On another note, I've come up with a new rule.

[conuly]

Every time I read the comments to an article that touch on ANY linguistic subject, I'm going to look up That One Chaucer Quote first. Then I'll just spam it at people who talk about "dumbing down" language, or "the decline of civilization", or "wild-eyed linguists and psychologists", or anything else along those lines.

Ahem:

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Eek for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

Long story short, Geoffrey is getting at the fact that language changes and we'd all damn well better get used to it already. This isn't news, folks! Chaucer knew it, Shakespeare knew it, you'd better all figure it out!

Comments

[mc776]

Haters gotta hate.

And sadly that takes up too much time for them to even try to figure out what that passage says. :|

[dragonwolf]

Well, the very fact that it takes the modern person 20 minutes to figure out what it says should be a testament to the very fact it conveys. Not that most Internet posters will get that, but...

[conuly]

More than 20, were you to hear it spoken instead of reading it on a page.

[delphi]

I work with a proofreader who is certain that contractions are inappropriate in written work and that kids today are just too lazy and unsophisticated to preserve English as it was intended to be. She (and this seems to be a pattern) also claims not to like any music but classical and any literature written past the 1940s.

I think people like that are on some level aware that they lack the critical skills to actually judge whether a work or an utterance is good or clever on its own merits, so they fixate on categories and markers that authority has told them are signs of quality and convince themselves that they can judge smart from stupid and good from bad. The concepts of language change and descriptivism scare them.

[conuly]

My mother once worked with a proofreader who insisted that every single pronoun had to have an antecedent. Even the dummy pronoun, as in "it's raining". Meaning you couldn't say "it's raining".

And these people all think they know more than those of us who DO know more.

I think people like that are on some level aware that they lack the critical skills to actually judge whether a work or an utterance is good or clever on its own merits, so they fixate on categories and markers that authority has told them are signs of quality and convince themselves that they can judge smart from stupid and good from bad.

If only they'd just fixate on some different subjects for a change!

[dragonwolf]

Even the dummy pronoun, as in "it's raining". Meaning you couldn't say "it's raining".

What the hell would you say instead?

[conuly]

"The rain is falling", I think.

My mother just quietly went and re-edited everything after she was done.

[delphi]

Even the dummy pronoun, as in "it's raining".

*groans* I'm counting myself lucky.

[conuly]

Don't bring it up to this woman!

[dragonwolf]

I remember being taught that contractions are inappropriate for "formal writings" (aka - everything but narratives). Not sure if that's still taught, though. I've found the "real world" to be quite a bit more lenient on that front, but I do draw the line at text speak.

As for your proofreader, it seems they read 1984 a few too many times and have associated the evolution/simplification of language with thought control. :)

[delphi]

We work with fiction and poetry, so it's extra ridiculous. Of course, when I point out that she allows "o'er" and "e'er," she exclaims, "But that's Shakespearean!"

Also, she would take exception at your spelling of 1984. Even as a title, she would insist on Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

[conuly]

I'll and he's and it's are Shakespearean too! Lord, what fool these mortals be.

[dragonwolf]

Hell, that era had more contractions than we have now. Three-word contractions for the win!

[conuly]

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/01/true-grit.html

[delphi]

This pains me even more to say, but no one at my place of business (beside me) believes in using a style guide. "I like English, but I wouldn't want to read a whole book about it!"

[conuly]

How the hell did they even get hired? How low can the standards for proofreading possibly be?

[delphi]

My boss isn't great with grammar herself, and as we're a semi-vanity joint, we proofread to portray a basic level of legitimacy rather than out of a wish to publish quality work.

[conuly]

I hope your customers are too dumb to realize how dumb they are (or too bright to need the help).

[dragonwolf]

I've seen it spelled both ways, even on the book itself (as the title), so that particular one is a bit moot, but assuming she does that for all years? Egads! I'd hate to see her write out dates.

[delphi]

All dates, all numbers. We once had this monstrosity: "It was eleven-forty-five A.M. on January twenty-first, two-thousand-and-three..."

[conuly]

She's okay with A.M. but not with 2003?

[delphi]

Oddly, that's one of our very few (five that I can think of) style rules: A.M. is in caps, with periods, one font smaller than the rest of the text.

[conuly]

Well, so long as you have standards. What are the other 4 rules, out of curiosity?

[delphi]

"Good-bye" and "good-night" take hyphens, no terminal ellipses, no Oxford commas, and...this is my favourite: we are not allowed to end a column or page on a finished sentence because people might not understand that they should continue reading.

[conuly]

1. That's the strangest list of guidelines I've ever read. Somebody's priorities are WEIRD.

2. That last one is my favorite as well.

3. The Oxford comma is awesome and everybody should use it. EVIL STYLE GUIDE!

[delphi]

The weirdest thing I encountered when I first started working there was that my boss acted as though everyone should know these rules...but I was the picky one for addressing comma splices and title capitalization.

I'm a fan of the Oxford comma as well, but my boss thinks doing away with it saves space.

[conuly]

I'm a fan of the Oxford comma as well, but my boss thinks doing away with it saves space.

...

Don't take this the wrong way, but your boss is an idiot.

[delphi]

Yeah, this...isn't news.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, but Chaucer and Shakespeare were literary and linguistic geniuses. The people who whine about "dumbing down language" and the like... generally aren't. ^^

[conuly]

And they're ignorant as well. A trained monkey might not be bright by human standards, but at least it doesn't try to do what it doesn't understand.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Which, as Socrates tells us, is the true mark of wisdom ;)

But yeah. It's really unfortunate that the most ignorant people tend to be the most vocal, too...