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Standards and Anti-Standards
lol i dont know why sooooo many millennials hate grammar but whatchya gonna do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Joking aside, this phenomenon drives me mad. Scarcely a day passes when I don’t see some flagrantly ungrammatical Facebook posting by someone who should know better. Twenty-something scientists, mathematicians, historians, poets, journalists, and even editors — editors, for goodness’ sake! — all write in the same quasi-illiterate nonstyle. When the social-media output of America’s aspiring literati is indistinguishable from that of its middle-school dropouts, something is deeply, deeply wrong. Our language’s Millennial gatekeepers haven’t merely abandoned their posts; they’ve joined the barbarians in storming the castle.
Now, I’m a pedant. My standards are unrealistic. I understand that. I certainly don’t expect people — even well-educated people — to plop HTML style tags into their text messages in lieu of italics.* I don’t expect them to distinguish between em dashes and en dashes. I don’t demand perfection. Typos happen. But is it so difficult to separate different sentences with periods? Does it truly take undue effort to capitalize an “I” or spell “don’t” with an apostrophe? I think not.
So, what’s happening here? It’s not poor education. These same people who present themselves on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as dyslexic fifth-graders are perfectly capable of writing polished prose. Indeed, I’d bet that a great many of them could pulverize me in a writing contest. They know the rules, and they fail to apply them. They choose to be ineloquent. Why? Because it’s a form of social signaling. Because sending into the digital nether a garbled mishmosh of words and abbreviations, all garnished with a heaping helping of emojis, says, “I’m young and sociable and cool, just like you.” Because ignoring standards has, paradoxically, become a standard. Because the absence of rules is itself a rule.
My friend and I once became embroiled in a heated (read: nearly violent), multi-day argument about punctuation in text messages. His position? That ending a message with a period constitutes a breach of the social contract. That terminating a text is an immoral act. This friend is quite bright — brilliant, even. He’s an economist and a classicist. He can read Latin. He’s an able writer. But he, like a great many Millennials, seems to believe that terminal punctuation is something to be reserved for only the tensest of interactions. Writing like a second-week ESL student, by contrast, signals openness, friendless, and a willingness to engage with interlocutors. Failing to understand this might have professional consequences, he warned. It might give someone a reason to fire me.
Pfft. I’m willing to take the risk. If grammar counts as a fireable offense in my boss’s eyes, I ought to run, screaming, from that boss, anyway. If grammar makes me look like an out-of-touch curmudgeon, good. It’s my pleasure. Better to be a curmudgeon than a mushy-minded social milquetoast.
I ought to remind my friend, though, that anti-standards have consequences. Just as an anti-joke is nothing more than a joke that subverts the expectations surrounding jokes, anti-standards, in general, are nothing more than standards which fling aside all the rules that proceeded them. Artistic anti-standards brought us postmodern art. Architectural anti-standards brought us brutalism and Cabrini–Green. Anti-standards tend to encourage a race to the bottom. In the realm of language, it’s an egalitarian race. Everyone — learned and ignorant, smart and dumb — competes to look as inane as possible. The pathology spreads — first from informal settings (like text-message chains) to semi-informal settings (like a Facebook page), and then to public platforms (like Twitter, Instagram, and personal blogs). Writing grammatically becomes ever slightly more unnatural, and ever slightly more a technical specialty.
What is the consequence of all this twaddle? I don’t know. All I can say is this:
The Millennials can pry the punctuation from my cold, dead hands.
* Yes, I used to do this — until I grew tired of fighting my phone’s automatic spelling correction. Now, I settle for asterisks.
Published in Culture
Agreed. I try not to be rude. I don’t openly police my peers’ writing. I observe it, grimace, think a few unkind thoughts, and move on. And I let my own commitment to semi-polished prose speak for itself.
But when these peers demand that I join them in their linguistic mud pit, and when they claim that my refusal to do so amounts to “meanness” or “being an [expletive],” I will respond, and I’ll do so without fear of offending.
