"English--the richest, most expressive language in the world"

Wed Mar 5 18:13:29 UTC 2008

Don and all:

If you send me these *short *stereotypes, I'll compile them and put them on
the language policy page.

Hal S.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Don Osborn <dzo at bisharat.net> wrote:

>  As an educational resource in this "International Year of Languages" I
> would love to see a website on language stereotypes that has on it quotes of
> (at least) two sorts:
>
>
>
> 1) Extolling one language (usually one's own) as inherently better than
> all the others
>
> 2) Declaring one or more languages to be inherently inferior or unsuited
> for various purposes
>
>
>
> There's certainly a lot of material out there - perhaps there are already
> some compilations? The point is or would be to highlight language myths and
> prejudices which certainly (mis)inform public discussion and policymaking.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu [mailto:
> owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] *On Behalf Of *Ann Evans
> *Sent:* Wednesday, March 05, 2008 10:55 AM
> *To:* lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
> *Subject:* Re: Gender neutrality and language
>
>
>
> Nice writing style for a computer scientist.
>
> The weak point lies on the cowpath.  Apparently the female cows are not to
> object to the path's trajectory.
>
> The other point which I take issue with is the "English--the richest, most
> expressive language in the world" part.  What insulting, ignorant, and
> jingoistic rubbish.  Such expressions as Putin's recent words (during a
> press conference no less), "Such 'rumors'...they picked from a nose and
> smeared onto their papers." were translated into dainty English, failing to
> catch earthiness of Putin's remarks.   The beauty of haiku?  The Italian of
> opera?  How does xenophobia link to this issue?
>
> I am distressed by the he/she, he or she, s/he usage because of its
> awkwardness. Did E. B. White really mean that his short book should become a
> proscriptive bible?  In acknowledging the cowpath, one suspects not.  Given
> the enormous changes which have occurred in English over the past 500 years
> or so, we can hardly argue that we should freeze it in the 1970's when E.B.
> White was writing his book.  This awkwardness will get straightened out
> somehow, perhaps by borrowing from some other language's clever skirting of
> the issue.  I wonder what issues are coming up in German, where "maedchen,"
> which means "girl," is neither male nor female.
>
> Samuel Johnson wrote that the language was going to hell in a handbasket,
> and by implication, the world in general.  The Apocalyse is frequently
> portrayed in recent work -- Cormac McCarthy's book, *The Road*, and in the
> movies *Bladerunner* and *Children of Men*.  According to this writer, the
> linguistic apocalyse is also upon us.
>
> Ann
>
> On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Jacob Berg <jsberg at gwu.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure if this Weekly Standard article has made the rounds.
> Apparently we are all to blame.
>
>
>
> /Jake
>
>
>
>
>
> Feminism and the English Language
> Can the damage to our mother tongue be undone?
> by David Gelernter
> 03/03/2008, Volume 013, Issue 24
>
>
>
> How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language
> has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our
> language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in
> the 1970s and '80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy
> artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we
> have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like "chairperson" and
> "humankind" strut and preen, where *he-or-she*'s keep bashing into
> surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like
> blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over
> common sense.
>
> We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away
> with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers
> emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole
> lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming
> institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can't wait much
> longer.
>
> Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one
> another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it
> simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare's most perfect phrases are
> miraculously simple and terse. ("Thou art the thing itself." "A plague o'
> both your houses." "Can one desire too much of a good thing?") The young
> Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written "pure simple
> English." Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a
> sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and
> chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.
>
>
> But our problem goes deeper than a few silly words and many tedious
> sentences. How can I (how can any teacher) get students to take the prime
> rule seriously when virtually the whole educational establishment teaches
> the opposite? When students have been ordered since first grade to put "he
> or she" in spots where "he" would mean exactly the same thing, and
> "firefighter" where "fireman" would mean exactly the same thing? How can we
> then tell them, "Make every word, every syllable count!" They may be
> ignorant but they're not stupid. The well-aimed torpedo of Feminist English
> has sunk the whole process of teaching students to write. The small minority
> of born writers will always get by, inventing their own rules as they go.
> But we used to expect every educated citizen to write decently--and that
> goal is out the window.
