Evergreen Standards.

April 16, 2018 by 131 Comments

A TLS back-page roundup (from March 18, 2016) mentions Philip Furia and Laurie J. Patterson’s The American Song Book: The Tin Pan Alley Era and says:

“We call them ‘standards’”, say the American authors, while “the British, who love them as much as we do, call them ‘evergreens’”. Do they? We love them too, but never have we heard a standard called an evergreen.

Since there are a fair number of UK Hatters (or Hattics, as you prefer), I thought I’d check: do you?

Comments

  1. AntC says
    April 16, 2018 at 6:25 pm

    Brit here: From the Great American Song Book? I call them “standards”. Always have, ever since I discovered Jazz. So have all the Jazz cats I’ve ever known in the UK.

    “Evergreens” sounds absurdly old-fashioned. I suppose I’d understand the word if somebody was talking about ever-popular songs (like ‘Greensleeves’ or some of the music-hall favourites like ‘My Old Man’). But that’s definitely not Jazz.

  2. J.W. Brewer says
    April 16, 2018 at 6:57 pm

    It’s a new one on me but I’m not a BrEng speaker, although I do know that BrEng for “Tin Pan Alley is or at least used to be “Denmark Street.”

    Google books reveals a book by Dennis Sinott (apparently a Brit) called “Masters of Songwriting,” that says things like “Songwriters aiming for a “Standard” or “Evergreen” should pay particular attention to the words,” and uses “evergreen” in several other places as if synonymous with “standard” – but often in the combination “standard(s) or evergreen(s),” as if his readers might not understand it as a freestanding word?

    And a book by Suggs (alias Graham McPherson) contains the sentence “English composer Fred Heatherton trumped them, I feel, with his evergreen and marvelously English standard ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts’.” But that’s evergreen as an adjective in a way that’s not incomprehensible to the AmEng ear.

  3. J.W. Brewer says
    April 16, 2018 at 7:09 pm

    Who would be a British singer well-known for singing what AmEng would call “standards”? I thought of the crooner Al Bowlly (sort of like Bing Crosby, if Bing had been born in Mozambique and then killed by the Luftwaffe raid on London), but one recent bio of him (by an author I take to be a Brit) uses “standards” a few times in the AmEng sense and “evergreen” only in ways that are at best ambiguous, not unlike the Suggs’ usage I quoted above.

  4. Brett says
    April 16, 2018 at 7:14 pm

    “Evergreens” sounds absurdly old-fashioned.

    But saying “jazz cats” is hip and groovy?

  5. languagehat says
    April 16, 2018 at 8:29 pm

    Brit here: From the Great American Song Book? I call them “standards”. Always have, ever since I discovered Jazz. So have all the Jazz cats I’ve ever known in the UK.

    “Evergreens” sounds absurdly old-fashioned. I suppose I’d understand the word if somebody was talking about ever-popular songs (like ‘Greensleeves’ or some of the music-hall favourites like ‘My Old Man’). But that’s definitely not Jazz.

    Thanks! Sounds like the American authors were, unsurprisingly, wrong about British usage.

  6. zyxt says
    April 16, 2018 at 9:45 pm

    On Australian radio they are called standards.

    In Croatia: evergrin.

  7. AntC says
    April 16, 2018 at 9:57 pm

    Who would be a British singer well-known for singing what AmEng would call “standards”?

    Off the top of my head: Cleo Laine/John Dankworth. (Although they also composed and sang plenty of other stuff, esp bebop.) wp has an entry on ‘British Jazz’. Any Jazz singer must have the “standards” in their repertoire to be allowed into Ronnie Scott’s, I would have thought. (Maybe not the dixie throwbacks like George Melley, Humphrey Lyttelton’s bands.)

    But saying “jazz cats” is hip and groovy?

    😉 It was at the time I discovered Jazz/”standards”. And then I discovered Blossom Dearie: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EMB5CzzWXMQ

  8. AntC says
    April 16, 2018 at 10:09 pm

    It occurs to me that “evergreens” might also be applied to those cross-generation pop songs/ballads that get rolled out at the end of wedding parties, etc: Beatles hits; Abba hits; “Sweet Caroline”; “Amarillo”; “My Way”. They’re not called “standards”.

    Everybody can at least sing the chorus. pay particular attention to the words maybe not so much.

    I have heard some of the early Blues numbers called “standards”: Lead Belly (his wp entry uses the word)/Howlin Wolf; “Li’l Red Rooster”, for example.

  9. ajay says
    April 17, 2018 at 5:10 am

    On Australian radio they are called standards.

    But in New Zealand they call them stindids.

  10. richardelguru says
    April 17, 2018 at 6:43 am

    70-y-o Briton here (as an aside, and as a computer developer, let me mention that in hexadecimal my age is 46; and that’s sooooo much better sounding).
    I associate the term ‘Evergreens’ with the Beeb’s The Black and White Minstrel Show* or Sing Something Simple, and pretty-much nothing else.

    ____________________
    * My God! Yes, that was a thing, and I believe right through the 60’s!!!!

  11. Jen in Edinburgh says
    April 17, 2018 at 6:48 am

    Jazz standards are jazz standards, but I don’t have a native word for the kind of pop/rock songs that every covers band plays, or the kind of folk songs everyone knows a bit of.

    The OED has an entry for ‘evergreen’ as a general noun, but it’s not specifically musical – ‘A person or thing that endures from one season to the next; a person or thing of enduring freshness, success, or popularity.’
    ‘Standard’ in the musical sense is ‘A tune or song of established popularity, esp. in Jazz’.

  12. FJ says
    April 17, 2018 at 7:46 am

    To me, in Serbian, ‘džez standard’ and ‘evergrin’ are not exactly the same thing. Jen above explains the difference well.

  13. Lizok says
    April 17, 2018 at 8:47 am

    This isn’t for music but Alma Classics, a UK publisher, uses the term “evergreens” for a line of classic books. (https://almabooks.com/product-category/evergreens/)

  14. Reed James says
    April 17, 2018 at 10:19 am

    I’ve also heard them called chestnuts, though I think this word means that they are standards and they are played over and over.

  15. David Eddyshaw says
    April 17, 2018 at 11:06 am

    I’d understand “evergreen” in this sense all right, but it sounds not so much old-fashioned as absurdly precious to me.

    Glad to see an honourable mention above for “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts.” Only bit I actually enjoyed from “The Lion King” … My children plead with me not to sing it whenever the matter of that movie comes up. For some reason. De gustibus …

  16. Brett says
    April 17, 2018 at 11:26 am

    The phrase “rock standard” used to appear in the Wikipedia entry for “Forever Young.”

  17. J.W. Brewer says
    April 17, 2018 at 12:26 pm

    One can peeve about exact boundaries and the scope of each article etc but wikipedia helpfully (I’m not going to link anything here to avoid the problems of multiple-links-in-single-comment) has an article titled Pop Standards (ok, technically one titled Traditional Pop Music that that redirects to) that overlaps substantially with the Great American Songbook article but is imho usefully distinct from the Jazz Standards article. Those GAS numbers are overwhelmingly not jazz-as-such (although many were written when a bit of jazz inflection was floating around the mainstream, just as there are obvious bits of rock-music influence in virtually all mainstream pop music of the 1970’s even the stuff that’s hard to call rock-as-such), but those GAS numbers were one important source of potential material adaptable for actual jazz-as-such use. “Standard” as a jazz-jargon word is a bit ambiguous because it can either mean GAS-origin material as so adapted or can mean any composition that has become core jazz repertoire played by lots of different artists over lots of different decades, including things like e.g. St. Louis Blues or Round Midnight or Goodbye Pork Pie Hat or Watermelon Man that really don’t fit the GAS template.

