Topics like this one keep me listening to Open Source:
Lurking in the background is an old (and tired?) debate among
linguists, anthropologists, and lexicographers about what constitute
‘real’ words and the authority to determine them. Prescriptive linguists argue spoken or written language ought to follow established rules; descriptive linguists
are more concerned with understanding language as it is used. Most
readers and scholars fall somewhere in between, embracing both
consistency and flexibility, but the pendulum seems to have swung
descriptive-ward.
The
more immediate context for this show is our relationship to verbal
authority in a time of user-generated dictionaries — of user-generated
everything. Scarequotes wrote that he’s been "thinking about our
relationship with The Dictionary. That mythical tome that determines
What’s a Real Word. Because our casual references to and belief in The
Dictionary seem to continue unhindered by the emergence of Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, and Double-Tongued Word Wrester."
We’re wondering how true this is, and why, if it is true, the
dictionary hasn’t suffered the crumbled-faith fate of other powerful
top-down institutions (like The Paper of Record, the The Encyclopedia, or The TV News).
Much has been made of web searching as a new standard for our current
lexicon. The Internet has spawned its own vocabulary ("website" seems
almost quaint after about a decade and a half) and hastened the
adoption of others ("text" as a verb). Microsoft Word can’t keep up: it
accepts "blog" but flags "podcast," which was the New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year
in 2005 and today yields 282 million Google hits.
So are lexicographers simply trying to keep up with the descriptive
power of search engines? Does the prevalence of new words signify the
downfall of dictionaries, or merely that they have been supplanted by
new authorities? Is Wiktionary, ever-changing but organized, the answer?
Put another way: how many hits do you need before you’re legal?
I am looking forward to this show. We can’t fight a changing language. Nor should we — but so many teachers think that the job of teaching reading and writing is one of being a protectionist or a guardian.
That’s so, so, so, so wrong.
Once when I was in grad school (MA TESOL), I was told that anything a native English speaker does with the language is OK. I told another ESL teacher about that a few weeks ago, and she had a heart attack! But when you look at the language variety produced by native English speakers, it is pretty hard to hold to the idea of one right way to speak and write.
I think that my ESL students, and probably all students, need to be taught what language will help and hurt them in their other classes or in a job search or whatever. That is for their protection. But I think it should stop there.
As for dictionaries, I have one in my classroom that I had used as a child (45 years ago or so). There are so many words that don’t appear in that old dictionary. And many of the meanings have changed. Who caused those changes? Regular old people who decided to use a word in a different way or to stop using a word entirely or to coin a new word. The order did not come down from on high. I am not ready to give up my right to use language the way I want to. I hope others still feel the same.
It is, of course, silly to think that dictionaries should never change. Truly new things usually need new words, and dictionaries must change to keep up with the legitimate needs of expressing innovation.
That, however, is very different than changing the dictionaries based on roundheeled descriptivism that allows ignorant usage to become “acceptable” through mindless repetition.
I would argue that “the job of teaching reading and writing is one of being a protectionist or a guardian” to a large extent. The teacher should protect and guard society from those who would change its language without good reason. Ignorant parroting of bad usage does not constitute a good reason.
Furthermore, the teacher has the obligation to protect and guard the students from the consequences of their own poor verbal expression.
We would think poorly of a wood-shop teacher who simply shrugged at crooked cuts, uneven sanding and poor staining; why should we tolerate an English teacher who puts up with shoddy grammar, diction, spelling and punctuation?
English is a living language! It must keep growing and changing– or else it would be Latin. Look at how much trouble the French have with trying to aprove every new word so that “Americanisms” don’t creep in, especially when it comes to technology.
I have sometimes played a game (even though I now teach social studies) with my students called “Word To Your Mother” where we talk about words that have been invented or changed since their parents were born, and then we move to words that have been invented since they themselves were born. AIDS, podcast, internet, new uses of words for new contexts– it’s all fair game.
We agree. New words are necessary for truly new things. Who could possibly argue against that?
My concern is that English also changes due to sloppy repetition by people ignorant of proper usage. English teachers have a duty to fight that.
I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I was quite intrigued by this discussion. Yes, language is indeed dynamic, not stagnant, which is exactly what makes it so exciting, and, especially for those just trying to learn it, rather frustrating as well.