>
> "He or she" is the proud marshal of this pathetic parade. It has generated
> a cascading series of problems in which the Establishment, having noticed
> that Officially Approved gender-neutral sentences sound rotten, has dreamt
> up alternatives that are even worse. So let's consider "he or she." In some
> cases the awfulness of a feminist phrase requires several paragraphs to
> investigate systematically. Such investigations are worth pursuing
> nonetheless; our language is at stake.
>
> When the style-smashers first announced, decades ago, that the neutral
> "he" meant "male" and excluded "female," they were lying and knew it. After
> all, when a critic like Mary Lascelles writes (in her classic 1939 study of
> Jane Austen) that "no reader can vouch for more than his own experience,"
> one can hardly accuse her of envisioning male readers only. In feminist
> minds ideology excused the lie, and the goal of interchangeable sexes was a
> far greater good than decent English. Even today's English professors have
> heard (I suppose) of Eudora Welty, who wrote in her 1984 memoirs--just as
> the feminist anti-English campaign was nearing total victory--that every
> story writer imagines himself inside his characters; "it is his first step,
> and his last too." Was the author demonstrating her inability to write
> proper English? Or merely letting us know that there is no such thing as a
> female writer?
>
> E.B. White was our greatest modern source of the purest, freshest,
> clearest, most bracing English, straight from a magic spring that bubbled
> for him alone. With A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, he was one of a
> triumvirate that made the *New Yorker* under its great editor Harold Ross
> a thing of beauty and a joy forever. The *Elements of Style*, White's
> revision of a short textbook by his Cornell professor William Strunk, is
> justly revered as the best thing of its kind. In the third edition (1979),
> White lays down the law on the he-or-she epidemic that was sweeping the
> country like a bad flu (or a bad joke).
>
> The use of *he* as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple,
> practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. *He
> * has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was
> unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds
> of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative
> connotations; it is never incorrect.
>
> (Warning: White died in 1985; a later edition of *Elements* published
> after his death is a disgrace to his memory.) In his 1984 White biography,
> Scott Elledge tells a remarkable story about "he or she":
>
> *The New Yorker* rejected [in 1971] a parable White had written about the
> campaign of feminists to abolish the use of the pronoun *his* to mean "his
> or her." He told Roger Angell [his wife's son by a previous marriage] that
> he was "surprised, but not downhearted, that the piece got sunk. .  .  .
> To me, any woman's (or man's) attempt to remove the gender from the language
> is both funny and futile."
>
> For the *New Yorker* to have rejected a piece by White, its darling and
> its hero, the man who did more than anyone but Ross himself to make the
> magazine the runaway, roaring success it became, and (by the way) a
> thorough-going liberal, was a sure sign that feminism had already got
> America in a chokehold.
>
> The fixed idea forced by language rapists upon a whole generation of
> students, that "he" can refer only to a male, is (in short) wrong. It is
> applied with nonsensical inconsistency, too. The same feminist warriors who
> would never write "he" where "he or she" will do would *also* never write
> "the author or authoress" where "the author" will do. They hate such words
> as actress and waitress; in these cases they insist that the masculine* *
> form* *be used for men *and* women. You would never find my feminist
> colleagues writing a phrase such as, "When an Anglican priest or priestess
> mounts the pulpit .  .  . " You *will* find them writing, "When an
> Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, he or she is about to address the
> congregation." Logic has never been a strong suit among the
> commissar-intellectuals who have bossed American culture since the 1970s.
> True, "he" sounds explicitly masculine in a way "priest" doesn't, to those
> who are just learning the language. Children also find it odd that "enough"
> should be spelled that way, that New York should be at the same latitude as
> Spain, that 7 squared is 49, and so on. Education was invented to set people
> straight on all these fine points.
>
> He-or-she'ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the
> Establishment couldn't help noticing. So feminist authorities went back to
> the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler
> into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the
> legs out from under grammar--which collapsed in a heap after agreement
> between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional. "When an Anglican
> priest mounts the pulpit, they are about to address the congregation." How
> many of today's high school English teachers would mark this sentence wrong,
> or even "awkward"? (Show of hands? Not one?) Yet such sentences skreak like
> fingernails on a blackboard.