    I’m not sure that there’s a conventional word for early/simple rock-music “evergreens” that every self-respecting garage band might traditionally have been expected to know (Louie Louie and Gloria and Wild Thing and Wipeout and one or two numbers each from the if-you-can-play-one-you-can-play-’em-all canons of Chuck Berry / Little Richard / Bo Diddley etc). “Standard(s)” doesn’t quite fit.

  18. languagehat says
    April 17, 2018 at 2:08 pm

    Those GAS numbers are overwhelmingly not jazz-as-such […] but […] were one important source of potential material adaptable for actual jazz-as-such use. “Standard” as a jazz-jargon word is a bit ambiguous because it can either mean GAS-origin material as so adapted or can mean any composition that has become core jazz repertoire played by lots of different artists over lots of different decades, including things like e.g. St. Louis Blues or Round Midnight or Goodbye Pork Pie Hat or Watermelon Man that really don’t fit the GAS template.

    Well put; that’s how I see it as well.

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this thread, it’s that there’s a Croatian word evergrin.

  19. maidhc says
    April 17, 2018 at 2:39 pm

    I think there’s a difference between jazz standards and Great American Songbook. GAS songs mostly come from Broadway or Hollywood, but have been adopted by jazz musicians. I think in many cases the reason is that they have interesting chord progressions that lend themselves to improvisation. But there are GAS songs that originate in jazz, such as songs recorded by people like Duke Ellington–“Sophisticated Lady” or “I’ve Got it Bad and That Ain’t Good”. And there are GAS songs that are not jazz standards, such as “Baby It’s Cold Outside” or “Singin’ in the Rain”.

    On the other hand there are jazz standards that every jazz musician would know that are not GAS songs, for example the compositions of Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis.

    The two categories overlap quite a bit but not totally.

    I’ve never heard the term “evergreen” even though I often listen to Radio 2, which seems to me where you would hear it if people actually used it. But perhaps I’m wrong about that.

  20. Hans says
    April 17, 2018 at 4:23 pm

    In Germany, Evergreen is a somewhat old-fashioned way to refer to popular songs that stayed popular for decades and that used to be part of any entertainer’s repertoire. Songs like “My Way” or “All of me”. Rock or after mid-60s Pop doesn’t qualify.

  21. Trond Engen says
    April 17, 2018 at 5:02 pm

    Same in Norway. Exactly the same. To me it’s the songs that my grandmother would hum to when they were sung on TV in the seventies. Usually performed with a hint of old-fashioned diction and in a not too jazzy arrangement.

  22. J.W. Brewer says
    April 17, 2018 at 7:06 pm

    richardelguru mentioned a BBC show I’d never heard of before titled Sing Something Simple. I believe this is a (Dutch-pressing) LP by the vocal group featured on that show titled “Eighteen Evergreens,” many of which (e.g. Home On the Range, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean) fall outside the scope of the GAS sort of standards. https://www.discogs.com/Adam-Singers-The-Sing-Something-Simple-Eighteen-Evergreens/release/4930527

  23. Jonathan Gitlin says
    April 17, 2018 at 7:20 pm

    KING.org – Seattle’s classical station, has four on-line channels; classical, symphony, second inversion (modern/experimental) and Evergreen. Evergreen is sentimental, easy to listen to, often baroque, and usually familiar. The Seattle classical community is a little pretentious and highly preoccupied with Wagner.

    Keep us the good work Languagehat – put a good crease in that fedora!

  24. Brett says
    April 17, 2018 at 10:50 pm

    The Seattle classical community is a little pretentious and highly preoccupied with Wagner.

    I’m not going to complain, since I was able to get a “Fafner and Fasolt: General Contractors” sweatshirt in Seattle.

  25. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 2:06 am

    If you can play one, you cannot play ’em all.

  26. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 2:08 am

    It is by no means sure that you can “play ’em all,” just because you can play one of ’em. At least right.

  27. mollymooly says
    April 18, 2018 at 4:55 am

    “Standard” has the same meaning for me as all for other commenters thus far.

    For me, “evergreen” is a somewhat patronising label for a song that remains popular even though the style of music that spawned it was never cool and is now historical.

    and I believe right through the 60’s!!!!

    Wiki says 1978. In my childhood I had no idea that minstrels and golliwogs were intended to caricature Africans; they were just clowns with a different makeup colour-scheme.

  28. ajay says
    April 18, 2018 at 5:30 am

    I’ve also heard them called chestnuts

    “Chestnut”, I think, is derogatory – rather like “cliche”. It’s a joke or remark that everyone has heard already, or a song that everyone’s sick of, or an argument that has long since been superseded.

  29. Hans says
    April 18, 2018 at 10:21 am

    @ ajay: As with many topics, chestnut has already been discussed at the hattery.

  30. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 3:39 pm

    “Prescriptivist” is also patronizing and derogatory.

  31. languagehat says
    April 18, 2018 at 3:55 pm

    Oh, come now. Prescriptivists prescribe how language should be used; how is that patronizing and derogatory? I’ve seen people describe themselves that way. What should one say, “brave upholder of the truth”?

  32. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 8:39 pm

    Disingenuous is a word that comes to mind.

  33. languagehat says
    April 18, 2018 at 8:48 pm

    Could you explain further? Because I really don’t see it.

  34. languagehat says
    April 18, 2018 at 8:49 pm

    When I want to be patronizing and derogatory, I say “peever.” “Prescriptivist” seems to me purely, well, descriptive.

  35. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 10:23 pm

    The whole previously non-existent dichotomy is a back-formation expressly invented in order to derogate marginalize, and stigmatize the side the inventors don’t like–in this case, prescriptivists. As are most such back-formation dichotomies (cf. “snail mail”). Claims to academic objectivity, I believe, are usually a pretense. Words have connotations. Most all of them.

    A fortiori. The tone and context of your initial response subverts your thesis. I daresay the OED would readily accept the passage as a solid citation in support of “derogatory” as a connotation commonly attaching to “prescriptivist.” “When I’m mad at prescriptivists I call them peevers”? Lexicographers tend to take note of such proximities. Not so much linguists.

  36. Y says
    April 18, 2018 at 10:35 pm

    Judging from examples in the OED at least, prescriptiv-ism, -ist was usually derogatory to begin with. Nowadays, as Hat says, it is used by the people it refers to, and has become more neutral.

    What term do you suggest for someone who says that ain’t isn’t a word, or that it is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition?

  37. Tim May says
    April 18, 2018 at 10:39 pm

    Regardless of whether it is or not, how is that relevant to anything in this comment thread?

  38. ə de vivre says
    April 18, 2018 at 10:49 pm

    I guess we could just call a spade a spade and call prescriptivists “classists,” “racists,” or “ignoramopodes.”

