John Petrie’s LifeBlag

Because they are incapable of wanting anything.

Earlier I remarked that Geoffrey Pullum, Ph.D., professional linguist, ardent descriptivist, and language blagger extraordinaire surely didn’t really think this but wrote it in Language Log posts for rhetorical effect: that languages want to change and love ambiguity and show no interest in avoiding polysemy or ambiguity. Perhaps he really does, without the purpose of irony, cuteness, rhetorical effect, or simple convenience/time-saving in informal blag posts, anthropomorphose languages to such a great extent. We’ve all heard about real-life and fictional animal researchers becoming attached to their research subjects the way they would a pet or loved one, artistic creators feeling more love and devotion to their creations than to real people, entrepreneurs exhibiting more devotion to their businesses than their families, car or boat lovers thinking of their cars or boats almost as people, etc. I guess some linguists can become so immersed in and attached to the subject of their life’s work that they ascribe to it human qualities that it doesn’t deserve.

Geoffrey Pullum has repeatedly, over and over and over again, written that languages love ambiguous meanings and show no interest in avoiding ambiguity or polysemy. No, of course they don’t, because they are abstract things, basically concepts, that are incapable of thought or emotion. People, on the other hand, very obviously are interested in avoiding ambiguity. At least, some of us are. I doubt very many people, even those dreaded prescriptivists whom Dr. Pullum basically makes into a caricature of intolerant, unthinking, dogmatic unreasonableness, which in itself makes me wary of intellectually associating myself too closely with descriptivists of his type, care too much about the polysemy that is so typical of short, one-syllable words that we’ve inherited from ages past. But I find myself sympathetic to prescriptivists, if that’s what it makes them (me), who object to a rarer word with an established meaning acquiring a new one that it doesn’t need and doesn’t help anyone communicate.

The point of those posts by Dr. Pullum was to point out that polysemy does not mean ambiguity and thereby prove that prescriptivists are wrong in wanting words to maintain constant meanings, or even in believing that they can.

I would say the archetypal ongoing definition shift that divides descriptivists from prescriptivists is the adjective “disinterested”. It means impartial or not having a stake in either side. In contrast, “uninterested” means bored or not engaged. I don’t know if it’s descriptivist, prescriptivist, or neither to note that “impartial” is basically a synonym of “disinterested”, so do we really need the latter at all?, and that it is kind of stupid to have two negation-of-”interested” words mean different things. Then again, the word “interest” means different things, so I have no problem with “disinterested” and “uninterested” meaning different things. The sentences, “I’m not interested in that,” and, “I don’t have an interest in that,” can have distinct meanings from each other—the first would mean “uninterested”, and the second would typically (or at least occasionally) mean “disinterested”. Ah, but “interested” isn’t the same word as “interest”; maybe that influenced the meanings of the sentences more than just the polysemy did. How about, “I have no interest in that,” vs., “I don’t have an interest in that”? Phrased and juxtaposed thusly, more ambiguity certainly seems to creep in. Normally, when we use “interest” to mean stake in a matter, we use “matter” or other contextual clues to clarify our meaning (“I don’t have an interest in that matter”).

The “interest” examples provide yet more support for my point that in contrast to languages, people are quite obviously interested in avoiding ambiguity and avoiding problems caused by polysemy. For example, if we wanted to write a sentence with a structure like one of those in the previous paragraph but were worried about the ambiguity of the word “interest” (meaning fascination/attraction/intrigue vs. stake/bias/potential benefit or loss), we would use a different word. This is because we are interested in avoiding ambiguity and the problems that polysemy causes. The languages we’ve inherited and were able to evolve on our own have plenty of polysemy, occasional ambiguity, and also plenty of ways to avoid both, so we can further influence our language through usage to enable as much precision, clarity, and anti-ambiguity as possible.

One way to achieve this in the “interest(ed)” examples is to choose a different (coincidentally, also polysemic) word that could, despite its polysemy, have only one meaning in the sentence at hand: “I have no stake in the matter,” or, “I don’t have a stake in the matter.” Or, you know, something completely different but still constructed in the same way: the colloquial, “I don’t have a horse in that race.” Another way to achieve clarity in a short sentence like that is to use a word with a specific meaning for this purpose, “disinterested”. We wouldn’t be compelled by Language to choose the word it wants us to use and has devised for this specific purpose; we ourselves would choose a different word, possibly the polysemic “stake”, which people themselves have come to use for certain meanings because of the benefit of doing so, not caring whether it were polysemic or what it meant in other, irrelevant contexts.

