Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:17:57 -0500, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

On 2009-11-08 21:45:58 -0500, Vassil Nikolov <vnikolov@xxxxxxxxx> said:

For example, when some
within that group speak in one way and the rest speak in another,
what is the criterion determining which is standard or "correct"?

Whoever controls the academy will determine what the next generation
considers "correct."

Please tell me who controls the academy in the US. Or even what the
academy is called there. I am curious.

Uneducated people don't have that option. As a result, they will spend
their whole lives unconsciously labeling themselves as uneducated. It's
very politically correct to say that all dialects are equal, but the
reality is that speaking some dialects immediately marks the speaker as
uneducated.

PC has nothing to do with this. Linguistics (per se) is a positive
(descriptive) science, and thus unable to make statements on which
variant is "correct". When people call language "correct", it usually
means "advantageous in certain social contexts" (such as talking to
people who are uptight about grammar), which is fine, but that is not
a statement about language, but about people.

Show up for a job interview with an interviewer who has some minimal
education in grammar and reply to an offer of a glass of water with "no
thanks, I just drunk some coke with lunch," and one's chances of getting
the job immediately fall below those of another applicant who answers
"no thanks, I just drank some coke with lunch." Often people make such
judgements unconsciously - they just "know" that someone "sounds
stupid." Knowing and being able to use the standard dialect has real
world consequences.

For some jobs (eg janitor), it does not really matter. Where it
matters, "the standard dialect" is usually quite easy to acquire for
the target audience (eg someone with a college education), even if
they are not native speakers. (BTW, you misspelled "judgments" above
(quite common), but I did not make either a conscious or an unconscious
judgment about you. I could not care less.)

But my guess is that the above things do not have much to do with why
people correct others on public forums about. Curiously, some people
believe that learning the exception list & obscure rules of the
"standard" variant of their native language somehow makes them
"educated", and they are really itching to signal this. It is rather
sad that they consider such achievements significant, but perhaps
that's the best they can aspire to.

Cheers,

Tamas

.

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