  39. T. I. Silar says
    April 18, 2018 at 11:37 pm

    I would call them realists.

    And a realist would not say “ain’t” ain’t a word. He would say people will think certain things of you when you use it. No matter how you “describe” it.

    And if you pronounce the “t” in often, people will think you are acting too big for your britches, trying to snow other people into thinking you are smarter than you are. Which you will be. If you pronounce the “t” in often.

    Both of which observations are true. And “descriptive.”

    I’ve seen some really impressive knowledgeable posts on this website. Not in the current responses at this particular juncture, however.

  40. Y says
    April 19, 2018 at 12:03 am

    What you’re describing is exactly what descriptivists do; specifically, sociolinguists.

    What started this conversation?

  41. languagehat says
    April 19, 2018 at 8:16 am

    And if you pronounce the “t” in often, people will think you are acting too big for your britches, trying to snow other people into thinking you are smarter than you are. Which you will be. If you pronounce the “t” in often.

    This is utterly absurd, and exactly why descriptivists (aka people who know how language works) are often patronizing to prescriptivists (who overwhelmingly don’t, as you have just demonstrated).

  42. David Eddyshaw says
    April 19, 2018 at 10:53 am

    As it happens, my impression of (at least) UK usage with this particular word is the exact opposite: Young People Today, whether posh or not, mostly pronounce the t in “often”, and the historically “correct” version without “t” is characteristic of old (and fairly upmarket) fogeys like me, and possibly the Queen. (She used to say “orphan”, but I think this pronunciation is now extinct.)

    What next with these horrid spelling pronunciations, I wonder? “Vurtyoo” instead of “varchoo”? “Univursity” instead of “univarsity”? Where will it end?

  43. languagehat says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:09 am

    Don’t confuse T. I. Silar with facts, he knows what he knows.

  44. David Eddyshaw says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:35 am

    In fairness, my data are consistent with TIS’s hypothesis, given the further assumption that either

    I (and the Queen) are not smart

    or

    I (and the Queen) are so secure in our smartness that we feel no need to advertise it by pronouncing the t in “often.”

    Patriotism naturally forbids me from entertaining the first alternative. The second, well – perhaps. I cannot speak for Her Majesty, at least on this matter. These are difficult times for the Monarchy.

  45. D.O. says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:45 am

    Who said anything about smart? The queen is simply acting too big for her britches. Or actually, too little, because she is not pronouncing “t”. Or maybe she is secretly American. Or (as you’ve mentioned and this is the last resort of prescr…realists) she is allowed to, because exception. But the rest of us should talk as we are told.

  46. Lars (the original one) says
    April 19, 2018 at 12:05 pm

    Allow me to be the devil’s advocate here, and claim my right to peeve when I want to — one’s feelings about one’s native language are sometimes beyond the reach of rational thought, and if something sounds wrong, it sounds wrong.

    Prescriptivism, on the other hand, basically maintains that a certain prestige variant of the language, curiously enough the one preferred by the people with most power in society, is in itself better than all others and deserves its position — and thus serves, by a sort of silent (reverse) proxy argument, to confirm that the people who have mastered that variant deserve their position in society, to the exclusion of others. (“But we aren’t allowed to say that in this country now, are we?”)

  47. J.W. Brewer says
    April 19, 2018 at 12:05 pm

    I’m trying to figure out how to get a prescriptivist sub-movement going that will deprecate the boobs and rubes who don’t pronounce the final -t in “acrosst.” Omitting it (because the word is conventionally spelled “across” because English orthography is weird) is probably one of those slavish spelling-pronunciation errors that shows you weren’t brought up properly, innit? (Not sure if this vintage LL discussion ever quite definitively sorted out who did and didn’t pronounce the word the correct way: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2495)

  48. languagehat says
    April 19, 2018 at 1:06 pm

    Allow me to be the devil’s advocate here, and claim my right to peeve when I want to — one’s feelings about one’s native language are sometimes beyond the reach of rational thought, and if something sounds wrong, it sounds wrong.

    Oh, we all have that inalienable right! I peeve to my wife frequently about misusages (by my standards) I encounter in print or on the radio. The point is not that we should all accept anything anybody says without question, it’s that we should realize that our sense of language, while right and proper for us, is not a universal mandate, and to chastise others in public for not following our own particular shibboleths is to be a sanctimonious fool.

  49. David Marjanović says
    April 19, 2018 at 5:40 pm

    What next with these horrid spelling pronunciations, I wonder? “Vurtyoo” instead of “varchoo”? “Univursity” instead of “univarsity”? Where will it end?

    Already there are those who pronounce issue with a loud and clear [sj].

    (…while others abbreviate it as ish even in writing.)

  50. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 7:00 pm

    This is really funny.

    I love how people who are so brilliant at things like sussing out the etymology of “oiking” turn into childlike emotionalists on this particular topos. Really. Read your own writing. Childlike. Emotional. I mean objective. And academic.

    And just btw, what “facts”? I haven’t seen any yet. Except from me.

  51. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 7:02 pm

    “Pet Peeve” is derogatory, minimalizing, peripheralizing, condescending, and patronizing.

    Oh, yeah. And objective and academic.

    And “absurd” is a technical term.

    How absurd to suggest that people will laugh at you if you pronounce the “t” in often. Even if they do.

  52. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 7:03 pm

    The Queen does not speak the Queen’s English, as anyone knows.

  53. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 7:43 pm

    Incidentally, your observation about the Queen’s pronunciation (not absurd or anything), obviates your (ideological and not objective or academic) contentions about prescriptivism. Think about it.

    Most of what has been said here, except for what I have said, is based on, what do they call them, hidebound academic paradigms, I guess. In other words, you all think alike and you cannot and will not take a minute to even understand what I am saying, but instead indulge in name-calling.

  54. David Eddyshaw says
    April 19, 2018 at 7:45 pm

    Does President Rump pronounce the “t”? That would surely settle the matter once and for all.

  55. Y says
    April 19, 2018 at 8:04 pm

    …Childlike. Emotional…
    hidebound…you all think alike…
    …indulge in name-calling.

    Like, are you for real?

  56. ə de vivre says
    April 19, 2018 at 10:00 pm

    Allow me to be the devil’s advocate here, and claim my right to peeve when I want to — one’s feelings about one’s native language are sometimes beyond the reach of rational thought, and if something sounds wrong, it sounds wrong.

    As many mental health professionals have attempted to impress on me, no one needs to be ashamed of their thoughts or feelings, no matter how troubling they are. We are however, responsible for which of those thoughts and feelings we choose to act on.

  57. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:04 pm

    Once upon a time, an academic revealed the truth about a whole lot of mysteries to me when he informed me that it is a proven fact that, whatever their IQ, the average emotional age of academics is 5.

    It is also a proven fact that 90% of the argumentation of citizens of England consists of name-calling.

  58. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:18 pm

    And what? So you think I’m stupid? Do I write stupidly? Is my syntax poor, my style ungracious, my vocabulary stunted, my diction infelicitous?

    Of course not. In fact, I write very well. As you can well see. And you are either lying or ignorant of the English language if you say I don’t.