On this point I both agree and disagree with Dr. Pullum: polysemy doesn’t (necessarily) cause ambiguity, certainly not enough to paralyze our use of language, but at the same time, we are not slaves to a disconnected, extra-societal, self-evolving Language that dictates what words mean and how they must be used. We have words with multiple meanings or one meaning because of how our ancestors used them, and we can continue to influence our usage of our language by conscious choice to achieve or at least maintain as much precision and clarity as is reasonable. What is reasonable can be debated extensively but also largely agreed upon, by either the linguistics community specifically or by society at large, and can include the maintenance of a word’s definition when it seems beneficial to do so and, especially, when it is obviously not necessary and not helpful for its meaning to change.

Language shows no interest in having “disinterested” and “uninterested” mean the same thing or different things or doing anything else. People, on the other hand—at least some people—seem to have an interest in keeping both “disinterested” and “uninterested” at one meaning each. Descriptivists are quick to remind us that “disinterested” used to mean what “uninterested” means today. This either occurred because the abstract concept of Language wanted and willed its meaning to change, or it happened because people came up with two different, non-overlapping meanings for these two words, which became standard and popular because it was helpful. Maybe it was the latter, and maybe people can choose, by way of usage, to keep it that way. Maybe it’s worth considering that people who use “disinterested” incorrectly are only doing so out of ignorance of its definition or a simple lapse of prefix distinction, not because Language wants oh-so-badly for it be polysemic, and that we could actually influence usage in a good way by simply reminding people of its definition while sparing ourselves half of the effort we expend arguing over whether this polysemic shift is a good, bad, or completely neutral thing.

Language Log commenter Jeff Rembetikoff said,

I don’t think the more reasonable breeds of prescriptivists object to each and every word with multiple meanings. Instead, they object to a rarer word losing a distinction between it and a more common word due to perceived sloppiness. Their frequent objections to certain uses of, for example, collide and comprise seemed reasonable enough to have influenced my own usage.

I agree. I don’t want words to have a certain, static meaning per se; rather, I want their meanings and distinctions to be clear and precise, and I want people separated by time and space to mean the same thing when they write, say, hear, and read the same words. Ardent descriptivists, in contrast, seem to consider any change a good and desirable thing per se because it’s what language does and is therefore by definition good. They spend hours and hours and millions of words defending their complete lack of a position, which seems to border on pointless, to me, except in such cases as people’s communication or understanding is impaired by undue prescriptivism or other strictness. I don’t really care about the polysemic words that we have, despite their meanings being broad and ambiguous, because the phrases and sentences they are used in are clear, unambiguous, and easily distinguishable from their other uses.

Going back to Dr. Pullum’s examples of completely unambiguous, unconfusing polysemy, I was particularly interested in his example “see”. Here are the definitions he lists for “see”, which exclude the original vision-related one:
1. understanding: I see what you’re saying.
2. judging: I see honesty as the fundamental prerequisite.
3. experiencing: Our business saw some hard times last year.
4. finding out: I’ll see whether he’s available.
5. dating: I heard that she’s seeing someone.
6. consulting: You need to see a doctor.
7. visiting: I’d be go and see my aunt for a while.
8. ensuring: I’ll see that this is done immediately.
9. escorting: Let me see you to your car.
10. sending away: I’ll come to the airport and see you off.

The thing that struck me about all of these uses is that in my world of scientific writing and editing, and possibly in the primary literature of most academic fields, every single one of these uses of the word “see” would be inappropriate. We would never use “see” to convey any one of these meanings (maaaayyyybe “see a physician”). Using “see” to mean any of those things in a biological or medical paper would be imprecise and inexact because we have better words with more specific, specialized meanings that would more precisely convey the meaning of the sentence. In everyday speech, such pomposity wouldn’t be necessary, but in higher-level writing, it’s often beneficial and even necessary, my objections to bombasticness in general notwithstanding. In the case of “see” as used with any of the meanings listed above, I would consider a replacement necessary, for clarity and precision. The reason “see” would be inappropriate in primary literature is not because Language wants and compels us to write differently for different situations, nor would it be (only) because scientists and scientific editors are bad writers who conflate “more syllables” with “better writing”. We would use more specific words because we want to and we see the benefits of doing so.

