Should language mean stuff?

No. I'm glad that you understand this. Because this is precisely the reason why we shouldn't artificially try to standardize language and just let is develop naturally on its own, part of that process being the so-called "misuses" that you are so annoyed by. No. Each misuse is akin to a mutation in genetics: the creative power of evolution. I don't know if you believe in any kind of evolution, but imagine if God, or nature, had locked all the species into a permanent state before humans got a chance to evolve. We would have never done all that we have done. In some sense, God would have squandered the potential of his matter by arbitrarily freezing its flows to, I dunno, make it easier on Him.

And to be sure this kind of standardizing practice is only meant to be easier on the ruling class which ALREADY largely speaks the language. I suppose Ebonics as whole would have to be eradicated as well as all southern dialects and our own beloved Pittsburghese. Notice how it is the lower classes and minorities that specialize their own language. Memes are most fecund in small communities: inside jokes, private sayings, etc. The global, bourgeois, cosmopolitan class seeks to standardize language nationwide and enforce it stringently.

Sounds very liberal elitist to me.

No. You are wrong. There is no critical mass. There are only plateaus. A meme could die at any moment for any reason. A meme could be suddenly altered and never be reverted. A meme could be suddenly superseded by a similar but more expressive meme. There is no pause or tipping point as your subtly worded sentence tries to suggest. Again, this is the fundamental difference between a consensus (top down) and a meme (bottom up). A consensus is made. It is declared. A meme merely reveals itself over time. Any attempts to declare it or render a consensus is an attempt at standardization. You should not equate your own liberal policies towards language with the way language actually functions.

Why would this be true? People can just be wrong about things. I do ask for clarification. I make it very easy, by laying out two or three claims and asking which you disagree with, and why. But that doesn't seem to work.

The word "roughly" is there to acknoweldge that when you translate an idea into a word, you lose something in that translation. I insert these caveats and qualifications because, if I don't, I know I might get a paragraph or two reminding me of such things, and I like to head them off to get to the core of the disagreement as smoothly and quickly as possible.

Sure. It's also rough because thoughts are too vast and intricate to be summarized in a reasonable amount of words. I don't recall saying anything to the contrary on either point.

It depends on how you standardize it. If you create a rigid series of objective definitions that are never allowed to grow or change, then yes, that's silly. But using objective definitions to foster consistent communication and merely encouraging their reference so as to reduce confusion over time has great value.

This is another paragraph that doesn't seem to actually contradict the point it's responding to. I am getting the distinct impression that you're arguing with what you see as some Dictionary Industrial Complex, and not with what I'm actually saying to you...

...and my suspicions are confirmed. I went well out of my way to emphasize multiple times that any sensible insistence on objective definitions has to be open to them changing if it wishes to satisfy its goal of being useful for communication. The fact that you threw the word "eternal" in here is either really blatantly rhetorical, or else a failure to notice a point I've made more than once.

I think your love for the "creativity of language" is vastly overblown, but whatever your thoughts there, there is a simple tradeoff between saying whatever pops into our heads at any time to mean whatever we happen to be thinking of, and conforming our creativity to an existing standard in order to be understood. Both things have value, and need to be balanced against one another, because being understood is important, and you will not be understood if you don't use most words to mean what most people use them to mean. This will change over time, but that doesn't change the fact that, when you use each one of them, with few exceptions they either fit a consensus about their meaning at that point in time, or not.

And, again: the only reason you can argue against how language is used is because it's being used, right now, the very way you say it shouldn't be. That's pretty much the whole ballgame. I can only understand your objections because you implicitly buy into the meanings of words with every word you type or read. You're sitting on the tree branch you're trying to saw off.

This is the fundamental problem with language. It is limited to ideas. Unfortunately, ideas to not exist in the world except as particles of language. Actually, they don't exist anywhere outside of that.

Therefore, if one standardizes language, one is standardizing a structure of ideas, a web of signs, a pure symbolic order. On word-webs, no matter how many definitions you go through, no matter how far you click, you will never get to a material object. You will only find words upon words upon words upon words. The object is always a leap from ideal to material.

When a word was made for a keyboard, it was not because someone wanted to capture the idea of a keyboard; it was because someone wanted to signal the material object of the keyboard itself. This is how all language forms. Ebonics is largely shaped by the biology of our palate, by certain musical rhythms and an aural style. The same goes for the southern twang. On top of this, they are both beautiful in their own way and expressive of entire worlds and emotions upon their mere utterance.

