1. It causes the communicatee to do an unnecessary amount of cognitive work to get what you, the communicator, mean.*
2. It induces the communicatee to make judgments about your character/identity/socioeconomic status/intelligence/etc. that are either inaccurate or undesirable.
2. It induces the communicatee to make judgments about your character/identity/socioeconomic status/intelligence/etc. that are either inaccurate or undesirable.
Please notice that not included here is anything about conforming to spelling, definitional, etymological, or grammatical standards found in dictionaries or usage manuals. The point is that there is no objective “rightness” or “goodness” that can be prescribed by books or manuals, but I submit that when the authors write these books or manuals they are generally (and perhaps unconsciously) appealing to the ideas in the two bullets above to make their very biased prescriptions.
This is a dead giveaway for my nerdiness, but I am currently plowing through David Foster Wallace’s 60-book-page essay “Authority and American Usage,” which is all about how scientific objectivism and postmodern relativism have seeped into the modern linguistic psyche (“that’s, like, just your usage, man”) but how this modern linguistic philosophy is itself just another one of the inevitable political ideologies that are employed in order to create these damn manuals. Crude summary, obviously, but hoo boy is this fascinating stuff for a language nerd.
I’m going to quote a couple of passages that led me to the two-bullet conclusion above. The first relates more to the first bullet (cognitive work) but melts into the second (signaling) toward the end:
A listener can usually figure out what I really mean when I misuse infer for imply or say indicate for say, too. But many of these solecisms – or even just clunky redundancies like “The door was rectangular in shape” – require at least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort, a kind of rapid sift-and-discard process, before the recipient gets it. Extra work. It’s debatable just how much extra work, but it seems indisputable that we put some extra interpretive burden on the recipient when we fail to honor certain conventions. W/r/t confusing clauses like the above, it simply seems more “considerate” to follow the rules of correct English…just as it’s more “considerate” to de-slob your home before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date. Not just more considerate but more respectful somehow – both of your listener/reader and of what you’re trying to get across. As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English “makes a statement” or “sends a message” – even though these statements/messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you’re trying to communicate.
He then expands on the fashion point by using the analogy of males wearing skirts.
If you, the reader, are a US male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. … Why? Well, because in modern America any male who comes to work or school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a total geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. … Similarly, when I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional context (i.e., the verbal information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It’s a function of the fact that there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing.
The other passage I am going to quote makes a point pretty similar to the skirt analogy but I want to quote it because it is DFW at his best. It is an ingenious way of demonstrating the signaling inherent in language by observing what happens to kids who use language “correctly,” i.e., use it the way usage manuals prescribe:
A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in Standard Written English (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you’ve seen them – these are the sorts of six-to-twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to shout “How incalculably dreadful!” The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don’t see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable.
Teachers who do this are dumb. The truth is that his peers’ punishment of the SNOOTlet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT – in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn.
And his Language Arts teacher – whose own Elementary Education training prizes “linguistic facility” as one of the “social skills” that ensure children’s “developmentally appropriate peer rapport,” but who does not or cannot consider the possibility that linguistic facility might involve more than lapidary SWE – is unable to see that her beloved SNOOTlet is actually deficient in Language Arts.
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*Note that sometimes using language that causes the listener/reader to do an unnecessary amount of cognitive work demonstrates considerable linguistic skill. See, for example, just about everything said by lawyers and politicians. While I’d be comfortable calling these “skillful” uses of language, “good” is something else. It’d be more accurate to say they are abusing language skillfully. And even in more artistic cases where, for example, a poet intentionally uses obtuse language, I’m still not going to call that “good” unless maybe the only purpose of the poetry is to sound a certain way rather than to communicate anything.
