sashagoblin | Linguistic Mission Statement, or why i talk nonsense in the way i do

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Linguistic Mission Statement, or why i talk nonsense in the way i do

Someone wrote this to me earlier: Actually, it’s kinda funny. I’m not an ‘English bod’ as it were, but I can’t stand abbreviations and acronyms, yet you being someone that essentially breathes the language, has no problem with them. Knowledge is power perhaps?

...and my answer turned into a bit of a mission statement. So i thought i'd inflict it on the world, especially that part of it on here who have to put up with my relentless acronymage!:

Language fascinates me, all the different things you can do with it, and becuse i can use correct academic English to a high level and get the opportunity to do so on a daily basis, i'm not interested in bringing it into everyday interactions where it isn't necessarily relevant or the most communicative option.

Because 'correct' English holds no terror or even particular interest for me, using it is like breathing, i love vernaculars and the sub-cultures that create them, and the strange argots that grow up around certain areas of expertise/activity/interest. i love catchphrases and the kind of shared linguistic reference points that establish intimacy. And i'm lazy - a lot of what i do is about cramming as much sophisticated meaning as possible into as few words as possible, and so when there's a phrase that comes up a lot (WWD; ateotd; iirc; ftr; ffr; offs, etc) it seems completely logical to use the acronym everybody will understand and plough on regardless, as well as making the sentence llook more interesting, less pretentious, etc. And i don't need to use my own understanding of correct English to differentiate my intelligence/understanding from that of those surrounding me, because the vast majority of my friends are just as, if not more, intelligent than i am, and justas articulate in their own ways. (Maybe i do tend to be one of the most emotionally self-aware/articulate, but that's about perception,not linguistic ability!) . So to get hung upon 'correctness' whose functionality is dubious when there might be superior methods of expressing precisely the same thing in vernacular or informal English would necessitate a pretension and an insecurity i really don't have. Not about my linguistic ability, anyway. :oP

(Minor digression: And incidentally, there are some things you can only do with obscenity: English doesn't have another word as flexible as 'fuck', f'rexmple, or 'cunt'. You eiher have to use multiples - 'have sex with'? - or specify certain actions/parts - 'penetrate', vagina, clit etc - or go all coy - 'inside' - or use something like 'shag' which means different things in different english-speaking areas of the world. Only 'fuck' is universally recognised. Plus such words take added power from their supposedly taboo nature, despite being someof our most commonly-used words. Especially if you look like this tiny well-brought-up middleclass girl ad open your mouth and all this filth spills out. Anyway. End of digression.)

So short answer: yep. Knowledge - or rather fluency and its recognition - is power. :oP Maybe?

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i love vernaculars and the sub-cultures that create them, and the strange argots that grow up around certain areas of expertise/activity/interest.

Very much so.

I love the word 'fuck', always have. I like its versatility, its frankness, and the weight it can be made to carry. (I don't agree with the claim that overuse of it detracts from the third quality, either.)

Interesting post, thank you :)

:o) thankyou! simply returns the favour for allyours. :oPxx

"Fuck" & "cunt" among my favourite words, which is probably obvious by the amount I use them (see also "cock" & "wanker").

There are kinds of linguistic correctness that I think are essential (ie preventing misunderstanding) and kinds I think are probably a waste of time, but I don't like how use of the vernacular is often confused with having a poor grasp of grammar - see also "people only swear because they don't have a decent vocabulary". No. I swear because my meaning is best expressed by swearing!

I do have a rather severe attachment to the avoidance of split infinitives, however, even if it's not a Proper Rule in Englisj.

:oP agree with you n all counts, except maybe the ininitives if they sound better split (some do). Why don't we rule the world yet?? :oP xx

Horses for courses. I generally find the thinking required to get around split-initiatives is a worthwhile mental challenge which improves language overall.

I suspect we don't rule the world because we have either insufficient guns or insufficient mind control.

Mm, to an extent I agree with you there. English basically just happens for me, too. otoh it takes actual effort for me to depunctuate and decapitalize my writing and it makes my writing much slower so i never bother xcept for effect

OTOOH, there is a definite argument that punctuation, capitalization, and whitespace are adaptive - they're there because they make it slightly easier to scan the text quickly. Some people extend that to acronyms too, but I don't think that's valid; like you say, nobody needs to expand ffs, wtf, etc., they just get read as symbols-in-themselves.

I don't agree with the "one proper English" school of thought some of my more tedious teachers used to rant about; it's trivially obvious to me that there are lots of ways to write proper English depending on context, and each one is going to be different than all the others, which are in turn different from each other. (Obviously, they're all much more similar to one another than they are to txtism or the Scientific Style.) And I totally agree with you that most of them actually detract from communication most of the time. So there's no plausible formal reason whatsoever to avoid casual vernaculars.

