Posts by Gareth Erskine-Jones

Suprise at spelling snafu sanctions

final words....

>It's not a lack of intelligence it suggests to me (although it sets me up to find you a >bit dim, and I need convincing you're not) so much as indolence. It's... slovenly.

Ah, the good old, laziness argument. Most commonly employed against people who use glottal stops in certain words (e.g. water), or who say "t'cat" instead of "the cat". This can only be justly considered lazy if you make the assumption that the person is either trying to speak RP, but not trying hard enough, or if you assume that everyone ought to speak RP, and the only reason they're not is because of laziness or some other moral failure. Complete rubbish, and the whole argument assumes that there ought to be a standard way of speaking or writing that any deviation is bad. If that were the case, then we are truly privileged - standard written english must be perfect, (unlike the english of the past, along with all other languages which has changed continuously thoughout its history).

>although it sets me up to find you a bit dim, and I need convincing you're not

If you're happy to judge people like that, then so be it. Personally, I make a particular effort not to do so - because I once met someone with a very strong regional accent (dialect really), and, yes, unconsciously assumed she wasn't very bright. I was very much mistaken - and that was my failing, not hers.

The really interesting aspect of your post though is that you don't mention any real benefits of standardisation - you simply state that you judge people based on the way they use language. This is exactly my point - by and large, a misplaced apostrophe doesn't cause confusion, it causes you to make a judgement about someone. It's a class issue and a prejudicial issue - we live in a country where standardised speech and writting were propogated though certain educational establishments, and the main use of subtle grammatical rules is to try to assess a person's educational background.

>It's a bit much to suggest that a subconscious assessment of someone's >intellectual ability based on their use of language is akin to racism.

I beg to differ. I didn't mean active racism, I meant the tendency to make judgements about people based on completely unsuitable criteria. You suggest that because you tend to think someone is dim because of the way they speak, they should change to accommodate your prejudice. I suggest that you work on eliminating that prejudice.

>You are right that small variations aren't going to confuse people, but if you >leave it then they get worse.

Says who? Is english worse now than it was five hundred years ago? There are many long term trends in the development of languages (loss of inflection in english for example - something which has occurred in many other languages too). This doesn't appear to have been accompanied by a reduction in the expressiveness of the language, or an increase in confusion. Some of the changes occuring at the moment are quite interesting and appear to be for the better. Very few people get upset by split infinitives these days, and they seem to differ slightly in meaning from the "standard" form. The traditional rules for apostrophe use are pretty arbitary and rarely useful, while the much deplored use of an apostrophe to separate a pluralising "s" from a capitalised abbreviation does carry some meaning. The loss of many diacritical marks (the circumflex in words like "role"), the cedilla in words like facade is really no loss at all. Unless of course seeing these words naked as it were, confuses the hell out of you.

>Besides, you have forgotten my other point that people worldwide speak English, >what may be idiomatic and easily understood by us may be very confusing to >someone from a very different cultural background speaking English as a >second language

I'm not sure how this supports your argument at all. The other english speaking nations of the world have their own distinctive accents, dialects, grammars and vocabularies. This doesn't seem to cause any major problems, and suggests that insisting that there is only one true way to speak and write english is a bit of a waste of time.

speak for yourself

>if you struggle to understand a person you will always have a poor opinion of their >intelligence.

Well, you might, but I don't. I struggle with Chaucer, and have problems understanding some of the regional accents in the UK, but I don't make judgements about intelligence on that basis - at least, not consciously.

As you say, it's sometimes an unconscious judgement, but the solution to that is to attempt to overcome the prejudice, not to try to change the other person so that your prejudices don't kick in. Some think that people with different coloured skin are less intelligent - again, the solution isn't to change the colour of their skin, but to work at removing your prejudice.

Once again though, you are confusing two things - you are suggesting that the use of non-standard spelling and grammar is strongly correlated with incomprehensibility. It is not. If someone spells "grammar" as "grammer", as one poster did, most people will not struggle to understand them. If a student hands in a paper which cannot be understood, then that is a problem, if they hand in a paper which is perfectly comprehensible, but which contains the occasional misplaced apostrophe, the only problem (unless they are being testing on apostrophe placement), is prejudice.

Someone else mentioned Lynne Truss. I don't have her book to hand, but I have read it. She's quite inconsistent. She decries the horrendous changes that are occurring in the written language, occasionally because they cause confusion, but mostly because they are just non-standard (e.g. "CD's"). She then goes on to speak about changes that have occurred in the recent past (the dropping of periods after abbreviations is given as an example I think). It appears that her view is that changes in written english are acceptable if they occurred in the past, but that if they are happening now, then they are to be abhorred.

I hate to say it, but I think a lot of people's views on this matter are influenced by a fairly narrow exposure to language and linguistics. The fact that our writting is primarily phonetic leads to the misconception that it's supposed to be a faithful representation of the spoken language, and silly phrases like "knife begins with a silent 'k'" demonstrate this misconception. People whose written languages differ much more from their spoken language don't suffer from these misconceptions so much. Nor do people who have studied a particular language as it evolved over a long period of time (e.g. akkadian, which was used for at least two thousand years). The idea that it's not possible to communicate clearly without everyone adhering to a fixed standardised written form is clearly untrue - it's been done for a very long time indeed.

you prove my point perfectly

If the paper is incomprehensible - then there is a problem. However as I said, it's quite possible for someone to use non-standard spelling or grammar, without the paper being incomprehensible. For example, I understood your point perfectly well, despite the fact that you used a non-standard spelling for the word "grammar".

Why we should listen to criminology lecturer about spelling...

...because he appears to understand language better than most of the people commenting here. Spoken language changes - words fall into disuse, change in meaning, new words are coined. The written language (which people often mistakenly think is a rendering of the spoken language in a different medium) also changes.

Descriptive grammar is the legitimate study of language as it is actually written or spoken. It's a kind of science.

Prescriptive grammar, when people are told that the way they express themselves is incorrect, is not a science, it's a system for enforcing class structures - the "correct" way to express something is to express it in the way that the dominant class in society would do it. It's extremely common to judge people's intelligence by the degree to which they adhere to standad grammar - despite this being an appallingly poor criterion.

The lecturer is suggesting that rather than concentrating on the content of the papers he marks, he is forced to waste effort imposing a particular grammar on his students.

Some people here have commented that it's important that students express themselves clearly - and so standard (meaning dominant) spelling should be enforced. This confuses two issues; it's possible to write something that's very hard to understand using standard spelling and grammar. It's also possible to write something perfectly clear while not using these standards.

There's another important educational issue here - substantial effort is being put into teaching people to conform, simply because we're prejudiced against those who do not. That effort could be better used elsewhere. Another example of this is the teaching of children to write. They need to learn this, but their facility for written language is present long before they possess the motor skills to write with a pen or pencil. My children now write very well, but at a time when they were still struggling to hold a pencil properly and taking an age to write a sentence, I put them in front of a keyboard and found that their literacy skills were actually much better than they seemed - and yet the school insists on teaching penmanship first, literacy afterwards.