I see the benefit of keeping many words’ meanings distinct and constant, the best example of which is “disinterested” vs. “uninterested”. Many more I don’t care about. I think it’s reasonable to agree with me on any or all of them (if I ever compile a list, I’ll let you know), and it doesn’t make me ignorant, intolerant, pompous, unrealistic, or prescriptivist to advocate lexicographical constancy for some words when there are clear reasons to do so and unclear benefits of change.

My desire is not to avoid polysemy or change per se, but rather to promote things that make sense and discourage things that don’t. All of those different uses of “set”, “draft/draught”, “charge”, and “put down” make sense and don’t cause ambiguity, so there is no problem with them. Advocating the use of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested” probably doesn’t cause much lack of clarity, either, but it’s stupid, so I oppose it. It’s stupid because it already means something else and there is already a word that means “uninterested”. It’s not a short, simple, common word with lots of everyday uses, especially uses that are distinguished in prepositional and adverbial clauses. It’s a long, uncommon adjective whose meaning it makes more sense to preserve, so I advocate its preservation and constancy. This position is simple, beneficial, common-sensical, and very nearly unobjectionable, as far as I can tell.

In the linguistics blagosphere last week, prescriptivists got all indignant because some British company I’d never heard of, Waterstone’s, dropped the apostrophe from its name, and descriptivists got all agitated at the prescriptivists for making undue proclamations about correctness, rules, and history.

Well, I don’t really care about a company changing its name, because it’s a trademark and it’s their prerogative to make a change for marketing and advertising purposes. The descriptivists are obviously right that it’s not so much a grammatical issue as it is a marketing one. That said, I do think it’s a little stupid for a company to, (1) change its name from what it’s always been; (2) change it to something that, regardless of the history or the future, does not currently express a possessive, which was the whole purpose of the letter s in its name in the first place, so to the extent that people in and out of the Waterstones company want it to express a possessive concept, it decidedly does not; and, (3) make a change that does nothing to prevent confusion, because no one is going to type www.waterstone’s.com in their browser’s address bar and be confused when its web page doesn’t load. People know to leave out the apostrophe when typing URLs.

The Waterstones powers that be might not care or intend for the new name to express a possessive. They do assert that the name change was motivated—or perhaps rationalized post facto—by the “altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.” Either way, I think Waterstones’ dropping of the apostrophe is about as unnecessary, silly, and possibly unwise as Barnes & Noble would be to drop the ampersand from its name because it can’t be part of a URL or file name. (I will say, however, that now that Waterstones’ trade name lacks an apostrophe, it makes it much easier, or at least more natural-looking, to make its name into a possessive!)

But this post isn’t about Waterstones. It’s about descriptivist claims regarding the nature and purpose of language that I think are only marginally relevant to the prescriptivists’ complaints about rule breaking, incorrect punctuation, and ambiguity creation.

I am not a linguist, nor ever will be, and I would not dream of challenging any assertions about meaning, ambiguity, or linguistic history put forth by Geoffrey Pullum and Michael Rosen in recent blag posts about prescriptivists and the apostrophe. I will, however, go so far as to at least question the conclusions or implications—or lack thereof—that a completely indifferent, disinterested, historical descriptivist viewpoint entails.

A fair summary of many grammatical descriptivist vs. prescriptivist battles could be phrased thusly: Descriptivists point out that everything about language changes over time and with usage, for convenience, clarity, technology, and other reasons, especially English; in fact, the exact way we’ve gotten to our current state of usage [e.g., of the apostrophe] is by a series of changes that began in some locale or industry [e.g., typesetting], that might have been considered wrong if there had been prescriptivists around, and whose current “end” result is now considered “right” by pedantic prescriptivists today. Prescriptivists counter that people occasionally had good reasons to change how language and punctuation were used, either consciously or subconsciously, and many things have changed for the better, and they don’t have to change again; we should strive for the ideal of logic, clarity, and uniformity in language to maintain ease of communication across time and space, and if prescriptivists can point out why something is more or less clear or logical than an alternative and they can influence people’s usage, then by god, they’re going to do so.

The key point as I see it regarding the topic I’m writing about today—ambiguity, precision, and declarations of “correctness” and “rules” in language—is that language is not some amorphous, physical, animate or inanimate object that has a will or behavior of its own. People use the language and people change the language.

Dr. Pullum writes:

English could easily have a distinct letter sequence for every different meaning, using letter sequences much shorter than the present ones. It doesn’t because the language in general shows no signs of being the slightest bit interested in that.

