More on substituting

[victor steinbok]

There appear to be multiple levels of miscommunication in the latest
development on this thread. JL noted a reversal that upsets him because he
thinks it fails to communicate the desired meaning--in fact, in standard
interpretation, it says the opposite (hence, reversal). AZ is annoyed
(mildly?) at the repetition of people expressing pet peeves about subjects
that have been previously covered and rehashed (in this case, anywhere from
4 to 6 years ago). DG comes up suggesting that this is not simply a
complaint about usage--that would indeed be quite ordinary--but about the
non-standard usage that's seeped into formally edited materials, i.e., it
has been tacitly accepted as standard. Thus the observation is not of new
usage but of a new level of spread. Some may find this to be a more
significant fact that others.

Feel free to correct my observation above if I got any part of it wrong.

However, RB goes beyond annoyance and throws insults embedded into a
one-liner--a practice that he normally condemns. There is a difference about
asking to avoid repetitions and referring to someone as an "alleged
linguist"--a difference that a linguist should be able to appreciate. What
may come through as annoyance or dissatisfaction in a longer email becomes
amplified in a short message sent from a "smart" phone. This technology
appears to have made it easier for people to become thoughtless, clumsy and
offensive. If a suggestion to avoid one-liners on the list is reasonable
(and I am certainly guilty of my share of one-liners), doing so on a phone
should be doubly so--the standard mental filters often fail because the
response time is shortened significantly. So, my recommendation to Ron--and
others--is to avoid sending quick responses via smart phones unless they are
directly on-topic (DG's message was constructive, in contrast). It will help
to tone down overheated rhetoric and certainly will not detract from the
flow of the discussion.

VS-)

PS: I am not a linguist and don't allege to be one, thus the comment would
not be insulting if it were addressed to me--it would not apply at all.
However, it was /not/ addressed to me. And, I believe, that comment was
uncalled for.

[RB: Thanks for this, Arnold. And all the inflated rhetoric about nightmares
and the lack of intelligibility of supposed "errors" seems *particularly
stupid coming from an alleged linguist*.] <-- Emphasis added.

PPS: One other practice that RB has objected to in the past--in association
with all the other complaints--was someone supporting a comment made earlier
(presumably without any actual supporting evidence, just an expression of
raw opinion). The comment quoted above falls into this category as well--in
other words, RB has violated not one, but at least three principle he has
previously espoused.

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Ron Butters <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:

Well, the reversal does not "completely miss communicate information." It
takes next to no thought whatever to understand the utterance in question,
which is probably why the editors ( if there were editors) did not notice
the reversal.

Sent from my Droid Charge on Verizon 4GLTE

------Original Message------
From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Date: Sunday, August 14, 2011 12:05:08 PM GMT-0400
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] More on substituting

Dan, I could not have said it better.

JL

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you really think the lack of intelligibility of a substitution
> reversal is inflated?
>
> I am shocked that a substitution reversal could survive an editing
> process, not because it is grammatically incorrect but because it
> completely miscommunicates information. That could not be said about
> any of the other items on Arnold's list. A distinction with a
> difference.
>
> Sent from my iPhone

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