>
> Slashes are just as bad. He/she is about to address the congregation" is
> unacceptable because it's not clear how to pronounce it: "he she," "he or
> she," "he slash she"? The unclarity is a nuisance, and each possibility
> sounds awful. Writing English is like writing music: One lays down the
> footprints of sounds that are recreated in each reader's mind. To be deaf to
> English is like being deaf to birdsong or laughter or rustling trees or
> babbling brooks--only worse, because English is the communal, emotional, and
> intellectual net that holds this nation together, if anything can.
> Occasionally one sees "s/he," which shows not indifference but outright
> contempt for the language and the reader.
>
> And it gets worse. At the bottom of this junkpile is a maneuver that seems
> to be growing in popularity, at least among college students: writing "she"
> instead of neutral "he," or interchanging "he" and "she" at random. This
> grotesque outcome follows naturally from the primordial lie. If you make
> students believe that "he" can refer only to a male, then writers who use
> "he" in sentences referring to men and women are *actually* discussing
> males only and excluding females--and might just as well use "she" and
> exclude males, leaving the reader to sort things out for himself. The
> she-sentences that result tend to slam on a reader's brakes and send him
> smash-and-spinning into the roadside underbrush, cursing under his breath.
> (I still remember the first time I encountered such a sentence, in an
> early-1980s book by a noted historian about a Jesuit in Asia.)
>
> Here is the problem with the dreaded she-sentence. Ideologues can lie
> themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to those who
> know modern English as it existed until the cultural revolution and still
> does exist in many quarters, the neutral he "has lost all suggestion of
> maleness." But there is no such thing as a neutral "she"; even feminists
> don't claim there is.
>
> "The driver turns on his headlights" is not about a male or female person;
> it is about a *driving *person. But "the driver turns on her headlights"
> is a sentence about a *female* driver. Just as any competent reader
> listens to what he is reading, he pictures it too (if it *can* be
> pictured); hearing and imagining the written word are ingrained habits. A
> reader who had thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifically
> *female* driver, and naturally wonders why. What is the writer getting at?
> To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip him up merely to
> demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness, is a low trick.
>
> White's comment: "If you think *she* is a handy substitute for *he*, try
> it and see what happens."
>
> Sometimes a writer can avoid plastering his prose with feminist
> bumper-stickers and still not provoke the running dogs of the Establishment
> by diving into the plural whenever danger threatens. ("Drivers turn on their
> headlights.") White's comment:
>
> Alternatively, put all controversial nouns in the plural and avoid the
> choice of sex altogether, and you may find your prose sounding general and
> diffuse as a result.
>
> But the real problem goes deeper. Why should I worry about feminist
> ideology while I write? Why should I worry about anyone's ideology? Writing
> is a tricky business that requires one's whole concentration, as any
> professional will tell you; as no doubt you know anyway. Who can afford to
> allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner
> mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to
> produce decent prose? Bargaining over the next word, shaping each phrase,
> netting and vetting the countless images that drift through the mind like
> butterflies in a summer garden, mounting some and releasing others--and
> keeping the trajectory and target always in mind?
>
> Throw the bum out.
>
> It's a disgrace that we graduate class after class of young Americans who
> will never be able to write down their thoughts effectively--in a business
> report, a letter of application or recommendation, a postcard or email, or
> any other form. Our one consolation is that the country is filling up
> gradually with people who have been reared on ugly, childish writing and
> will never expect anything else. But the implications of our spineless
> surrender go deeper. We have accepted, implicitly, a hit-and-run vandalizing
> of English--the richest, most expressive language in the world. Languages
> such as French are shaped and guided by official boards of big shots. But
> English used to be a language of the people, by the people, for the people.
> "The living language is like a cowpath," wrote White; "it is the creation of
> the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it
> according to their whims or their needs." We have allowed our academic
> overlords to plow up White's cow-path and replace it with a
> steel-and-concrete highway, hemmed in by guardrails and heavily patrolled by
> police.
>
> Of course all languages change. A feminist might say that he-or-she is
> merely the latest twist in our ever-changing cowpath; that he-or-she was the
> will of the people. But this too is a lie, and in fairness to my opponents I
> have never heard them deploy it. They know that Americans of the late 1960s
> were not struck en masse by sudden unhappiness over the neutral he or the
> word "chairman." Such complaints never did rank high on the average
> American's list of worries. (Way back in the 1970s, "chairperson" was in
> fact a one-word joke: an object lesson in the ludicrous places you would
> reach if you took Feminist English seriously.) In fact the New English was
> deliberately created and pounded into children's heads by an intellectual
> elite asserting its control over American culture. The same conclusion
> follows independently from a language's well-established tendency to
> simplify and compress its existing structure (like a settling sea-bed) to
> make room for constantly arriving new coinages. Words like "authoress" would
> almost certainly have disappeared with no help from feminists. But "he"
> transforming itself into "he or she" is like a ball rolling uphill. It
> doesn't happen unless someone has volunteered to push.