To standardize language into a proofreader's ideal is to destroy all of this creativity.

no, language shouldn't mean anything, but it does in certain situations.

for instance, i wouldnt suggest calling your mother-in-law out for her c+nty behavior.

that doesn't go over well i can assure you

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

I understand what you're saying, I just think you are ascribing far more value to this "flow" than is sensible. I think there's a simple tradeoff between standardizing communication and allowing it to develop. I also think this "development" is fairly haphazard and not even necessarily an improvement in most cases, which calls into question just why it's supposed to be so awesomely free to begin with. Nevertheless, there is clearly a tradeoff. Therefore, your disagreement comes from the fact that you think this "flow" is of supreme importance, and any attempt to restrict it is bad. I don't. I think being understood effectively over time is more helpful for a variety of reasons (think about how dense older books are, for example). But either way, our positions are not opposites, because I acknowledge the need for a balance, whereas you take the extreme position that dictionaries are draconian.

It's worth pointing out that the rigid standardization you're talking about doesn't exist in real life. Whatever threat you think there is, it is purely abstract. In real life, we have different dictionaries, and even those adjust over time and add things like Internet speak, slang, etc. over time. They do this when they feel the phrase has become widely understood to mean a certain thing. A dictionary is not so much a book of rules as it is an attempt to describe a language at a given time. It just so happens that communication is a lot smoother if we don't change words around all the damn time, yes? So there is value in standardization as long as you feel that being understood effectively has value, yes?

Yes, we are oppressing people by saying that mongooses are not computers.

Somebody please put that in your signature.

Sure there is. There is a point at which a word is used a certain way by MOST people, and at which point you are more likely to be misunderstood than understood if you use it one way over another. This will vary somewhat from place to place, but that doesn't change the fact that, at any point in time, in any place, you will either be more or less understood if you use a word one way as opposed to another. I'm going to keep hammering on this, because I don't feel this point is being at all contradicted or even really addressed much.

Stroll into a convenience store and ask the clerk for a Buick instead of a pack of cigarettes. You will not be understood. Congratulations, you've just expressed the memetic, creative flow of language. You also won't get your cigarettes. This will happen in almost every English-speaking convenience store, which proves that there is a broad consensus about what those words mean. Could this change? Yes. Does that mean there isn't a consensus right now? No. And that's the point. Every other point is extrapolating the discussion beyond the scope of any actual disagreement. Which is okay, as long as we both agree that there's no actual contradiction taking place.

A consensus does not have to be declared. You're bringing associations to the word "consensus" to make it appear more formal than it is, and then arguing against those formalities.

Oh, I don't think so. An idea exists in my head before I give it a name.

Yup.

I'm not sure this distinction is a sensible one. The word signals an idea, but the idea is of a physical object.

Sure. I like accents. I like Coen brothers movies more because of accents.

Well, first off, I have to take issue with "proofreader's ideal." I have no idea what connotations you're smuggling inside that phrase, but it sounds a good deal stricter than anything I'm talking about.

Secondly, accents are not the same as mixing definitions around.

Thirdly, while you can certainly come up with fun, folksy, beautiful examples of language and its flow, it does not follow that deciding to use a word to mean something else entirely is similarly fun, folksy, or beautiful. Would it be "beautiful" or "creative" if I used hot to mean cold, or dull to mean exciting? Or would it just muddy the lines of communication?

Again, I think the majority of your arguments make their point very well...if you were arguing with some strict prescriptivist who believed in a static, unchanging set of definitions that never made any allowance for the evolution of language. But you aren't.

See, here it looks like I can stop.

THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU JUST SAID

How can you be a "stickler" who wants to "reduce confusion" (lol, this just means smooth out the roughs) and allow change? This is called a contradiction (pictured above).

Well, you just don't get the memetic theory of language then, or at least you don't subscribe to it. I guess you think that language was just, I dunno, there and that people just picked it up and started using it all at once. But memes are not structural totalities, they are dynamic flows. They aren't conforming to some standard. There is no standard.

No man. Everything I say is an echo of something I once heard that has been imprinted into my brain so that I think through them.

Internet memes have also been imprinted into my brain somewhat. Sometimes I'm frustrated and the images of the angry raging face comes up in my mind. I literally think through memes.

