Every publication in America today includes pages that would appear, to the purist of forty years ago, unbuttoned gibberish. Not that they are; they simply show that you can't hold the language of one generation up as a model for the next. It's not that you mustn't. You can't.
--Bergen Evans, "But What's a Dictionary For?" in The Ways of Language 77, 79 (Raymond J. Pflug ed., 1967).
4 comments:
I don't have any reason to disagree with Evans, but I'll note that the same sense of change can also be seen when looking back...
I disagree generally with the proposition that rules must be revised from generation to generation, so I'm tending to disagree with Evans's application as well.
Hmmm...
Aren't most rules designed with specific situations in mind?
Don't those situations change over time?
Insofar as situations remain consistent (let's say, the situation of human nature, the situation of an author's intention for communication) the rules will stay in place. Evans is taking things much too far when he says that writing of the future will appear as "unbuttoned gibberish." We can understand what Dickens and Shakespeare and even Dante were all talking about, and they could probably understand us.
That said, as our lives change we will all learn to communicate in new ways. I'm sure that you've seen a shift in the vocabulary of your siblings as they mature and experience new things. There's an overall consistency, of course, but there's a lot of meaning that's caught up in the nuance of our communication, which changes over time.
Then again, it might be our deviation from a norm that makes those nuances personally significant...
I guess it's impossible to really have a great dialogue on this without knowing (1) where Evans is coming from and (2) what he means by "unbuttoned gibberish." My reaction is that given a general trend toward the abandonment of absolute rules (in all areas, including writing), there is a lot of unbuttoned gibberish out there that could and should be eliminated. And there isn't much Dickens/Shakespeare/Dante-level composition going on nowadays. Not that their particular styles of language need to continue, but their command of it is certainly worth emulation. Dickens/Shakespeare/Dante are night-and-day different from each other, but each ascribed to accepted conventions of writing and language. There's a difference between creative-diversity-within-bounds and "creativity" that means the end of bounds.
What No. 6 says, we measure by a measuring rod of 4-year-old norms (that's the same as what it was when I was 4, and probably the same as what it was when my mom was 4, only in another language). If she decided to start talking like a Martian or a California valley girl, there would be trouble ... and knowing No. 6, it's frighteningly likely ...
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