Eileen, this post awaits your comments
I've been thinking about language and community and the fact that today I mocked Samuel Johnson's attempt to write a dictionary to protect the English language from French "corruption" (the mocking may or may not have involved a Stephen Colbert impression) but then spent the evening correcting spelling and reigning in imprecise diction in my students' papers. If I think language must be flexible in order to be useful, why is it so important to tell Student X that "to rifle" means to cut grooves, to throw, or to ransack, and not to shoot with a rifle? Is it just so he won't sound ignorant or uneducated? I knew right away that by "rifle" he meant "shoot"; the other, "real" definitions I had to look up. How do we decide in what contexts linguistic rules must be followed, and when it's okay to choose a "wrong," but perhaps equally efficient, word? How much weight should graders place on words that are inaccurate but understandable?
posted by sagejenn @ 1:06 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Wow, a blog title just for me! hehe
Those are some really good questions, Jenn. If there's anything I learned in my first day of grad school, it's that a lot of language is pretty useless. Take, for example, the sentence "John goes to the beach". You'd probably hear a lot of English as a second language speakers say "John go to the beach". Now, in the second example, you still can perfectly understand what the person is saying, but that "s" in "goes" is a necessary part of the formation of the third person singular verb form. Why is it necessary? I think the best answer I have is "because it is." Not very reassuring. But it is very interesting to think about the grammar rules and how they continue to change over time (is it hung or hanged, for example). Maybe this century, it will be hung, but in the next, we will change it to hanged. Ah, the joys of the ever-living language.
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