Your casting of the fact that you can understand me and I you as some kind of positive for being a "stickler" is almost insanely myopic. It's as if language for you is so much of a fixed structure that we constantly need people like Austruck around holding it together or else it will break apart like in the Tower of Babel. As if without a standardized language none of us will ever understand each other or communicate anything.

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

Ooooo. I think I'm onto something. It's something you're not actually saying, or else not communicating effectively (how funny would that be?). Need some time to process it (but mainly, to eat pizza and watch more Justified). But I'll be back. This post could end up being tremendously clarifying. More later.

This guy.

This guy right here . . .

. . . is the idealist/materialist debate or the whole Matrix thing where the world is in your head. There is more in your mind than ideas. I can touch this keyboard. I can feel it pushing up against my fingers. Now, whether or not these are all ideas or material flows of chemical signifier is, well, one of the more difficult debates throughout history.

Thirdly, Ebonics and Southern dialect are not merely accents. Listen to rap.

An instructive example: Michael Jackson's Bad. Was it made better or worse by how "bad" standardly means terrible, but in this case "bad" meant its very opposite "good" in terms of "cool" or "bad ass"? I think this kind of reversal is extremely creative, don't you? The very fact that slang often takes on the very opposite meaning of the standardized meaning is breathtaking to me.

And yes, it is a class issue. The only people who want to standardize language are upper class intellectuals who write, read, or proofread for a living.

Maybe. But I was also thinking that you're a programmer, which means you interact with a certain kind of artificial language every day, which means that you must find it comforting that things can be coded in such a precise, mathematical way. However, normal language just isn't like this, because our minds are not computers.

But I can see how programmers, scientists, and mathematicians like that kind of clarity. But to be clear, these languages are constructed from the ground up by people for people. They are artificial languages. They do not develop and evolve like ordinary language.

When I word is taken from these technical languages into ordinary language, it becomes a buzzword and is often seen as a pretentious or amateur abuse of that word. However, the word is taken only because the person abusing it saw something meaningful in it (perhaps something conveying technicality or knowledge even) so that it was necessary to use that work instead of a more quotidian term. This is how ordinary language works. By necessity. Not by streamlined design.

You could say that there's an INVISIBLE HAND at work.

Ed Byrne's breakthough "Ironic" routine.

Language primarily serves as a reference system. There are atomic words from which further meaning cannot be extracted, and there is a governing syntax which are the rules of proper form ie. consistent language constructs which are considered grammatically coherent by us.

However, beyond its practical value, language can be employed (and frequently is) to allow unique subjective connections between seemingly disparate referents. While not strictly literal, such metaphorical play is likely the basis for much of human artistry.

Even so, when we get right down to it, all language is figurative, so the distinction between objective language with solid, concrete referents and subjective language that is expressive of individual perception is not so absolute.

An interesting thing to consider is the view of reality itself as a language operating via the subject-object distinction, with that distinction not being absolute in reality either.

To elaborate, consider reality as an innately self-referential status quo -not so difficult to do, and the logical conclusion if one defines reality as all-inclusive. If reality is all-inclusive, meaning it contains all "real things" or all existence, then reality is also self-contained ie. it contains itself since it is by definition real.

So, if we view reality as self-contained (as would be logical), then it is of necessity a self-referential system, so the subject-object line would not be fixed but rather act as a dynamic interpretative process in which reality is representing itself via metaphorical relationships.

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#31 on SC's Top 100 Mofos list!!

Give us an example, Planet.

I will do some specific replying, and I will do some general replying. First, the general, stemming from this one quote:

Okay, now, I'm going to go off on a little gimmick of sorts where I argue something it sounds like you may be arguing (or should be arguing, or will eventually argue). Sorry if that's confusing.

One thing that is obviously undeniable is that we have to have a rough agreement as to what words mean to have a conversation. I've been saying this from the beginning, and while you clearly have objections on a much larger scale, I don't see how this point is disputable. And since you haven't really disputed it, I'll assume you agree. If I say the word "house" and I mean "banana" (which I'm totally saying just because I'm in a house and have a banana on my desk right now, by the way), you will not understand me, and our conversation will be the poorer for it. This does not mean that house must always mean what it means now, or that we can't have slang, etc. But it does mean that we need this common ground to talk to each other. Good? Good.