I know he doesn’t really think it, but the insinuation that I’m refuting is there nonetheless: that language is just some extra-human, extra-societal thing that changes with a mind of its own and that we are powerless to stop. Language is not “the slightest bit interested” in perfect logical clarity or reducing ambiguity because it is not interested in anything because it cannot be. Humans, on the other hand, very obviously are interested in logic, clarity, and consistency, and the very nature of our brains, at least if Chomsky is right, is to think in words and not just pictures, movies, actions, and feelings. (Even if Chomsky’s hypothesis about the basic nature of our brains as opposed to animals’ isn’t right, it is undoubtedly true that civilized humans who grow up in a social environment do think primarily in language.) Therefore, it makes perfect sense to me that we as thinkers, doers, and language users should both consciously and subconsciously strive to create rules and affect our language to suit our myriad purposes as well as possible. The apostrophe does a decent job of expressing genitive nouns, inconsistently though it may be used in pronouns, and it’d be nice to have different symbols to represent elision and possession, but this is what we’ve inherited and everyone knows how to use it, so let’s guard against its decay and misuse.

Descriptivists would counter that prescriptivists are failing even on their own terms: if we’re supposed to strive for logic, consistency, and clarity, then that means we have to allow language to change in order to improve, and the apostrophe clearly isn’t used very consistently even now, so maintaining the status quo clearly isn’t amenable to the prescriptivists’ own ends, save for the desire for uniformity across time: the desire for our language to be similar to the English of future centuries. Well, I don’t know how many other characters are even available to introduce into orthography, and no one is going to just start using or start teaching the use of a completely different, non-standard symbol, so keeping the apostrophe just where it is is fine by me.

people who say that the ridiculous orthographic mess we have inherited is a finely tuned system for clear communication and avoidance of ambiguity are simply fools.

Well, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty clear almost all of the time. I think Dr. Pullum’s main point here is that language and orthography have not been “tuned”, and certainly not “finely”, by any wise or learned body, and certainly not for any purpose or according to any plan. I can’t argue with a professional linguist about how finely it has been tuned, but the history lessons related by him, Dr. Rosen, and other descriptivists seem to indicate that people have, in fact, tuned the language in many specific ways by tweaking their usage and following different rules over the centuries. Many of these tweaks were made consciously and intentionally for clear, verifiable reasons, with clear, logical goals, and with clear, lasting effects. Typesetters made conscious decisions for specific reasons to start using apostrophes, and English-speaking people adopted some or all of those uses because of the advantages they saw in them—clarity, consistency, or a function the apostrophe fulfilled that seemed desirable, or some combination of these. People are omitting them for a clear reason: convenience, laziness, and no real loss of clarity. (They also add them where they don’t belong for a clear reason: they are ignorant or perhaps stupid.)

The fact is that dogs, dog’s, and dogs’ are all pronounced exactly the same, so the fact that we can understand each other when we talk about dogs is as good a proof as one could expect for the proposition that there is no real danger of irresolvable confusion here.

True, but I bet few literate societies have ever talked just the way they wrote, and our writing (and understanding of written language) shouldn’t be—in fact, isn’t—limited by what our mouths can pronounce, so I think it’s a fine thing that we can distinguish on paper those three words that all sound identical when spoken. We have the ability to distinguish those three concepts clearly with a simple, tiny symbol, which many other languages don’t even have, so its use in making small distinctions like this has clear value in orthography and was seemingly introduced by real, living people who consciously decided to use it in that way. Maybe we’d be better off speaking and writing like Romance languages and saying “of the dog” or “of the dogs”, but I have a feeling those bulky phrases can create as many problems (though surely of different types) as our apostrophe does. Thanks to the apostrophe, dogs, dog’s, and dogs’ do all mean different things, which we all understand perfectly and immediately, and I think that’s worth something. That’s an accomplishment of conscious human effort combined with circumstance (as Dr. Rosen’s dogges -> dog’s explanation shows), not unknowing, detached, extra-societal linguistic evolution. I’m proud of us for reaching even this level of precision and anti-ambiguity, inadequate though our minds may be for grasping the deeper nature of the universe and insufficient though our languages may be for expressing what our distant descendants may discover about it. I’d be proud if future generations continued to improve the logic, consistency, precision, and clarity of our language, and I, for one, especially hope that English speakers of the year 2400 can understand our writing much more easily than we can understand Shakespeare’s. As a layman, I can’t see any need for English vocabulary to change very much at all (except for the invention and borrowing of new words, which don’t change the comprehensibility of current English), and I can’t see how English could be improved by any unforeseen, unprecedented, major grammatical or syntax changes, so how is anyone harmed by advocating—I’ll say it—stagnation? How would anyone be harmed by the occurrence of stagnation (except, again, the introduction of new and additional words)? Why do descriptivists get so indignant when prescriptivists recommend that something be standardized or held constant?