As far as obscenity goes, I think I'm in precisely the opposite position - I've spent so much time in contexts where it's expected and unmarked that it's actually quite surprising when I don't. Doesn't mean I'm not fond of using it for emphasis on occasion, of course...

Agreed, except that I don't think it's true to say that these are acronyms 'everyone will understand'. Everyone doesn't. In practice their use is restricted to internet-savvy members of Generation Y, a smaller group than you might suppose. (Personally, I recognise most of the acronyms you list, but what is WWD? Wikipedia suggests Women's Wear Daily but I wouldn't say this 'comes up a lot' in your writing.) I don't get hung up about correctness -- I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist -- but I think there's a risk of excluding people by using acronyms; it can come across as a way of saying 'are you cool enough to be in my gang?'

As for 'fuck', you don't always realise the effect it has on other people. This is fresh in my mind because of a conversation I had with Petra a few days ago which went as follows:

P: Daddy, why doesn't Sasha like me?
Me: I'm sure she does, darling; whatever gave you that idea?
P: But she called me 'your fucking daughter'. Why did she say that about me?

I was certainly at fault in not asking you to mind your language around Petra, but I do think (and I hope you won't mind my saying so) that you were also at fault in not considering the effect of your words on one hurt and confused little girl who is now convinced that you dislike her. I feel embarrassed about mentioning this (please don't take it as a rebuke), but I thought you'd want to know.

Of course i want to know, i hope you assured her otherwise, and will do so mysel at the earliest opportunity. Maybe sometime this weekend, orare you busy? And i will of course be careful in future.

But, several factors i think are relevant:

1)Petra's attitude to linuistic taboos is a product of yours an Alison's, just like kids who say 'fuck' all the time because Mummy and Daddy do or they watch Eastenders or somethig. Children are different from adults, and 99.9% of tse i talk to these days are adults, and i'm usually not bad at gauging their likely reactions. Even i i then proceed to invite censure.:oP

2) The circumstances o that conversation, if you recall. I haven't been quite so angry fr some time, as i'm sure you can imagine, and am unlikely to be so for a while. And Ihad at that stage said i'd gobecause i was finding it difficult to be civil, and you'd begged me not to, so i'deven warned you i was beyond my normallevels of rationalcontrol. I'd imagine Petra's reaction was inspired not so muchby the word itself as my manner, which i'm sure was scary, but was damn carefully never aimed at her. In fact i recall hissing that phrase right at you, which i'm sure was scary,but more because she didn't understand where the sudden ucontrollable venom came from than simply the vocab i used to express it. Poor darling might eventhink it was her. I hope you explained that i was cross with you??

AAMOF Petra hasn't grown up in a fuck-free household, whatever you may think. In a tantrum, aged six, she threatened: 'I'll use the F-word', and then, when this didn't produce the desired effect, yelled 'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!' and was very disconcerted when Alison and I burst out laughing. She has heard me say 'fuck' at moments of stress (usually while driving) and knows that I don't make a big issue out of it. We don't treat it as a taboo. At the same time we try not to normalise it.

Seriously (or should that be 'srsly'?) I hope you carry on blurting out 'fuck' at inappropriate moments, because it's part of the impulsive, uninhibited, shoot-from-the-hip Sasha I know and love. You might want to avoid it at academic job interviews, though. TANSTAAFL.

:oP if that's the case, Arnold, you then have even *less* case for suggesting it was my vocabulary itself, rather than the manner in which i pronounced it, for which you were largely responsible, as stated above - that upset her so much. Poor darling probably thinks she'd done something wrong. :o(

It was *both* your choice of words *and* the way you said them. Petra said nothing at the time, but mentioned it to me about a fortnight later, so she'd obviously been brooding on it. Don't worry, I reassured her that she was not the object of your wrath.

Among my friends, there seems to be a strong arts/sciences divide on this. Arty types aren't much bothered about rigidly-applied grammar rules and the like. Scientists (& allied trades) are more likely to complain about it spelling, punctuation or grammar.

I like your acronyms -- but partly because I enjoy the head-scratching mini-puzzle when an unfamiliar one comes up, which is probably not the strongest possible endorsement of them. And a few still baffle me (e.g. who is RWTCP? Or is it RTWCP?)

Of my LJ-friends who also do Proper Writing, I usually find their
Telegraphically-compressed LJ posts more powerful than their professional work. This makes me uneasy; I don't like circumstances where more work brings worse results, and would rather pretend they don't exist. The informality and succinctness of LJ posts seems to be part of the reason, along with trust in an audience and the lower need to explain everything.

Me? I don't much need abbreviations online, because I type about as fast as I think. Writing longhand, otoh, they're about the only way I'd ever get something written before I stopped caring about it.

Scientists (& allied trades) are more likely to complain about it spelling, punctuation or grammar.

