Sunshine Recorder

As a writer, I am greatly concerned with the written word. And, as a writer, I am greatly troubled by it. Our system of language, our system of signs, is terribly inconclusive. The sign itself is simple enough. On the one side you have the signifier, the word itself, written or spoken. On the other, you have the signified –the referent –the thing itself. The problem is that when you look at it closely, it falls apart. It seems that nothing in the universe can stand firm under enough scrutiny. Is this a fact of reality, though? or just human limitation?

The first problem we find with a closer look at the sign, is that it is arbitrary. There is nothing that actually ties the word ‘tree’ to the concept of ‘tree’ or the thing itself. We could have just as easily chosen ‘moose’ as a signifier for the word tree. The the letters that make it up, the sound those letters make when spoken –none of it has anything to do with a tree. It is simply consensus that allows for us to think of a tree when someone ‘tree.’ A collective agreement constructing our linguistic reality.

The second problem arises with abstract concepts or objects without an agreed upon significance, such as race and gender. Here the signifier is what Claude Lévi-Strauss called a ‘floating signifier.’ Or to use his words “a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified.” Some words have no agreed upon definition. One person’s understanding of the word could be vastly different from another’s. Because these signs are then open to interpretation, they lose all meaning. Because they can mean anything, they mean nothing.

The third, fourth, fifth, and so on(th) problems come when we welcome postmodernism and Jacques Derrida into the discussion. Here we find the claim that all signifiers, not just those attached to obvious abstractions, are floating. Words, or signs of any kind, never point directly to a referent. When I say bicycle, you think of a blue and shiny frame with curved handle-bars. I think of a rickety old squeaking thing with rusted handlebars. Or, we could take the name of a big corporation for example, “Corporation X.” It points simultaneously to the CEO as a figurehead, the many employees, the area of influence, the mission, the location, the wealth. More signs, more signifiers, more referents. There is no conclusion in the utterance or writing of a word, only constant, floating referral.

How then do we come to name or define things? When does four legs and a slab make a table? If I take a leg away, is it still a table? It probably isn’t what you think of when I say table. It certainly isn’t what you would find in a dictionary. Of course there are tables with three legs, or even one large central leg. So it cannot be the legs. So, if I take all the legs away, that shouldn’t matter. But it does. Maybe it is in the purpose of the thing? A raised, flat surface upon which we can safely place things. A desk is a table, then. No. So a table is not a desk. A chair could be a table. But it isn’t. So a table is not a chair. A table is sometimes made of wood, but it is not a tree. When did the tree stop being a tree? When it died? No? At what point in its slow decomposition does it cross the threshold of ‘treeness,’ and become something else?  Certainly the resulting soil is not a tree.

And so we go, on and on and on. Never actually getting to what constitutes ‘tableness,’ and only ever deciding what it is not. Defining it by negative isolation. Coming only to see some vague shape of table surrounded by endless signifiers — floating in perpetual referral –which would themselves fall apart under similar scrutiny. In this light, nothing can exist in isolation, because it only the very existence of other things that can define it. Furthermore, nothing can exist without language. The act of naming and defining and categorizing the world is not an act of organization then, but an act of creation, which is why, perhaps ‘The Word’ plays such a significant role in Christian mythology. The languages of science or of mathematics are not inherent to the world, awaiting our discovery –we dressed the naked world in them, and now that is the world we see, the world we know. Surely there were different ways to define it; other forms of categorization would have done just as well as this one.

So, what does this mean for a writer? Well, I guess it means were in the business of lying, of spinning yarns, if you will, so that instead of chaos, readers find harmony. We perpetuate the delusion that if we put enough pieces together, we will see a completed puzzle with a pretty picture of the universe painted on top of it. We build great monuments with arbitrary blocks. We say things as if they inhere to the world, but they don’t. These words here, shapeless words all of them, insist upon a truth that doesn’t exist. Yet here I write, and there you read. Suckers all of us. Devout believers in a reality that makes sense. A faithful congregation of the deaf and blind and dumb in collective, reassuring, anesthetizing denial. I suppose denial is an essential human trait. After all, it gives us all that we have.