Moving on. I can (and have) easily constructed examples about how it'd be pointless and stupid if we were just randomly making up what a word meant at any given moment. On the other hand, you can (and have) offered examples of how messing around with language can be interesting, fun, and any other number of delightful things. So we've established, I hope, that words need to have a degree of consistency, but not too much. We need some consistency to communicate, but too much stifles a kind of cultural osmosis and evolution that helps make life a little more vibrant and interesting. Great.

So, how does this happen? Well, you seem to be suggesting (I don't think you've made this argument explicitly yet, but you seem to be headed this way) that it should happen naturally. Which is interesting, because it's very, very subtly at odds with your arguments. In other words, it's one thing to say there should be no restrictions or regulation of language, and another to say that it should, ideally, self-regulate, which would seem to follow from your position. I will assume, for the moment, that you believe this.

If you do, then Austruck simply becomes a part of that self-regulation. And so do you. And so does Michael Jackson. The balance is achieved both by Michael Jackson saying "bad" to mean "fearsome," and by me sitting in the Shoutbox and saying "that's not what irony means." That's how we, as a culture, regulate our language. Sometimes the usage is fun, obvious, interesting, and disseminates to the rest of the culture quickly. And sometimes people are just ignorant or sloppy about word use, and aren't really expressing much of anything, and they only add to confusion and poor writing if we all just go along and say that whatever they use a word for, that's what it can mean.

But more important than any of this, I think, is that these restrictions are not necessarily at odds with creativity. Structure does not kill art, it breathes an entirely new kind of life into it. Is poetry the lesser because we insist that it have a meter? Is literature hurt by simple forms of structure like periods, or capital letters? Does Jackson Pollock exist at all if he doesn't exist in a world alongside people who think paintings should look like things?

Art is pervasive. It is not more or less beautiful because of the restrictions it lives under: it weaves itself around them, like ivy. It incorporates all hurdles to become something new, something often more beautiful in oppressive places than open ones, whether that oppression is life-threatening and specific, or a trivial grammatical correction.

Similarly, the fun twisting of language you value is only possible with rules. Using a word in a new way ceases to be interesting, clever, or unique if there is no standard against which this new use trangresses. If everybody were playing free association all the time, it wouldn't be creative, it would be chaos. Limitation is a huge part of art, not only because of the ways in which it can resemble a more technical discipline, but because it can't break boundaries that aren't there. Or, to use a Chesterton quote that I think actually mostly means something else: "All art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

Okay. Now for a few specific stands. Though I think most of this becomes moot depending on how you respond to the previous post.

Aye, but they're also still mostly the same words I use, in the same way. I don't know if we can use occasional examples or accents to say that words don't have to mean things. It's just an argument for not being a total prescriptivist.

The fact that one class is usually for something and another class is not does not mean one class is oppressing another. If anything, if this formalized English is considered the "business" form of the language (and it undeniably is), then it's in their interest to have fewer people well-versed in it, no?


I like this observation. It ventures towards psychoanalyzing, which I usually hate in any discussion, but it's fair, polite, and probably somewhat accurate. But allow me to ask, in response: which types of languages more obviously progress? Spoken languages, or computer languages?

I could also, of course, argue that being a programmer simply means I'm more acutely aware of the ways in which it is superior. It is as likely to give me special insight into these ideas as it is to color them unduly.

I think formal stuff should be perfect terminology. But if I'm speaking with someone I know well, in chat or in actual conversation, there's always that "you know what I mean factor". If it's someone I'm not that friendly or fluid with, or if the person is a pretentious douche (if you take offense calm it down or let it go) it's the "but you ******* know what I mean!" factor.
It becomes more prominent in writing, I think. Sometimes what's ironic is also funny or just something to think about and sometimes it's easy to get the two mixed up. If you throw grammar and punctuation into the mix it becomes a hole other story. See?

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The Freedom Roads

Pitiful lesser beings need their language crutch until they realize there is no spoon.

Le sigh. Silly argument...

Is this really an argument about whether or not words actually mean something?

Buahahahahahahaha.

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Well, of course mumbo dog fish banana patch. That'd be stamp wisely!

I just want you all to know that I hate philosophy of language. Some people take it way too far and it's one hellva mind-****.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Like all of contemporary American academia? Yeah, I agree. Especially people like John Searle who attacked Derrida for trying to bring up just the very mildest notion that logic and language might not be the end of everything, calling him a charlatan and all the other stuff usually lobbed at postmodernists.

Hate you, Bertrand Russell.