I think a better question than “Why do prescriptivists want this or that?” or “Why does what prescriptivists want matter?” or even “What do strict descriptivists want?” is “Do strict descriptivists want anything?” Do strict descriptivists have any opinion on any grammatical or vocabulary matter whatsoever? Do they ever take a position on anything other than how ignorant and overly restrictive prescriptivists are? What viewpoint or recommendation has any descriptivist ever put forth on an accessible web page that could be considered a specific rule or proscription that it would be wise for English speakers to follow? Is there an example of a descriptivist saying, “Yes, I think this grammatical convention is better, and we’d all be wise to follow it for clarity and uniformity,” or, “Yes, it is true that this word currently has such-and-such meaning, and it’d be a shame if the ignorant misuse of this word led to an accepted alteration in meaning”? What is the point of studying something you have no opinion about other than “anything goes”?

Or is it more accurate to classify descriptivists as linguists and other interested grammarians who agree with the prescriptivists and the conventions of the world on 95% of issues but define themselves as descriptivist (and, complementarily, their detractors as prescriptivist) by their refusal to take a side on the issues that they think we shouldn’t take sides on? Obviously, being agnostic and saying “either/or” is a position and is an opinion…but when they go so far as to say it really doesn’t matter whether the apostrophe lives or dies and it really doesn’t matter if 21st-century English sounds like a foreign language in 500 years, I think they’re going overboard in their desire to remain impartial and avoid influencing usage.

Saying that language just changes on its own and that it’s pointless for us to opine on, care about, or try to influence it seems to me like saying, “All of the continents once existed in a single land mass called Pangaea, and land masses are all constantly moving and will all crash into each other again someday, so it’s meaningless to refer to seven different continents today or to take precautions against earthquakes.” We might be powerless to stop continental drift, but we’re not powerless to influence language and usage. We use it every day, and we influence it and it influences us, so insisting on certain grammatical conventions and striving for vocabulary constancy seems preferable to descriptivist indifference.

If some people are fine with the complete elimination of the apostrophe from the English language, which would be a widespread, large-scale, major overhaul of a grammar, why not instead advocate the development of computer programs and operating systems that can tolerate more characters in URL names? Which is more impossible to achieve, and which would require more major overhauls of how we conduct our daily lives? I honestly don’t know the answer.

In a recent post about a different topic, Bill Walsh mentions some annoying vowel shifts exhibited by young-ish American females. These mainly involve changing the short e to the short u sound, so that “desk”, “test”, and “better” become “dusk”, “tust”, and “butter”, respectively. “Dad” also becomes “Dodd”. I’ve also noticed these and been annoyed by them. It’s kind of a California valley-girl accent creeping into all parts of the country in teenage girls and 20-something women, and now probably even women in their 30’s.

I tried to post a comment reporting my observation of another pair of vowel shifts that have annoyed me much more than those have, but his blag only allows posts from Google Blagger users, which I am not. (What kind of foolish isolationism is that? How many insightful comments and loyal frequent visitors has that practice precluded over the years at the blags that employ it? I’ve only ever seen it at Blagspot blags, but I know the owner has to choose to enable that restriction, so I can’t place the blame entirely on Google.)

Instead, I’ll post it to my own blag and reap the sweet, sweet internet karma it’ll bring me: The annoying vowel shift I’ve noticed that is unique to young-ish American females is pronouncing “thank you” as “think yo”. I guess the “yo” is actually more of a Minnesota/Midwestern type of “yoh”, but it’s not like it’s ever stressed or enunciated so strongly that it makes you think of Marge Gunderson. Maybe it’s just halfway between “you” and “yo”, and maybe the first word is more of a “thenk” than a “think”, but whatever it is with each individual girl, it’s annoying.

I haven’t noticed any prevalence of vowel shifts among American males, although a little bit of the valley accent certainly can be heard in some college guys’ (especially frat guys’) speech, as in “mahn” for “man”, “cuhl” for “cool”, etc. Sort of a surfer accent by guys who are trying too hard to sound casual and indifferent (or who have tried to sound casual and indifferent for so long that they no longer can tell any difference).

Maybe some nit-picky female linguists are equally as annoyed at males’ dropping of entire consonant sounds, as in “’anks” for “thanks”?