    And if I write well, I must not be stupid then.

    Then how is it that somebody not stupid could be saying things that scan-do-lize you so?

    That professors stop learning new things the day they get their diplomas is a rumor that refuses to die.

    Maybe if you got down off your high horses I could larn you something.

    Fat chance.

  59. Bathrobe says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:20 pm

    https://tedsilar.wordpress.com cannot be found. What are you trying to put over on us, T. I. Silar?

  60. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:20 pm

    Oh, and by the way. I know what slanting is. And thank you for using it to so felicitously characterize my serious and sincere observations.

  61. T. I. Silar says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:21 pm

    What are you looking me up for? I don’t look you up.

  62. Bathrobe says
    April 19, 2018 at 11:27 pm

    “What are you looking me up for?”

    Don’t be so defensive. I just want to find what other gems of wisdom you might have to share with the world.

    What is your emotional age, again?

  63. Bathrobe says
    April 20, 2018 at 12:08 am

    “And a realist would not say “ain’t” ain’t a word. He would say people will think certain things of you when you use it. No matter how you “describe” it.”

    I agree with this. This is actually descriptive linguistics.

    But that is not how a presciptivist would describe it. And that is the problem with “prescriptivism”, whether you regard that term as pejorative or neutral.

    Descriptivism includes prescriptivism within its embrace. The descriptivist notes what prescriptivists say. The descriptivist says that “ain’t” is disapproved of by many speakers, although it is commonly used in some varieties and contexts (such as the lyrics of popular music). That is an objective description of the situation.

    But only the prescriptivist would say that it is just “wrong”, full stop. Only the prescriptivist would attempt to make out that disapproved usages are wrong (morally, intellectually, logically, objectively wrong) in any circumstances, speech or writing, boudoir or public rostrum. That is bullshit and descriptivists are right for calling people out on such attitudes.

  64. D.O. says
    April 20, 2018 at 1:01 am

    The link works for me.

    I am almost sure we are not dealing with Poe’s law here, but the logical chain:
    I am writing in standard dialect well -> I am smart -> what I say is true
    is almost too good to be real.

  65. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 1:11 am

    Ah. But then I also say that if you have never seen a person get all hoity-toity and simultaneously pronounce the “t” in often, then you are probably not a native speaker, or else surpassing unobservant.

    I not only am realistic about how people think of people speaking (as with my thoughts on that old evergreen chestnut, “ain’t”). I am realistic about how people speaking think about themselves.

    What I am getting at is that a lot of “language,” whatever that is (that thing I supposedly don’t know how it “works”), is performative (and I don’t mean the technical meaning of that term). People say words, not as much to impart information, as to perform, to show us the cut of their jib, the content of their character, just how wise and wonderful and excellent at pronunciation they are.

    Example 2: I wouldn’t say people who pronounce good old English words like homage and niche and soprano all frenchy-like are wrong. I would say they are risible. Ludicrous. Ab-frogging-surd.

    I am obviously a very bad guy.

    At least you give a respectful answer rather than attempting and failing at lame jokes about the Queen and Trump.

    And just incidentally, I think your characterization of “prescriptivists” is just wrong, period (not that other thing, what ever that is.)

    No, in all seriousness what I really mean is that it is dismissive, un-insightful, un-helpful, marginalizing, peripheralizing, did I say dismissive? Oh, I know the word I want. Straw Man. Simplified Stereotype. Nobody is like that. You may remember this all started with me observing that “prescriptivist” is a pejorative. An epithet. An insult. Not some objective description–ah–of reality. Nobody is like your Straw Man. Real realists tend to be as eminently complex as self-defined descriptivists. Descriptivism, you know, I am convinced, has all sorts of ideological, non-objective, non-scientific or -statistical, or even -logical paraphernalia hanging all about it (much as it would like to sweep all of it under the rug). Descriptivism does not exist in some kind of universal absolute Platonic vacuum, merely “describing” reality the way God’s hand moves over the waters. It is acquainted with the dust and the dusk and the detritus and the same gutters we all crawl, and subject to their constraints and vicissitudes.

    I’m on a roll here, so let me finish by positing that descriptivism is a prescription.

    I know. I hate two-bit deconstruction as much as the next guy. Especially when it’s true.

    But let’s qualify that. Descriptivists have as many prescriptions as prescriptivists. Just different ones.

  66. SFReader says
    April 20, 2018 at 1:14 am

    Deconstructivist performatism of prescriptivists is peripheralizing.

  67. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 1:16 am

    More slanting from DO. Do you know what slanting means?

    I did not in the least say what you said I said. And you are not a very good reader if you honestly think I did.

    OK. And I say you said your mother wears army boots. Now you didn’t say that. But I say you did. In a short little post. Making me right. Just like you.

    You imply you don’t understand what I am getting at. Yes, in the modern era, it is a well-known phenomenon that people see everything flatly. They cannot see connotation, association, irony, etc. It is very obvious what I am getting at and how I am using and ordering my connotations, associations, ironies. I prescribe reading class. That is not ironic.

    My tone? You don’t like my tone? Listen to your own.

    Guy makes fun of good writing with bad writing. Ironic.

  68. Lars (the original one) says
    April 20, 2018 at 2:17 am

    to chastise others in public for not following our own particular shibboleths is to be a sanctimonious fool

    That is true. Done right, complaining about usage should be like complaining about the weather or the eternal unreliability of public transport. A victimless vice shared with friends or strangers and quickly forgotten.

    And I agree with Ted Silar on one thing, using ‘pet peeve’ to describe somebody’s deeply felt conviction that the civilized world is going to hell in a handbasket because of sloppy usage is patronizing (and all the other things he said). Even if we personally think that western civilization will survive the pronunciation of the t in often, there is no reason not to apply the golden rule to people of a different opinion.

  69. dainichi says
    April 20, 2018 at 2:42 am

    To be honest, to me “prescriptivism” often feels like a straw man. Sure, saying that infinitives shouldn’t be split is silly, but I feel like people are spending much more time ridiculing such obviously silly statements than discussing more interesting questions like:

    * To what extent is a standard language necessary?
    * What should be the nature of such a standard? How, if at all, can such a standard be chosen/constructed in a relatively fair way? To what extent/in which situations should adhesion to the standard be required/encouraged?
    * How can we teach a standard without inadvertently creating an impression that the standard is somehow superior to non-standard varieties?

  70. laowai says
    April 20, 2018 at 3:27 am

    But then I also say that if you have never seen a person get all hoity-toity and simultaneously pronounce the “t” in often, then you are probably not a native speaker, or else surpassing unobservant.

    Because you have traveled to every corner of the English-speaking world and are fully conversant with the several dozen varieties of English found in the United Kingdom alone, no doubt.

    Prescriptivists object to the word “prescriptivist” for precisely the same reason that Saudi Sunnis object to the term “Wahhabist.” It implies that they are sectarian followers of a long-dead high cleric instead of upholders of the One True Faith. Except in this case the long-dead high clerics are Strunk & White.

  71. Lars (the original one) says
    April 20, 2018 at 4:05 am

    Well, since the “standard is superior” side seems to try for and get media exposure much more than the descriptivist side, it’s hard to keep from discussing them. But you are right, there is not really much meat on those bones any more.

