[lg policy] Nobody likes a language snob.

[Harold Schiffman]

Nobody likes a language snob.

This is the person who corrects you in mid-sentence when you make a
mistake. “Mr. President,” he shouts, at a press conference, “when you
say ‘misunderestimate,’ do you perhaps have another word in mind?” And
everyone laughs at you, for days.

Language snobs are everywhere, even in France, where they even have an
“Académie française,” was designed to define, protect, and regulate
proper French grammar and usage. In the English-speaking world,
language snobs write dictionaries that practically frown at you when
you can’t remember the difference between “parameter” and “perimeter.”
(The first is a mathematical term for a constant in an equation; the
second refers to a boundary. Trust me, I looked these terms up in a
dictionary.)

It’s easy to ridicule the language snobs, as Robin Williams did in his
“rip it out” scene in the Dead Poet’s Society.

But here’s the thing about language snobs: They are oddly egalitarian.
While language snobs might giggle at people who choose the wrong words
or who make grammatical mistakes, their underlying premise is that
there are universal rules for language. Learning to use those rules is
the ultimate ladder to success, integration, and acceptance.

In this week’s New Yorker, book critic Joan Acocella writes about the
ongoing debate between language snobs (or “prescriptivists,” as they
apparently prefer to be called) and “descriptivists,” who believe that
“all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what
the current practice was.” Ms. Acocella is definitely in the
prescriptivist camp, and when she reviews the new book “The Language
Wars: A History of Proper English,” by Henry Hitchings, a
descriptivist, you know you are in for a good fight.

All of this might seem petty, but for writers such as George Orwell,
the use and abuse of words had the potential to start wars, prop up
dictatorships, and justify genocides. In his essay, “Politics and the
English Language,” he wrote:

    Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts
set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along
the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of
scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name
things without calling up mental pictures of them.

    Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.

more at: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Keep-Calm/2012/0510/Good-Reads-on-the-politics-of-language-Genghis-Khan-and-the-Beastie-Boys

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