Language is fine; people are the problem
David Bentley Hart has returned to the issues over which he and I disagreed a couple of weeks ago to clarify a couple of points about his views on language.
The first: “My column was just an elaborate flippancy, but it did express certain convictions regarding language that I truly hold. …” I believe that that is exactly what Arrant Pedantry and I understood him to be saying. It is gratifying to know that we were in agreement after all.
Dr. Hart then contrasts the viewpoint of the prescriptivist and the descriptivist: “The prescriptivist believes clarity, precision, subtlety, nuance, and poetic richness need to be defended against the leveling drabness of mass culture; the describer believes words are primarily vehicles of communicative intention, whose ‘proper’ connotations are communally determined. The one finds authority in the aristocratic and long-attested, the other finds it in the demotic and current. The one sees language as a precious cultural inheritance, the other sees it as the commonest social coin. The one worries about the continuity of literature, traditions, and the consensus of the learned; the other consults newspapers, daily transactions, and the consent of the people.”
I think that Dr. Hart is spot on in his description of the hard-core prescriptivist, because Those People, Queen’s English Society pretenders and the like, talk about themselves as an embattled aristocracy attempting to keep the fabric of the language from being spattered by the rabble.
But loath as I am to suggest that an eminent theologian and scholar of Orthodox Christianity might be given to loading the dice, his portrait of the descriptivist doesn’t match any of the descriptivists I’ve met. Imagine the response, for example, if you were to describe Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum’s prose as drab and demotic. Or to suggest that Ben Zimmer’s lively accounts of the language are “the commonest social coin.”
It might be well to keep in mind that the demotic is where new things bubble up in language, many of which come in time to be adopted by the aristocracy, which otherwise grows a little inbred and attenuated.
But really, the jaw-dropping part of this latest essay comes with his insistence that the “analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean. Hence, ‘prescriptivism,’ however hopeless it is, has a rational and moral worth that ‘descriptivism’ lacks.”
A specific example of where this preposterous attitude leads? Transpire “does not mean ‘occur,’ no matter how many persons use it that way.”
Yes. His own words, directly transcribed.
It is neither rational nor moral to suggest that words have some—let me risk lifting a word from Dr. Hart’s field—ousia or Platonic essence. Words mean only what people choose them to mean. That is precisely why nice no longer means “lewd.” Transpire came to mean something in English beyond its roots in Latin, from “giving off breath or vapor” to “coming to light.” And it is increasingly in use meaning “occur.” Over time, the vulgar, who created English in the first place, have their way.
But let’s keep our heads. These transformations do not mean that Dr. Hart and his fellow patricians are at risk of being carried off in a tumbril, or should be.
What it does mean is that there is a place—even at those dreadful demotic newspapers—for reasonable prescriptivists who take some trouble to understand what linguists are actually saying and who attempt to make informed judgments about which distinctions are worth preserving and which are decaying into shibboleths.