    If you want my opinion, quasi-standard languages will always exist, including ones that signify membership of a privileged class, and actually codifying an official standard might make it easier to gain access to that. Of course you can make it explicit that exam answers, dissertations and job applications are must adhere to that standard to be taken at full value, but I think people are well aware of that without being told.

    But trying to construct a standard that does not closely follow the prestige variant of the language seems to me to be a recipe for failure — even if you could define what fairness is in this regard, the privileged users of the prestige variant will not see any advantage in changing to the new standard, and since other people are well aware that those are ones marking and evaluating exam answers, dissertations and job applications, they will still feel they need to learn the prestige variant.

    Lastly, if the educational system concentrates on teaching the standard form of the language — which it has to because of resource constraints — I don’t think you can avoid giving the impression that it’s better.

  72. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:19 am

    You must be kidding. Descriptivist uber alles is the call and watchword au courant. Where on earth did you get the idea that prescriptivism, which is really realism, is anything but a berated rat skulking from alley to alley seeking shelter? Typical. Co-optation. Dialectic. Reversal. Pot calling kettle black.

    But you are all getting better at getting into the swing of things. Grow up and say things vaguely intelligent. Instead of emotionally defending descriptivism as if it was the word of god. And yes I said was.

  73. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:35 am

    Here’s the thing.

    Have you no panache? Have you no elan? Have you no savoir faire? Have you no joie de vivre? And other pretentious Frenchiscisms?

    Do you not love the English language? And all its ineffable permutations?

    Why don’t you show your erudition?

    I got on here because I loved, yes, loved, your explications of how the Estonian derivation of “fracking” affected the Uralic pronunciation of “duh.”

    I admire your ability to find the proto-Lithuanian roots of some arcane dialectical Ruthenian usage.

    I have no idea what you are talking about when you do things like that and my jaw drops in awe.

    And that ain’t irony.

    But when you talk meaning and usage in English with me, you have not yet hit the mark. Macte, I believe (do correct me) en Latin.

    Why do you waste time trying to be funny.

    Refute me with phonetics and etymology. I don’t care if I’m wrong. I just am disappointed with the ways in which my wrongness is pointed out. I could get these comments in a bar.

    I am listening to Vivaldii’s Violin Concertos as I type. Popular Music. And Ernest Tubb. Classical Music.

  74. Lars (the original one) says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:42 am

    Ted, could you please indicate which of the many diverse contributors to this thread that comment (EDIT: the 5:19 one) is intended to engage with? I for one am off riding my own hobby horses and not trying to change your mind about anything, but seeing your comment right after mine makes me unsure whether we agree about that.

  75. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:47 am

    Dainichi and Lars, thank you for showing respect. And more or less Bathrobe too. Respect is what I crave. As do you. As does anybody. But never craven respect.

  76. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:49 am

    Sorry Lars. I write what I write when I write it. But I appreciate your comments. And please be just as erudite as you possibly can, because that is what I like.

  77. David Marjanović says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:54 am

    Most of what has been said here, except for what I have said, is based on, what do they call them, hidebound academic paradigms, I guess. In other words, you all think alike and you cannot and will not take a minute to even understand what I am saying, but instead indulge in name-calling.

    Maybe if you took a moment to explain what you’re saying, instead of assuming every detail about what everyone here knows and how everyone here thinks, we’d get somewhere.

    And if I write well, I must not be stupid then.

    Indeed I don’t think you’re stupid, but that has different reasons. There is no inverse correlation between stupidity and writing quality at all; I’ve seen amazingly stupid things expressed in superb writing.

    [T. I. Silar’s blog] cannot be found.

    Is it blocked in China? I have no trouble accessing it.

    But let’s qualify that. Descriptivists have as many prescriptions as prescriptivists. Just different ones.

    Like what, for example? That’s an honest question, not a rhetorical one.

    It is very obvious what I am getting at

    When I started writing scientific papers, the first thing my thesis supervisor said to me was to the effect of: “you will be misunderstood – by someone, at some point, for some reason –, and therefore it is your responsibility to leave as few opportunities for this to happen as possible”.

    No, it is not obvious what you’re getting at. Please explain yourself better.

    * How can we teach a standard without inadvertently creating an impression that the standard is somehow superior to non-standard varieties?

    That seems to come naturally in a diglossia situation, though we may be looking at a chicken-and-egg problem here.

    You must be kidding. Descriptivist uber alles is the call and watchword au courant. Where on earth did you get the idea that prescriptivism, which is really realism, is anything but a berated rat skulking from alley to alley seeking shelter? Typical. Co-optation. Dialectic. Reversal. Pot calling kettle black.

    I’m afraid this sounds like you’re living in a bubble. I recommend scrolling through a few pages of this and just the headlines about what people are saying about AAVE, to pick just one example.

  78. David Marjanović says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:58 am

    Why don’t you show your erudition?

    Why bother? It’ll come out inevitably when the opportunity arises. Most threads on this blog, in fact, consist of little but everyone showing their erudition – not as an end in itself, but simply as part of the discussion on some topic or other.

  79. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 6:11 am

    By the way. I believe that the Southern dialect of the American English language (including its AAVE variation, which was much closer to the general Southron black/white standard a century ago) was superior a century or more ago. More poetic. More rich. More expressive. More varied. More beautiful. The writers in dialect of the period are denigrated now for their political incorrectness. (Correctness is a prescriptivist concept.) I personally think that this language is exquisite, I don’t care who writes it or what their agenda is, and I know it is as dead and as lost as Hittite, but still, thank goodness, accessible because of its affinity with standard.

    You could argue that modern AAVE or Southron is better. Maybe you could do a word count and find that its vocabulary was larger. But large is not aesthetics. I have a hundred arguments defending the old AAVE and Southron, close to the earth, and the world, and with human relations, in comparison with the new.. It would involve citing mind-bogglingly artful locutions by the wagon-load. But that would be prescriptivist.

    I fear I am a prescriptivist. I prescribe the dialect tales of the old south.

  80. T. I. Silar says
    April 20, 2018 at 6:29 am

    David,

    Thank you for sincere responses.

    I cannot answer all of them.

    I could say this. Jacques Barzun wrote a great book. Wait a minute, I’ll look it up. Nahh, I can’t figure out which one it is. In it, at any rate, he says that intellectual conversation is fast, allusive, mutual. In other words, everybody knows what everybody is talking about, and so everybody can talk in shorthand, and it makes for a very satisfying intercourse. This in reaction to his editors insisting he explain every dam thing he writes. Part and parcel of this “flattening” of modern ways of reading, incited I understand by the internet, where people can’t read into what writers of the past (who were often allusive, multi-vocal, ironic) were up to.

    I guess Barzun is bad though. I figure he’s on the out list. He’s not all free and everything.

  81. David Marjanović says
    April 20, 2018 at 6:30 am

    More beautiful.

    You’re aware how diverse people’s tastes are, right?

    (Me, you can chase me with strawberries. Their stench is really disgusting.)

  82. David Marjanović says
    April 20, 2018 at 6:33 am

    intellectual conversation is fast, allusive, mutual. In other words, everybody knows what everybody is talking about, and so everybody can talk in shorthand, and it makes for a very satisfying intercourse.

