Word Wars
Dear Dennis,
The last few weeks have been good ones for popular discussion of language.
Monica Lewinsky's father is suing a TV show for using his daughter's name to
refer to a sex act; a woman chosen to run one of the world's largest law firms
has decided to refer to herself as "chairman"; and Senator Jesse Helms used the
delightful word "floccinaucinihilipilification," the longest word in the first
edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , in a letter to President
Clinton.
I hope we can talk about some of these issues this week. But the one thing
that's been most striking recently is the response to an "On Language" column
by Margalit Fox in the New York Times Magazine . Ms Fox, filling in for
William Safire, wrote about a common "language myth": that some dialects are
intrinsically better than others.
Ms. Fox, citing various linguists and explaining things quite clearly, said
that negative reactions to nonstandard dialects are the result of social
factors, not linguistic ones; the dialects--whether "ebonics," Brooklynese, or
Peter Jennings'--are just as regular and logical as any other variety of
English.
To us, as linguists, this is familiar and noncontroversial. I had thought
that Ms Fox's presentation would be viewed by the general public as
noncontroversial as well, but I was mistaken: The letters column last week had
no fewer than six angry letters, calling us "intellectual diddlers" and
"well-paid academic theorists" who "confine" our "victims to minimum-wage
jobs." It was even implied that considering dialects to be linguistically equal
was a "pernicious threat to common sense, logic, science and our basic
political freedoms." (Who knew?)
It would seem that the writers of such letters themselves lack common sense,
or at least the ability to understand simple language. Ms. Fox was very clear
that languages were considered equal "on purely linguistic grounds," and that
value judgments were "socially determined." The linguists who spoke in favor of
diversity were certainly not advocating the abandonment of language teaching,
just a better understanding of how language works.
It's too bad that a genuine effort to spread this understanding has to meet
with such hostility, don't you think?
Best,
Jesse
