Tuesday, April 13, 2010
I try not to be a killjoy linguistic purist. As regular readers can probably tell, I usually judge word choice based on effectiveness, rather than 'correctness.' (I don't always get it right, but that's to be expected.) That's why I don't mind phrases like "an idea of such staggering wrongitude," since 'wrongitude' makes intuitive sense. (So does "a steaming pile of wrong," for that matter.) I'll admit getting annoyed at people who are just a little too enthusiastic about catching prepositions at the end of sentences, or who hold the injunction against splitting infinitives somewhere above "thou shalt not kill."
But there are limits. And wifi as a verb is just a steaming pile of wrong.
In the 90's, I occasionally heard someone use "calendar" as a verb, as in "I'll calendar that appointment." It always made me want to poke them with a sharp stick. I couldn't figure out what "calendar" accomplished that "schedule" didn't. Somehow, I don't have the same response to "google" as a verb, probably because there's no obvious, easy substitute. "I'll look it up online" is kinda clunky, and "I'll search for it" is misleading. "Google" also didn't have a common meaning independent of this usage. It referred to a seldom-used number, and occasionally it would become a modifier ("googly eyes"), but prior to the search engine I don't recall using either much. "Calendar," by contrast, was a perfectly ordinary noun.
Back then, I also heard students use "sex" as a verb, as in "they were drinking and sexing all weekend." It got the point across, I guess, but it never quite sounded right to me.
Admittedly, I've committed my share of crimes against verbs. I've used "Kubler-Ross" as a verb, as in "the department is still Kubler-Rossing outcomes assessment, but it'll get there." (Most of them are at the "bargaining" stage.) I thought of it as a species of gallows humor, but if someone were to wince, I couldn't argue the point. I also have a guilty fondness for the "so-with-a-dropped-predicate" structure made popular by Jennifer Aniston. ("I am so not going to do that.") Again, no argument with those who take offense; it's just useful for indicating where a metaphor would go if you could actually think of one.
I'm not claiming perfection here. If I were, I wouldn't have used "kinda" a few paragraphs ago. But even acknowledging the need for flexibility, some words just clang.
Technology can lend itself to some awkward constructions, just because it moves faster than the language. A few years ago, there was no need for a verb that meant "to install a wireless internet connection." Now, apparently, there is. "Text" became a verb not because of post-structuralism, but because of cell phones. I've made my peace with "texting" as a verb, just because I can't come up with a more elegant substitute. The meaning is specific, and I haven't found anything else that quite captures it. "Tweet" still strikes me as an inelegant term for posting on Twitter, but since "twit" is so much worse, I deal with it.
Wise and worldly readers, has anything clanged for you lately? I don't know if we can stop any of it, but just getting it out there can be weirdly therapeutic.
My current peeve is with the word "fail" used instead of "failure" though I am now informed that the meanings are slightly different...
And I think no dictionary quite defines the phrase "epic fail" as this picture.
Metric is a adjective and not a substitute for measurement or criterion.
Not every neologism that pushes our buttons is necessarily decline - that is the history of modernism right? Can't quite see the fuss with this one?
In this case, you're talking about a fascinating feature of English. I'm a French-speaker. In my mind, this feature of English, among many others, may contribute to the vitality of your language to such a degree that it helps it being so dominant in different parts of the world. Conversely, French language ideology precludes this type of innovation and I think it may play a part in the losses suffered by my native language in the past little while.
You can resist the lure of language purism. It's just a question of maintaining the distance between your personal reactions (based on your enculturation) and what you tell others. Otherwise, a judgmental mode may set in and it might not be beneficial to anyone.
Responding to enkerli: prescriptivism is of course a methodological flaw for the linguist, which is why it's flogged out of LING 101 students. A truly descriptivist (socio)linguist would recognize, though, that attitudes of language purism do play a meaningful role in language: they stabilize the language within a particular discourse community (e.g. academia). Language change isn't something to value or denigrate: it just happens. (That's the whole point of the linguist's anti-prescriptivist attitude.)
As far as I can tell, DD's post isn't penalizing anybody for their individual language use. He's just expressing aesthetic distaste for certain turns of phrase that are alien to his idiolect... Surely that's an experience we can all relate to?
(On another topic: "metric" does have a well-defined meaning in mathematical contexts, which might be where Pete's peeve is coming from.)
I have to admit, I take some joy in throwing out bits of l33tspeak or lolspeak lingo in my conversation, but only playfully. I'll even do it in class to wake up the students. Last night, I read a student paper that actually used the phrase "as u can see".
You're not Prince, dear student. Write the whole damned word or get your spell-check to fix these chatspeak tidbits in your end-of-term research paper!
For example, "email" as a verb used to make me cringe, but not it seems utterly acceptable.
This may be a link to the Clark & Clark paper, which is on JSTOR in any event: http://www.jstor.org/stable/412745?cookieSet=1
If only we were able to accept that diversity of language codes is a richness and that, though it's completely inappropriate to use IMspeak in formal writing, nobody has the authority to dictate what people should say in informal speech (including broad meetings). The situations we're describing are very close to Ferguson's view of diglossia with lots of input from Labov's approach to linguistic variation. More than two "generations" later, we're still not letting it go.
Ah, well... I'll do it, then.
Verbing weirds language.
I also have a serious pet peeve of "that" when it should be "who." Especially from people who write for a living...goodness.
"she texted her friend" et al, without the benefit of a built-in grammatical partical that makes a noun into a verb, though we have the gerund to make verbs into nouns.
I used to raise rabbits, and this sentence created an image of drunk college students turning some poor rabbit on its back and repeatedly poking its genital area in order to determine its sex. (This is, in my mind, what "sexing" as a verb implies.) As amusing as it is, I still feel sorry for the poor (imaginary) rabbit.
One usage rule that stuck in my head from HS English is a shirt was "hung", but an executed prisoner was "hanged." I have never been in a situation, however, where pointing out the misuse would be appropriate, so it has become something of an itch I cannot scratch.
"a shirt was "hung", but an executed prisoner was "hanged." "
Haha, I just noticed this recently in the song The Highwayman - "The bastards hung me in the spring of '25/but I am still alive" - the song is based on a poem, I believe, though I did not check the source.
Wi Fi in and of itself is relatively new and when you think about it only a bit--somewhat nonsensical. It's a play on the *hi fi" that us old farts used to listen to which was short for "High Fidelity." In my mind (small though it may be) allowing for a relatively new word to so rapidly emerge, and then extend into verb form, shouldn't be a surprise.
The second point: Google was a noun first, in this specific case. Google is the name of the company (and the website). Now that you have me thinking about it, perhaps Google's success isn't just limited to their powerful algorithm but also the ease with which it could be verbed. I mean, "I will Alta-Vista that..." just doesn't have the same fluidity.