>
> The depressing trail continues one last mile. What happens to a nation's
> thinking when you ban such phrases as "great men"? The alternatives are so
> bad--"great person" sounds silly; "great human being" is a casual tribute to
> a friend--that it's hard to know where to turn. "Hero" doesn't work;
> "Wittgenstein was a great man" is a self-sufficient assertion, but
> "Wittgenstein was a hero" is not. Was he a war hero, a philosophical hero?
> (Yes and yes.) "Wittgenstein was a great heart" (also true) can't be
> rephrased in hero-speak, and can't substitute for "great man" either.
>
> We happen to know also that the *idea* of "great men" has been bounced
> right out of education at every level. Nowadays students are taught to
> admire celebrities and money instead. We might well have misplaced the
> "great man" idea anyway, but losing the phrase didn't help. Civilization
> copes poorly with ideas that have no names.
>
> And what should we say instead of "brotherhood"? "Crown thy good with
> siblinghood"? "Tolerance" is no substitute for "brotherhood"; it's passive
> and bland where "brotherhood" is active and inspiring. "Brotherhood" has
> accordingly been quietly stricken from the list of good things to which
> Americans should aspire.
>
> We allowed ideologues to wreck the English language. Do we have the
> courage to rebuild?
>
> *David Gelernter, a national fellow of the American Enterprise Institute
> and a contributing editor to* THE WEEKLY STANDARD*, is a professor of
> computer science at Yale.*
>
>
>
> (c) Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
>
>  ----- Original Message -----
>
> *From:* Ronald Kephart <rkephart at unf.edu>
>
> *To:* lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, March 04, 2008 9:17 AM
>
> *Subject:* Re: Gender neutrality and language
>
>
>
> On 3/3/08 9:12 PM, "Ann Evans" <annevans123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's interesting that this post has degenerated into a religious
> discussion
> > ....
> >
> And I apologize for that, since it was my fault. I am especially sensitive
>
> to this issue this semester because I am teaching a cultural anthropology
> course that seems to have an unusually high number of creationists,
> intelligent designists, and theistic evolutionists. So when a poster here
> seemed to suggest that the male first, female second order of things was
> put
> there by a god, my anti-nonsense reflex went into overdrive. Sorry.
>
> At the same, though, I agree with Lynn that this wasn't necessarily a
> "degeneration." Folk models of language play an important, sometimes
> Determinative, role in language policies, and beliefs and values regarding
>
> the supernatural are often a part of those folk models.
>
> > ...when something extremely pertinent is at hand.  How are we to express
> the
> > gender-neutral pronoun?  I tell my classes that it will be up to them to
>
> > figure this one out, but I would like to be a of a little more help to
> them
> > than that.  Is it true that "they" was once legitimately the
> gender-neutral
> > third-person singular pronoun?  How else, other than rewriting
> sentences, can
> > this issue be resolved.  One posting recently mentioned "yo" as a
> > gender-neutral pronoun, but I don't see that catching on.  Any other
> > inventions lately?
> >
> Yes, "they" has been, historically, used as a generic pronoun, and by some
>
> pretty good writers, too. For example:
>
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their
> well-acquainted friend
> — Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3
> (1594)
>
> "To be sure, you knew no actual good of me -- but nobody thinks of that
> when
> they fall in love."
> __Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
>
> A person cannot help their birth.
> — Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
>
> And so on. So, I don't think we need to invent anything, and in any case
> inventing a pronoun (closed lexical class) is a lot harder than inventing
> nouns and verbs, which are open classes. (Note though that we already
> invented "y'all" and "youze," and "you-uns" to express second person
> plural,
> which "standard" English lacks, and some African American communities
> borrowed the Igbo second plural; "unu" to fill this gap.)
>
> The simplest and most elegant way to fix this, in my view, is to make
> generic sentences plural, so that "they" doesn't upset the Grammar Police.
>
> Ron
>
>
>

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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