concrete issue and even if I think that we should all embrace our own inherent specialness, I'm not someone who's ever been penalized for my accent or dialect, so it's not a very risky position for me to take.

[Katya]

In the future start all critiques of my answers with a long winded complimentary paragraph about my beauty, charm and incredible amazingness. Soothe my ego.

This is why I chose Concorde as my spirit animal.

I feel like I need to make a testimonial video for Katya. "I'm a reformed prescriptivist. THERE'S HOPE."

[Katya]

I think you're misreading Mico. I don't think she's angry, just disagreeing. We talked about this one time when Haleakalā thought we were "offended," and we weren't. We just disagreed.

There tends to be few feelings of offense over here but lots of disagreeing. Maybe we need to make a FAQ with "you will be disagreed with - a lot." on it.

Yeah, that's partly why the "answers I liked" thread was created, because answers we disagreed with were more likely to spark discussions, which left the impression that we didn't like most of the answers posted.

[Portia]

ETA: That's not even grammar, that's palatalization and a stupid straw man to distract from many policy problems in the Bush administration.

Is "nuclear" vs "nookyular" really about palatalization? I've always interpreted it as simplifying the consonant structure from CVCCVC to CVCVC. (But then there is the question of why the /i/ turns into a /ju/. Hmmm.)

Ctrl + F "nucular" on this thread from when the Internet was a wee babe. Fascinating stuff!

Re the other examples; I (as pron* editor) included febyooery in AHD* (hadn't realized I was considered all that prescriptive) because it is so prevalent and accepted - whereas liberree isn't. When I was still in school, we were taught that the definition of "correct" speech and pronunciation was that which was spoken by the educated folks in any given area.

Sometimes, however, we more-or-less descriptivist pronchics* still get unhappy. At Random House, we put in the nucular pron because Carter said it (referencing The President's Speech theory), and originally were going to put a pronunciation modifier along with it: "nookleear, often nookular" to be really read as, "and entirely too often".

At first I thought they were time-travelers! They're talking about President Carter, because this is from 1995!

*pronunciation
*pronunciation chicks? Don't Google this: "pron" has come to be a replacement for "porn"
*American Heritage Dictionary

[Portia]

Also, deep shame, I said "straw man" when I probably should have used "red herring." #truewordcrimes

[Katya]

Ctrl + F "nucular" on this thread from when the Internet was a wee babe. Fascinating stuff!

Re the other examples; I (as pron* editor) included febyooery in AHD* (hadn't realized I was considered all that prescriptive) because it is so prevalent and accepted - whereas liberree isn't. When I was still in school, we were taught that the definition of "correct" speech and pronunciation was that which was spoken by the educated folks in any given area.

Sometimes, however, we more-or-less descriptivist pronchics* still get unhappy. At Random House, we put in the nucular pron because Carter said it (referencing The President's Speech theory), and originally were going to put a pronunciation modifier along with it: "nookleear, often nookular" to be really read as, "and entirely too often".

At first I thought they were time-travelers! They're talking about President Carter, because this is from 1995!

*pronunciation
*pronunciation chicks? Don't Google this: "pron" has come to be a replacement for "porn"
*American Heritage Dictionary

That is interesting, although the "febyooery" pronunciation is easily explained as an analogical extension of "January," where I'm not aware of any equivalent for "nuclear."

[Whistler]

Dr. Baker-Smemoe at BYU even has been doing studies on the speech patterns of Mormons and Non-Mormons in Utah and, guess what! They talk differently!

fascinating!