    All that is true within very narrow fields. As soon as we encounter someone from outside our little specialty, we have to add explanations, or we aren’t understood anymore.

  83. languagehat says
    April 20, 2018 at 8:32 am

    T.I., you seem like a good sort of fellow, and I have nothing against you personally, just against your tiresomely predictable ideas. (Seriously, you are not some brave, lonely, embattled fighter for the Truth, you are one of a vast horde of people lamenting the degeneration of language — laudatores temporis acti, since you like the Latin — and thinking their appreciation of well-used English gives them some sort of unique insight into the Truth about language.) Please think about it for a minute: does it not enter your head that you might not be the world’s expert on a subject you have never studied? I promise you that if you took an intro linguistics class (and paid attention, and didn’t drop out because it offended your beliefs) you would wind up understanding that no forms of language are “better” than others (although of course people are better or worse at using them), that languages are constantly changing and no phase is better than any other, and that you find certain forms especially pleasing either because you grew up with them or because they happen to resonate with you, not because they are inherently superior.

    Look, pretty much everyone starts out thinking the way you do; it’s the natural untutored view, just as it’s natural to think the sun goes around the earth (you can see it happening every day, for Pete’s sake). I have a good friend who espoused your views for a long time, but he had an open enough mind to realize he might have things to learn, and he’s come around to a scientific (“descriptivist”) view of language and defends it eloquently. I hope you lower your defenses and come to the same conclusion, because you’re pretty eloquent yourself and I enjoy your expounding of your views even though I reject the views themselves.

  84. languagehat says
    April 20, 2018 at 8:58 am

    T.I., read this Stan Carey post, if you would, and see if it affects your views. Can you identify at all with the Finnish family in Sweden, their attachment to their language, and the narrator’s finding safety in silence (“Everything was so much easier now that I had stopped speaking. I never had to worry about saying the wrong thing”)?

  85. Bathrobe says
    April 20, 2018 at 9:53 am

    When I tried to open the site I got this:

    Your connection is not private
    Attackers might be trying to steal your information from tedsilar.wordpress.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more
    NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

    The problem seems to be an invalid certificate. At any rate, Google, or someone, doesn’t want me to get through.

  86. Lars (the original one) says
    April 20, 2018 at 10:26 am

    @Bathrobe, that is a strange error, when I check right now wordpress.com is using a venerable GoDaddy root certificate that should be deployed in all modern browsers. Either wordpress.com had a glitch when you tried, or you have a man in the middle in your network.

    There is a small problem with pictures loaded from images.cdbaby.com with HTTP instead of HTTPS, that’s what prevents the site from getting the green padlock icon in Chrome (and other browsers, presumably).

  87. David Eddyshaw says
    April 20, 2018 at 4:56 pm

    From evidently disgruntled references to the Queen (Gawd bless ‘er) I suspect I am the main culprit in having produced TIS’ unfortunate impression of our lack of civility. Hoping to make amends:

    @TIS:

    I used to work for an altogether superb German aid organisation, which (apart from its fine actual work) could have been designed as a showcase of why God made Germans. Always well-disposed to German moral earnestness, and delighted that I am myself frequently mistaken for a German (three people stopped to ask me directions – in German – when I was last in Berlin), I was abundantly confirmed in my free-floating bias in favour of the most European of all Europeans.

    However, I made a significant discovery. It is absolutely false (as the more regrettable of my fellow-countrymen sometimes maintain) that Germans have no sense of humour. Nothing could be farther from the truth. However, there actually is a reason why some Brits have come to this ludicrous misapprehension: Germans do not expect you to deploy your doubtless fine sense of humour in serious contexts (like work) and tend to make wrong assumptions about you if you do (my actual employers were professionally used to strange cultures and were a definite exception.)

    Subsequent work with people from all over the world confirmed that it is Germans who are mainstream in this respect, along with practically everybody else apart from the Irish. In particular, in this as in many other respects, Americans are more like Germans than Brits.

    Hat’s site is, like my former employers, understanding of this quirk. However, perhaps I should have been more careful to make it clear that my objection to your thesis in no way implies a low opinion of your own intellect, and my deployment of traditional British juvenile humour did not mean that I was not making an actual factual point, viz. your feeling that pronouncing the “t” in “often” is generally (not just by you) stigmatised as a hypercorrection or the like: in the UK, at least, this is just not so.

    I agree with Hat that it would be a pity if you were lost to us …
    By the way, I am not an academic. Do not think ill of them on my account.

  88. languagehat says
    April 20, 2018 at 5:27 pm

    I too am not an academic. (And I enjoy traditional British juvenile humor.)

  89. D.O. says
    April 20, 2018 at 6:42 pm

    But we are encouraged to use connotation, association, irony, etc. (also, litotes) And I think it was me who was flat and rude. And I am not even English, I have no excuse.

    Also, let’s rename “prescriptivists” as “proscriptivists”. Because that’s what they ofTen do. Or “perspectivists”, because they think that their language intuition must be a universal truth.

  90. Bathrobe says
    April 21, 2018 at 2:31 am

    OK, when I found I couldn’t even access the Stan Carey site I knew something was wrong.

    I don’t know what is causing the problem (anti-virus software? government blocking? browser settings?) but I’ve found the only way to circumvent it is to use a VPN. Now I can open Stan Carey’s site, Ted Silar’s site, and many others that were being blocked. This looks like the only solution since my browsers put up an impassable roadblock that didn’t even give the option of going ahead and opening these sites at my own risk.

  91. Lars (the original one) says
    April 21, 2018 at 3:14 am

    @Bathrope, if it’s all browsers and a VPN circumvents it, it’s more like the government spying on you. Or someone more local, the government is usually able to do it so you don’t notice.

    (The last part is why we want DNSSEC and CAA/TLSA records (and one reason you should run the DNSSEC check on your local machine)).

    ObLinguistics, sort of: In this context TLS means Transport Layer Security, not Times Literary Supplement.

  92. Trond Engen says
    April 21, 2018 at 5:55 am

    Three Letter Shortening.

  93. juha says
    April 21, 2018 at 7:33 am

    Speaking of numbers, why is it that it’s Kapitel ett/et in Swedish and Danish, but Kapittel en in Norwegian?

  94. Trond Engen says
    April 21, 2018 at 8:46 am

    It’s not. Kapittelet “the chapter”. But kapitelen “the capital type”.

    When there’s a difference it’s usually Swedish that is the odd man out.

  95. juha says
    April 21, 2018 at 9:53 am

    No, I meant “Chapter 1”.

  96. Trond Engen says
    April 21, 2018 at 10:40 am

    Oh, right. Yes, that is odd. I think we may say that there’s a dissolve between the numbers as independent entities and as modifiers of nouns. The independent numbers are not inflected for gender and are identical to the default gender, which is masculine. We say kapittel én and also e.g. år én and hus én. Neuter objects like chapters, years or houses are counted ett hus, to hus, tre hus, … but én, to, tre, ….

  97. juha says
    April 21, 2018 at 10:51 am

    Well, it’s the same in Russian: dom (m) odin, stroyeniye (n) odin, kvartira (f) odin (as in “I live at 1, Lenin Street, …”
    Maybe it’s because the word nomer ‘number’ is masculine, and the full form would be “kvartira nomer odin’, but I’m not sure.

