language wars

I read a bit about languages, and one thing that stands out is the difference between spoken and written. We are born to speak languages. If people don’t have a language when they are growing up they will invent one, the way twins develop their own language if raised together, which sadly they drop when they pick up the languages of their parents. People who aren’t exposed to a language by about four, like in that movie Nell, even when later taught a language can never speak it well.

Spoken language is basically something humans make up and these guys who come afterwards and try to make rules, like the plural of goose is geese, are only recording what is already being done and formulating it as a rule.

Of course you can’t really judge spoken language because it is written on the air, but the written is written on paper so it lasts quite a bit longer. As long as there were only a few educated people writing the language they could police themselves, but once every Tom, Dick, and Harry could write (or sort of write), it was Katy bar the door. Notice how I said ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry,’ and not ‘Tom, Dick and Harry.’ The former has two commas, and is called the Oxford comma, the latter has one and is called, well I don’t know, the anti-Oxford comma.

This is a controversy. The Oxford group thinks it just makes sense if all things are equal, like if you say for sandwiches we have ham, turkey, and peanut butter. The anti people say, well everybody knows that a comma is just shorthand for ‘and,’ so if we stick that second comma in it has like a double comma so it should be ‘ham, turkey and peanut butter.’

But then say the Oxfordites, of whom I am one, that makes it sound like there are only two kinds of sandwiches, ham, and turkey and peanut butter. Oh for Chrissake say the Oxfordites anybody can tell there is no such thing as a turkey and peanut butter sandwich. What if it’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich answers my side? If you say ‘ham, turkey, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches’ under the Oxford rules you know right away there are three kinds of sandwiches, whereas if you say ‘ham, turkey, peanut butter, and jelly, it is obvious that there are four. This difference cannot be expressed in the anti Oxford manner, therefore that manner should be dismissed out of hand. I’ll dismiss you out of hand, say the antis, and anyway look, our method saves a comma, saves ink, saves paper, saves the forests. Oh pshaw say the Oxfordites, a little bitty comma doesn’t mean shit in this cockamamie world, and speaking of sandwiches how would you like a knuckle sandwich, and I mean a thumb, fingers, and knuckle sandwich?

And so the debate goes amongst the genteel cap and gowners in their high ivy towers while in the streets the rabble and the raffish sometimes they use the Oxford, sometimes the anti Oxford, and it’s nothing they think about very much.

Do you remember the controversy about the use of the word ‘hopefully,’ as in hopefully Beagles will solve global warming? There is no such word claimed the antis, you can’t just convert an adjective to an adverb just like that. Of course we do that all the time, but that doesn’t make it right, and anyway the word just didn’t sound right to the delicate shell-like ears of the educated antis who were manning the walls of proper English against the barbarian hordes of well barbarians and ad men, and sloppy writers, and probably commies, because they are always into any fight to destroy civilization.

But basically the pro side said fuck a bunch of you stodges and kept on saying it and anymore I think you see the word all the time and the stodges may turn up their noses, but it doesn’t do any good anymore to say anything so they don’t.

I think that valley girl was a real thing, but it was maybe just an LA thing until Frank Zappa wrote that song and teen age girls across the nation thought it was so cool that they adopted it, and I think it still exists today. Well I hear it, but I don’t know if they are mocking it or just doing it. That’s the trouble in these modern times, you can’t tell when something is being mocked or if it is being done seriously.

Just another sign of the world going to hell in a handbasket, a streak of lightning car, and a moon unit, nothing to be done about it though, unless hopefully Beagles invents something to stop it.