Hah. My dad hasto edit science papers sometimes. They can be virtually incomprehsible. Hypocrits.:oP

more work brings worse results, and would rather pretend they don't exist.

it's not about more work, it's about style, lexis, technique etc. I'm damn sure you'd find one of my essaysinfiitely harder work thanlj,but that'scos lj isaimed drectly at you, whereas thedemands of acedmic stringency/publication eithos play into other formats...

RTWCP = robert the (my) wonderful clinical psychlogist :oP

"They can be virtually incomprehsible."

Grammatical and incomprehensible can go perfectly well together;)

& as you said, "i don't need to use my own understanding of correct English to differentiate my intelligence/understanding from that of those surrounding me". It's presumably a more effective status marker when those around you are getting it wrong. Or more satisfying to prove you know something, if you've learned it with difficulty.

[or maybe scientists are just more pedantic. We've got a whole shooting gallery of two-cultures stereotypes here, folks]

[ Warning: this is one of my bugbears, and has been for many years before I met you. Feel free to regard the following as a tedious and ignorable rant. :) ]

I find reading your blog posts and text messages to be a process of word-for-word translation, rather than one of reading. It's a noticeably slow and sometimes quite annoying process, compared to normal reading.

Basically, I think you (or ne1 who abbvs mrclsly onlne) are saving yourself a few seconds when writing something, at the expense of costing every reader a few seconds to decode it. The readers (collectively) lose more time than you save, so it's selfish in that respect.

For example (heh), it took me a second to work out what "f'rexmple" meant - I had to sound it out in my head, instead of just recognising the symbol and absorbing it. That's an order of magnitude slower.

As well as being slower, it also robs the phrases of their meaning sometimes. Translating word-for-word means I don't always get a feel of the meaning of the sentence initially, and have to re-read a few times to pick that up too.

Also (and I do realise this is snobbery on my part), I regard people who can't spell properly online as being unintelligent. The fact that I know this isn't true of you means that I sometimes find it hard to associate things written by you, with you - even when they have your name and/or photo above them. Which is mildly confusing. :)

i think the thing is that I can write in perect English *anytime*. Using language in that way is a mark of being 'at work'. Vernacular in the sense i use it online in informal situation is - as perdrix states below -a mark both of intimacy and of being relaxed, informal, more openly myself. I use language to differentiate, demarcate and signify spaces, particularly safe spaces, in this case for the expression of various elements of myself I'm desperately insecure about in real life.

'F'rexample' isa good example, actually - it's a construction i use because it reflects how i say the phrase. It's phonetic. It hadn't occurred to me that it wuld be difficult to decipher (which is a failure on my part,i'm sorry, i thought it'd be obvious) because as the above suggests, i *breathe* language. As my eyes scan a text, any text, i'm checking for linguisic signifiers, codes, sounding it out in my head - even when the argot in which something else is written is unfamiliar or comes from a culture i've never experienced, i tend to e pretty goodatworkingut what's going on pretty quickly. Everything from Irvine Welsh to crele poetry. if it's written in English I'll be playing the various different sound options in my head as i go, and given that i *know* you're familiar with how I speak, i'd assumed its phonetic notation would hold no terrors. Erroneously, obviously.

:o( i'm sorry you find it difficult. But by losing the linguistic intimacy i feel i'd lose the psychological intimacy too, and i don't want to do that. :o(

F'rexample would have been quite a bit easier to decode than f'rexmple - the typos and missing spaces don't help the situation. :)

i love catchphrases and the kind of shared linguistic reference points that establish intimacy.

Aye. :)

I get & like your rationale on swearing & abbreviations, but I don't use the latter and find myself often trying to cut down on the former!

Abbreviations mark a language that feels cosy and intimate, & I often stray towards typing them, then correcting myself. I've never been in the habit of txtspk, & so for me it's a performance of intimacy. And, y'know, intimacy isn't really something you want to be performing! And because I have slightly more reflexion when I'm typing than speaking, I almost always catch myself at it and stop it.

Swearing? Well, my parents don't swear. (I cried so much when my dad yelled damn you at a rather irritating seven-year-old me ... Yeah. "Damn". Not even a swearword by most people's standards, but because swearwords were absolutely taboo, it was really rather brutal!) My speech is fairly peppered with swearwords, just as emotional punctuation, but I still get really - um, frightened - when my closest friends swear in exasperation (and this never directed at me). Senseless, isn't it? I try to cut back on swearing when I start feeling that the swear doesn't only express, but enhances, the emotion, and it's not an emotion I much want.

Heh. :}

:o) you are lovely and i have much to say, but hell, hney,if one performs one's gender, surely intimacy as much as anything else is a matter of performance? :oP xxx

Thank you for sharing! :)

Only tangentially related, but if you want something else to stretch out your time a little bit thinner, have you tried

languagelog?

Acronyms are absolutely fine, as far as I can see, providing you are confident a helthy majority of your audience will be able to read them without having to interruipt thought to work out what they mean. And most of the ones you list there are definitely in the bloddstream of the vox bloguli...

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