I'm usually not disappointed to arrive at a golf course, but yesterday while en route I was listening to this interview on public radio, and the prospect of hitting my first drive into lush fescue seemed like an inadequate compensation for having to miss the last minutes of the show. I've heard the whole thing now. If you don't want to click, the executive summary is that the interviewee, Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor in Nevada, is the author of a book, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, and she has views about language usage that a lot of earnest people find disagreeable.
I think I liked the show so well because a credentialed expert was putting into words vague reactions and annoyances of mine. If you've studied "English," people think you must be an expert on lay or lie, and have a strong opinion about whether "hopefully" can be used for "I hope," and "they" for one person of indeterminate gender, and can a respectable sentence ever end with a preposition, and so on, and so forth. I could care less. Wait, that's not exactly right. It's more like the people who care a lot annoy me, with the result that I care enough to take the other side.
That is the kind of English up with which I will not put. Hopefully, you can see it's dumb to talk that way. Like, seriously, what kind of person is offended by "Me and the kids went to the game"?
The professor's niche is sociolinguistics, which seems like it's largely the wine/beer thing applied to language. If you frown on "Me and the kids went to the game," that's wine. If you don't care or didn't notice, that's beer. Judging by the calls and tweets and emails from listeners, wine drinkers are overrepresented in the public radio audience. But the professor amiably held her ground. I formed the idea that nettled listeners were particularly nettled on account of the insult to their comfortable assumption about whose side an enlightened arbiter, such as a professor, is sure to take on a question relating to proper language use. Delightful to behold wounded pride.
The correct, approved language of carping grammarians has to bear the weight of politicians avoiding questions and ambitious underlings replying to the boss, in the boss's own style, "As per your memo of August 10. . . ." Who wants to sound like that? Not anyone young and aspiring to be cool. I remember eating breakfast one Saturday morning long ago. In the booth behind me two young Black women were talking about the problems of the Vikings quarterback, Warren Moon. His wife had recently called the police to report that he'd physically assaulted her. She subsequently withdrew the complaint, said that she'd provoked him, and that they'd reconciled. The booths were high-backed, so the young women couldn't see that someone who looked like a public radio listener was about 3 feet away. I could hear every word, and I remember how one of them put a bow on their discussion, concluding, "Bitch hasta leave. He beat her once, muthafucka beat her a thousan' time." Compare: "She should consult a competent family law attorney as the undesirable behavior is apt to persist into the foreseeable future."
These women would in time be proven correct about the probable course of events in the domestic life of Warren Moon. And they weren't just right: they were memorably, dazzlingly right. I'm old but it's not that hard to see why kids are attracted to, for example, hip-hop. It doesn't hurt that respectable people hate it.
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