  98. Trond Engen says
    April 21, 2018 at 11:06 am

    That makes sense, but Norwegian nummer is neuter. And the native word tall “tally, number” is also neuter.

  99. juha says
    April 21, 2018 at 11:24 am

    Norwegian nummer is neuter

    That was the first thing I looked up in a dictionary!

  100. laowai says
    April 21, 2018 at 11:28 am

    I don’t know what is causing the problem (anti-virus software? government blocking? browser settings?)

    If you happen to be in China, government blocking is certainly to blame. The wordpress.com domain has been blocked there for years. As far as I know, that’s the only place that blocks it.

  101. D.O. says
    April 21, 2018 at 11:36 am

    Maybe the assumed word “number” plays a role in “kvartira odin”, but in Russian more generally words for counting always go in masculine form no matter what is being counted. I guess, it is what is called “counting-order” numerals as opposed to “quantity-number” numerals, the latter agreeing in gender with the objects being enumerated. Or maybe Russians just always have silent “number” on their minds…

  102. Lars (the original one) says
    April 21, 2018 at 12:23 pm

    The wordpress.com domain has been blocked [in China] for years.

    Yes, but for Bathrobe to get a NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID error something other than blocking (causing connections to fail) must be going on. Possibly just an attempt to redirect to a warning page — which for natural reasons will have the wrong certificate — or possibly something more sinister.

    Also I though that if you were behind the Great Firewall you weren’t allowed to use VPN to the outside, so maybe that’s not where Bathrobe is. I’ll stop nerding about this, it’s too close to what I do in my day job anyway.

  103. laowai says
    April 21, 2018 at 12:43 pm

    People routinely use VPNs in China. It’s a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities finding new ones that can bypass the Great Firewall as old ones are disabled.

    And when I lived in China (some time ago, now) there was no such thing as a “warning page” telling you a particular site was blocked. It always simply looked like a page-load error. (This contrasts with Saudi Arabia which tells you straightforwardly that such-and-such a domain is blocked for such-and-such a reason.) Perhaps it’s different now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t.

  104. David Marjanović says
    April 21, 2018 at 3:19 pm

    Only 1 is normally inflected in German, but that has a dedicated counted form, eins, which coincides with the form eines used to refer to neuter nouns in their absence (as in “that’s one”) in most or all dialects but not the standard. Nothing masculine about it.

    Norwegian nummer is neuter. And the native word tall “tally, number” is also neuter.

    Both of these (Nummer, Zahl) are feminine in German, the former evidently on the model of the latter.

  105. Bathrobe says
    April 21, 2018 at 7:14 pm

    I’m in Mongolia, folks, not China.

    Thanks for all the comments. I still don’t know the cause (anti-virus software?) but it seems to have rectified itself and I don’t need to use VPN….

  106. John Cowan says
    April 21, 2018 at 7:46 pm

    One is remarkably polysemous, not to say homophonous, in English: there is the cardinal (invariable), the 1sg quasi-pronoun as in “one does one’s best” (inflected forms ones, one’s, ones’, oneself), the adjective meaning ‘sole, only; whole, entire’ and various other related things (invariable), and the noun meaning inter alia ‘one-dollar bill; single run in cricket; joke; special person’ (inflected forms ones, one’s, ones’).

    What is more, Wiktionary lists 16 other languages in which one is a word: Hawaiian, Mangarevan, Maori, Niuean, Rarotongan,Tahitian, Tuamotuan ‘sand’, with extended meanings ‘beach’, ‘dust’, ‘soil, ‘gunpowder’ in some languages, Japanese ‘mountain ridge’, Kustenau (an extinct Arawakan language of Brazil) ‘water’, Polish, BCSM, Slovene ‘they-NVIR’, Volapük ‘it-DAT’.

  107. David Eddyshaw says
    April 21, 2018 at 8:36 pm

    Kusaal too (unaccountably missing from the list, despite getting on for half a million speakers these days.) “Who” (as a relative pronoun.) Spelt onɛ in the fancy new orthography of 2016, but we prescriptivists know that all change is for the worse, including change for the better.

  108. languagehat says
    April 21, 2018 at 8:45 pm

    And in Russian оне is an archaic feminine plural pronoun. (They still used it in writing in the 19th century; I don’t know when they stopped saying it.) I see from Wiktionary that it’s still so used in Serbo-Croatian.

  109. David Marjanović says
    April 22, 2018 at 5:07 am

    I see from Wiktionary that it’s still so used in Serbo-Croatian.

    Yep – but there -e is the nom. pl. and gen. sg. ending of the entire a-declension.

  110. Allan from Iowa says
    April 22, 2018 at 10:16 am

    So is The Queen’s English like all those products labeled “By Appointment to Her Majesty” — it means she endorses it but doesn’t necessarily use it personally?

  111. David Eddyshaw says
    April 22, 2018 at 11:08 am

    The Queen’s idiolect has in fact changed quite significantly over the years, from what is sometimes called “Marked RP” to something more like “ordinary” RP. But the claim that she doesn’t speak “the Queen’s English” is simply silly.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation#Historical_variation

  112. David Eddyshaw says
    April 22, 2018 at 11:30 am

    In the privacy of her own home, she presumably speaks the same language as the other reptilians from Alpha Draconis, but that’s another story.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians#David_Icke

  113. jamessal says
    April 23, 2018 at 5:34 pm

    Wow, now that was one terribly entertaining kerfuffle! And it all stemmed from a piece of prescriptivist bullshit I’ve never heard before: that the term prescriptivism is itself pejorative, so that merely using it gives short shrift, dismisses, pooh-poohs, derides, scants, vilipends, maligns, even downright calumnates a belief not merely reasonable, verisimilar, and ratiocinative, but correct, veritable, veracious, veridical, apodictic, sound, right, and true, going so far as to imply (by merely using the term prescriptivist) that the good people who are pointillist in their beliefs about language type as if with a thesaurus beside the keyboard and lines of meth in the readiest drawer.

    Seriously, though, one point of relevance that I’ve made before but might as well take a few seconds to make again is that pre- and descriptivism are both terms that should be avoided altogether in arguments between linguists and those who understand and appreciate what they (linguists) do and those who believe that one form of language is better than another. It’s worse still to frame the debate that way, because not only do the terms imply a debate where there really isn’t one for anyone who understands the matters at hand but they (the terms) also enable people desperate to be right to conflate, and those just approaching the subject to confuse, the terms with prescribing and describing, as if linguists seek nothing less than the cessation of all activities that involve teaching people how to use language effectively.

  114. Lars (the original one) says
    April 24, 2018 at 3:27 am

    @jamessal, I don’t disagree but nobody had tried to engage with this particular ‘pointilist’ or his convictions, he just up and joined our internal debate to be affronted by the use of prescriptivist in its descriptivist sense.

    Not framing a debate with language correctness advocates in terms of pre- and de-scription sounds like a good tactic, but that side is not innocent of using descriptivist as a slur either. So what should we say instead?