An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”

Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”

It wasn’t long after he released his manuscript on the Internet that a small community of language enthusiasts began to recognize what Quijada, a civil servant without an advanced degree, had accomplished. Ithkuil, one Web site declared, “is a monument to human ingenuity and design.” It may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries: the creation of a more perfect language.

Ithkuil’s first piece of press was a brief mention in 2004 in a Russian popular-science magazine called Computerra. An article titled “The Speed of Thought” noted remarkable similarities between Ithkuil and an imaginary language cooked up by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein for his novella “Gulf,” from 1949. Heinlein’s story describes a secret society of geniuses called the New Men who train themselves to think more rapidly and precisely using a language called Speedtalk, which is capable of condensing entire sentences into single words. Using their efficient language to communicate, the New Men plot to take over the world from the benighted “homo saps.”

Soon after the publication of the Russian article, Quijada began to receive a steady stream of letters from e-mail addresses ending in .ru, peppering him with arcane questions and requesting changes to the language to make its words easier to pronounce. Alexey Samons, a Russian software engineer based in Vladivostok, took on the monumental task of translating the Ithkuil Web site into Russian, and before long three Russian Web forums had sprung up to debate the merits and uses of Ithkuil.

At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia. “I was a third humbled, a third flattered, and a third intrigued,” he told me. “Beyond that, I just wanted to know: who are these people?”

A fascinating article on why Lithuanian is likely the most conservative living descendant of the Proto-Indo-European languages.

“Lithuanian is a very old language.” This is a bit of mythology which is constantly repeated whenever the subject of the Lithuanian language arises. It seems, however, that very few people ever take the time to ask exactly what this means. Every language has a history extending back to the date of its earliest historical records and one assumes that there existed speakers of this language even before the historical records. There is no human population anywhere in the world that does not have some language and it seems likely that the ability to speak a language is a fundamental property of all mankind. Certainly Lithuanian is a very old language, but so is every language spoken today. The origin of language in general is shrouded in mystery, but all nations have a language.

Let us try here, however, to understand a little bit about what we humans do know about language development, although it behooves us to be quite modest about achievements in this regard. Every advance in science tells us that we know less than we thought we did.

By the words historical linguistics we mean the science which concerns itself with the ways languages change, how the sounds and forms of one stage of a language became different at a later stage of the same language, how the meanings of words change during the course of time. The earliest recorded history in the form of monuments in the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian languages goes back only around 5,000 years. When we talk of historical records we always have some form of written language in mind. The recorded evidence of some language families is better than that for others. One of the language families with the most complete historical records is the Romance language family, and I will use this family for my illustration.

The Romance languages are, of course, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Moldavian, Catalan, Provencal, Sardinian, Rheto-Romance (Romansh, Engadinish, Ladin, Friulan). (See Elcock, 1975, 15). These languages all had their origin in Latin and this Latin gradually changed or evolved into the contemporary Romance languages. Thus to say that French or Spanish or whatever are ‘old languages’ would be meaningless. They are contemporary representatives of Latin which only exists today as a separate language as a result of the efforts of scholars. Thus French faire ‘to do, to make’ or Spanish hacer are just the modern forms of Latin facere.

It is no longer possible for the uneducated Frenchman or Spaniard to understand Latin, just as it is no longer possible for the average American to understand Chaucer. The reason for this is that the languages have changed in the course of time.

A common, but somewhat simplified way of looking at this is the family tree scheme.

The relationship of Latin to the Romance languages is parallel to the relationship of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (frequently known also as just Indo-European) to the various daughter languages. For example, Italic is a daughter language with respect to Indo-European, but is the source for Latin which in turn is the source for French, Spanish, Italian, etc. One can compare this to the generations of a family, although in this case the analogy isn’t quite exact since there is only one parent. Perhaps it can be compared to a biological chart where we see the evolution of various types of animal or plant families.

