In the Boston Globe this morning, there's an opinion piece by a staff writer venting about imprecision in language use. The author quotes the Mad Hatter, who humorously (but incorrectly) said that saying what you mean is the same as meaning what you say. The article disagrees, to put it mildly.
Linguists often get themselves worked up over a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammars. The former is written to describe how you "should" speak according to some convention or other, and the latter is how you "do". The scare quotes are appropriate because the hand-wringing in both directions is usually overblown.
On the one hand, the author is correct that "transpire" is not the synonym for "happen" that people use it as, at least not in the prescribed usage. But to close one's eyes and pretend that it isn't happening is to miss out on an important fact about how people are actually using the language. People obsessed with grammatical correctness have been bemoaning the decay of English for hundreds of years -- SC once took a course on the history of English which included a handout full of such quotes from prominent literary figures in each of the last five centuries. But it's easy to become hysterical in the other direction and deny the validity of social conventions which favor prescribed uses. The price of admission to most desirable jobs in the U.S. is an ability to communicate in English as taught in our schools and colleges. SC cannot and will not get upset about the idea that other people expect you to be able to share meaning with them in an efficient manner.
SC does not normally read the Boston Globe, and owes Arts and Letters Daily for bringing this one to his attention.
The Mad Hatter was not the one that made the logical error. It was Alice. The Hatter correctly and humorously set her straight.
Posted by: Charles | February 24, 2004 at 09:32 AM