  115. John Cowan says
    April 24, 2018 at 9:23 am

    Every word that names a belief can be pejorative in the right mouth. “John called Mary a Republican, and then she insulted him” is grammatical if and only if you believe Republican is an insult.

    Note that there are two suffixes -ism in English. I wrote this at Nick Nicholas’s blog in his discussion of speciesism:

    English derivation patterns are part of English; they aren’t just random. Looksism is fine, but *toothgrindingism is not. For that sense of -ism, we need and have bruxism (though we could have had frendism, frendeism, fresism instead), because the -ism of a prejudice can attach to any English word, whereas the -ism of a behavior or a school only exists as part of neoclassical compounds.

    Thus we don’t have Freudism (though French has freudisme); we need to create from this Germanic name a pseudo-Latin Freudianus and then we can make Freudianism out of it. [David M pointed out that Darwinism is an exception.] They are really two separate morphemes with the same pronunciation, spelling, and etymology but different categorization patterns: Greekism would be prejudice against (or possibly in favor of) Greeks, whereas Grecism is a name for a Greek word in an English context.

  116. jamessal says
    April 24, 2018 at 3:13 pm

    Lars, yes, of course what’s his face just came out of nowhere, interrupting your discussion with his bizarre “arguments”; he’s the only commenter I had any issue with; hence the parody.

    As for how we should frame the debate — and I’d not only agree with you but go further and say people who believe one form of language is better than another have gone much further in using descriptivist as a misleading slur — I think we should avoid giving this farce of a debate the dignity of neat titles. Make people articulate what they believe, without terms that imply intellectual equivalence, and it will become clear that some people understand how language works (at least enough not to sneer at dialects) and some just don’t, no matter how passionately they might feel about the subject. As for what we should call such people, how about people who don’t understand language — but, if you want to go further, think they do because they use it, like someone who thinks they know how to cook because they eat, or like chefs who think they know a lot about chemistry because cooking involves it. Peevers, language bullies, and soi disant grammarians are good shorthands if you’re talking among linguists and those who appreciate linguistics, but I’d avoid such terms in the debates themselves, because the arguments are pretty simple and it’s the use of terms of any kind that enable those with the arguments that don’t stand on their own to complicate the debate and make people who don’t know any better that they have a reasonable intellectual position about language, even though none of what they say can be found in a single modern linguistics textbook (linguistics being of course the study of language). In short, when the high road is totally clear and so mildly graded you’d barely notice it, take it. People who pronounce on language while knowing nothing about how it works can only even seem to hold their own in the swamp.

  117. ə de vivre says
    April 24, 2018 at 4:04 pm

    Thus we don’t have Freudism (though French has freudisme); we need to create from this Germanic name a pseudo-Latin Freudianus and then we can make Freudianism out of it.

    Marxism? Leninism? Benthamism? Thomism? Millerism but Lutheranism?

  118. John Cowan says
    April 25, 2018 at 10:00 am

    Modulo proper names, though, I think the distinction still makes sense. Mark Rosenfelder coined (I thought) conservativism to refer to the policies of the U.S. Republican party, many of which do not conform to “normal” conservatism.

    Or at least that’s the way I read it. A restricted Google search suggests that it’s simply a malapropism: it appears twenty-odd times at zompist.com, often in Almean rather than American contexts, whereas conservatism appears only once outside a quotation.

    A straight Google search reveals a quarter of a million hits for conservativism, whereas conservatism has more like ten million, so the word is out there but very much a minority usage. It is in Wiktionary, but not AHD or m-w.

  119. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2018 at 10:27 am

    When you ask google about “Chomskyanism” it asks if you mean “Chomskyism” but not the other way round. So Chomsky is perhaps more like Lenin than Luther, at least in that respect.

    Sometimes piling up suffixes does affect the emotional valence of a word. I remember back in college a fellow I knew determined to his own satisfaction that “Communistic” was a more pejorative word than “Communist,” which seemed plausible to me. Unless, of course, “Communistic” sounded so over-the-top as to be counterproductive to use with pejorative intent, because it seemed like the sort of word a scriptwriter might put in the mouth of an unsympathetic or parody anti-Communist character. The next logical step in the progression seemed to be “Communistical,” but we all agreed that that was past the tipping point where the self-parody valence definitely outweighed the pejorative valence.

  120. Brett says
    April 25, 2018 at 12:16 pm

    “Communistic” is definitely over the top.

    https://youtu.be/pG6taS9R1KM

  121. ə de vivre says
    April 25, 2018 at 12:44 pm

    Modulo proper names, though, I think the distinction still makes sense

    What’s the distinction then? I’m not trying to make a smarmy point, I read the linked blog post, but I’m also on some mid-level pain meds right now so my reading comprehension isn’t at 100%.

  122. John Cowan says
    April 25, 2018 at 2:02 pm

    That -ism meaning a prejudice for or against something can attach to any English word directly (dropping any final silent e), whereas -ism in any other meaning cannot always do so. The Greekism/Grecism minimal pair illustrates this. (The first word doesn’t appear in dictionaries, but a search will find examples like “in Roman days it was [Egypt’s] imported Greekism that she opposed to the Romans, not her own old and submerged Khemism.”)

  123. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2018 at 2:39 pm

    Consider e.g. John Lennon’s Homeric catalog of nonce isms that everyone was (allegedly) talking about: “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism / This-ism, that-ism, ism ism ism …” It may be nonsense, but it’s not morphologically ill-formed nonsense.

  124. David Marjanović says
    April 25, 2018 at 5:38 pm

    Konservativismus seems to be the only option in German.

    (We also haven’t shortened Ovomaltine®.)

  125. ə de vivre says
    April 25, 2018 at 6:07 pm

    But Lennon’s are nonce-ideologies, not nonce-prejudices, no?

  126. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2018 at 8:47 pm

    One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor; one man’s meat is another man’s poison; one man’s nonce-ideology is another man’s nonce-prejudice, innit?

  127. ə de vivre says
    April 25, 2018 at 8:56 pm

    Right, but if there are two morphemes with non-identical distributions, shouldn’t native speakers have more or less predictable intuitions about what those distributions are?

    In the context of the song, at least, I always interpreted the ism litany as being about political factionalism rather than all the different kinds of prejudices. I’ve got my bag, so I’m a bagist, not someone prejudiced against bag havers.

  128. juha says
    July 26, 2018 at 5:56 am

    Kapitel ett/et in Swedish and Danish, Kapittel en in Norwegian

    In (Modern) Greek:

    When counting, the neuter form of declinable cardinal numerals is used:
    (14) η σελίδα τέσσερα
    ‘page four’

    Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language
    By David Holton, Peter Mackridge, Irene Philippaki-Warburton, Vassilios Spyropoulos

  129. languagehat says
    July 26, 2018 at 8:18 am

    In Russian, the gender-appropriate form of the adjective is used: страница четвертая ‘page (the) fourth’ (четвертая being feminine because страница ‘page’ is).

  130. juha says
    July 26, 2018 at 8:28 am

    – Otkrojte vashi knigi na stranice sorok i delajte zadachi.

    https://mybook.ru/author/olga-shumkova-2/domoj-5/read/?page=9

  131. languagehat says
    July 26, 2018 at 9:42 am

    OK, I guess they do it more than one way — thanks!

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