Thus Proto-Indo-European is the source for a Proto-Baltic which in turn is divided into Proto-East Baltic and Proto-West Baltic. West Baltic is represented by the extinct Old Prussian (divided into eleven tribes). East Baltic is divided up into four groups: Lithuanian, Latvian and the now extinct languages of Semigallian and Selonian. One other extinct Baltic language, Curonian, stands somewhere between East and West Baltic. Or perhaps it was an East Baltic language greatly influenced by West Baltic. The relationships can be visualized like this, perhaps.

The above schematization shows only several of the branches of the Indo-European language family and likewise it is vastly oversimplified. It should serve, however, to give a general notion of what is meant by the family tree of Indo-European languages. Thus, the notion of age with regard to a language is hard to understand. What one can say is that the Baltic languages seem to have undergone fewer changes than their sister Indo-European languages. The problem here is, of course, that there are no speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language left, so we cannot be absolutely certain as to how it was pronounced nor can we be absolutely certain of its grammatical structure. The reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language is a fascinating game, a game on which I have spent most of my adult life. Still it befits the specialists in the field to be very modest about the achievements of Indo-European linguistics. Although the Indo-Europeanists can make informed guesses based on inductive reasoning, they can never really know in any absolute way the nature of the Indo-European sound or grammatical system.

So how do Indo-Europeanists try to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language? They take the oldest attested form of all the various Indo-European languages and try to imagine how an ancestor to all of these attested languages would appear.

One of the oldest attested forms of the Italic language branch is Latin, the oldest attested form of Greek is Mycenean Creek, the oldest attested form of Indo-lranian is Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest attested form of Slavic is Old Church Slavic.

Old Church Slavic, also known as Old Bulgarian, is an extinct South Slavic language which was used by the Slavic missionaries Cyril and Methodius to propagate the Christian faith. Later forms of this language called simply Church Slavic were and are used in the Orthodox church for religious purposes.

The oldest attested form of Baltic is Old Prussian, but there are so many problems with the interpretation of Old Prussian texts that most comparativists use Lithuanian for the Baltic branch. (The language is sometimes called merely Prussian = Lithuanian prūsas, but I prefer the term Old Prussian to avoid confusion with German dialects of the area which are usually called Prussian dialects.)

The oldest attested form of the Germanic language is Gothic, known to us chiefly through the Bible translation made by the West Gothic (Visigothic) bishop Wulfila (311-382 or 3). The remaining leaves of this translation (187 out of an original 336) are now in the library of the University of Uppsala, Sweden. It is unlikely that any contemporary speaker of English could understand an ancient Goth, but a few words show the common changes which English and Gothic have undergone as opposed to their Lithuanian counterparts: Gothic fimf, English five have an initial f- as opposed to Lithuanian penki which has an initial p-; Gothic twai, English twohave an initial t- as opposed to Lithuanian du or dvi with an initial d-.

Other ancient Indo-European languages such as Hittite, Old Irish, etc. are also used, but usually to a somewhat lesser degree for various reasons.

And the child asked:

Q:  Where did this rock come from?
A:  I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q:  Where did the boulder come from?
A:  It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q:  Where did the mountain come from?
A:  The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q:  Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A:  From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q:  Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A:  Never ask that question.

Consider the seeming paradox of the First Cause.  Science has traced events back to the Big Bang, but why did the Big Bang happen?  It’s all well and good to say that the zero of time begins at the Big Bang—that there is nothing before the Big Bang in the ordinary flow of minutes and hours.  But saying this presumes our physical law, which itself appears highly structured; it calls out for explanation.  Where did the physical laws come from?  You could say that we’re all a computer simulation, but then the computer simulation is running on some other world’s laws of physics—where did those laws of physics come from?

At this point, some people say, “God!”