Don’t we usually chalk these up to tiny phone keyboards, fuzzy microphones, and/or the intrusive obtuseness of “AutoIncorrect”? All are valid reasons for errors, aren’t they? :-)
As a person who is married to an Old English Professor (proper capitalization compels me to use an upper-case “O” in deference to his philological specialty), I am trying to decide whether or not I resemble this remark.
Being married to an old English professor is probably worse than being an old English professor. My wife Marie claims it’s not a lot of fun. For one thing, I insist that she observe the distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested.”
I don’t generally rant too much about language changes for their own sake. Indeed, I will adopt a new usage if I find that it genuinely addresses a new need. What annoys me is when a change actually causes us to lose something. Our language is one of the most precious things we have, and when it loses some of its richness and expressiveness, that’s worth fighting against.
An example: Over recent years I have been dismayed to observe a near-complete abandonment of the pluperfect counterfactual: “I wish I had eaten breakfast this morning.” Instead, people almost universally say “I wish I would have eaten breakfast this morning.” This is grammatically wrong; and worse than that, it blurs a distinction between different verb tenses that mean different things. If we lose the ability to make those distinctions with the language, we’re left with ambiguity or with clumsy workarounds.
Unfortunately, most people just don’t care. Most people would roll their eyes if I were to point out things like this, content to shrug and say “Oh, you know what I meant.”
Maybe English will eventually become a tonal language?
I guess I don’t get out enough. I’m not a grammarian, but I would certainly say “I wish I had eaten breakfast this morning,” and not the other.
Mr. Ogilvie, Jr., I tried not to roll my eyes, but they rolled anyway. I’m sorry.
I had no idea. The “pluperfect counterfactual”? What a concept! Your mastery of grammatical tenses is beyond my understanding. I’ll try harder, though, to distinguish between the correct use of the pluperfect counterfactual and the incorrect version that inserts a “would have” into the sentence stream—though right now that distinction seems a bit beyond my grasp.
I don’t text, so this isn’t a faux pas I’m likely to make.
Nifty! The pluperfect counterfactual, eh? We Ricochetti learn something new every day.
I’m a partisan of the subjunctive mood — particularly inverted subjunctive constructions. There’s something so elegant about the phrasing, “Were I [something], I’d [something].” And possessives with gerunds . . . mmm- mmm!
I had to Google it to find out what it was called. But you don’t have to know what it’s called to know how to use it correctly.
I am totally into the subjunctive mood, and gerunding is one of my favorite activities.
[Never mind.]
My wife told me of this one:
Lol. I got a text message on my flip phone once. It was a wrong number.
Isn’t it already that way: friendly, inquisitive, declarative, humorous, hostile, aggressive, etc.? (I knew you meant conveying meaning-by-inflection, like Southeast Asian languages.) :-)
I agree. No one likes to be interupted by someone who says, “That should be ‘whom’.”
Still, I consider a newspaper a professional setting and proper grammar should be used. The same goes for the classrooms in schools.
Interruptions from parents, etc., when children are learning grammatical rules, are helpful. They can last a lifetime.
“Vocal fry” is a very close second.
Which is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register
I hear it started with Kim Kardashian, but if you’ve ever heard Kelly McEvers on NPR you’ve heard uptalk combined with vocal fry. There are lots of videos on youtube, as I found searching for the definition above, but I didn’t watch any of them.
What’s the point of vocal fry?
It’s just a silly affectation as far as I can tell.
One hypothesis is that it’s a subconscious attempt to convey humility, similar to using “like” to start a sentence, uptalking (the practice of turning every sentence into a question), etc. It’s like incorporating “uh” into every word you speak.
I thought anything fried was bad for you . . .
Vocally flummoxed, then. Thank you, Mis!
I cannot express how strange I find it to learn that some folks think that properly ending a sentence in a text message with a period is somehow harsh.
Failing to end a sentence with a period seems simply ignorant. In a text, two space bars after a word will result in a period with most phones.
I never knew that!
I never realized it until I looked it up, but apparently it is a deeper register than one’s normal speaking voice. Some claim it is an attempt to sound more authoritative. It doesn’t sound authoritative to me, but that’s what is claimed.