What could possibly make anyone, even a highly religious person, think this even helped answer the paradox of the First Cause?  Why wouldn’t you automatically ask, “Where did God come from?”  Saying “God is uncaused” or “God created Himself” leaves us in exactly the same position as “Time began with the Big Bang.”  We just ask why the whole metasystem exists in the first place, or why some events but not others are allowed to be uncaused.

My purpose here is not to discuss the seeming paradox of the First Cause, but to ask why anyone would think “God!”could resolve the paradox.  Saying “God!” is a way of belonging to a tribe, which gives people a motive to say it as often as possible—some people even say it for questions like “Why did this hurricane strike New Orleans?”  Even so, you’d hope people would notice that on the particular puzzle of the First Cause, saying “God!” doesn’t help.  It doesn’t make the paradox seem any less paradoxical even if true.  How could anyone not notice this?

Jonathan Wallace suggested that “God!” functions as a semantic stopsign—that it isn’t a propositional assertion, so much as a cognitive traffic signal: do not think past this point.  Saying “God!” doesn’t so much resolve the paradox, as put up a cognitive traffic signal to halt the obvious continuation of the question-and-answer chain.

Of course you’d never do that, being a good and proper atheist, right?  But “God!” isn’t the only semantic stopsign, just the obvious first example.

The transhuman technologies—molecular nanotechnology, advanced biotech, genetech, Artificial Intelligence, et cetera—pose tough policy questions.  What kind of role, if any, should a government take in supervising a parent’s choice of genes for their child?  Could parents deliberately choose genes for schizophrenia?  If enhancing a child’s intelligence is expensive, should governments help ensure access, to prevent the emergence of a cognitive elite?  You can propose various institutions to answer these policy questions—for example, that private charities should provide financial aid for intelligence enhancement—but the obvious next question is, “Will this institution be effective?”  If we rely on product liability lawsuits to prevent corporations from building harmful nanotech, will that really work?

I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is “Liberal democracy!”  That’s it.  That’s his answer.  If you ask the obvious question of “How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?” or “What if liberal democracy does something stupid?” then you’re an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person.  No one is allowed to question democracy.

I once called this kind of thinking “the divine right of democracy”.  But it is more precise to say that “Democracy!” functioned for him as a semantic stopsign.  If anyone had said to him “Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!”, he would have asked the obvious next questions:  “Why?  What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it?  Why should we trust them?  Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?”

Or suppose that someone says “Mexican-Americans are plotting to remove all the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.”  You’d probably ask, “Why would they do that?  Don’t Mexican-Americans have to breathe too?  Do Mexican-Americans even function as a unified conspiracy?”  If you don’t ask these obvious next questions when someone says, “Corporations are plotting to remove Earth’s oxygen,” then “Corporations!” functions for you as a semantic stopsign.

Be careful here not to create a new generic counterargument against things you don’t like—”Oh, it’s just a stopsign!”  No word is a stopsign of itself; the question is whether a word has that effect on a particular person.  Having strong emotions about something doesn’t qualify it as a stopsign.  I’m not exactly fond of terrorists or fearful of private property; that doesn’t mean “Terrorists!” or “Capitalism!” are cognitive traffic signals unto me.  (The word “intelligence” did once have that effect on me, though no longer.)  What distinguishes a semantic stopsign is failure to consider the obvious next question.

Some years back I was invited to speak at a black-tie event for the French-American Chamber of Commerce at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Because the audience would be primarily French nationals, I was advised to avoid using American idioms in my address. This is a fine kettle of fish, I thought as I sat down to purge my vocabulary of American idioms. What I was left with at the end of the day was “Good evening,” “Thank you” and a rented tuxedo.

I’d have sold the farm back then for a peek into Jag Bhalla’s 2009 book, I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World. Had I done so, I could have substituted French idioms for the English ones that make up way too much of my working vocabulary.

Imagine the audience’s delight had I told them how I felt my butt was fringed with noodles (very lucky) to be there. These noodles, by the way, would be different from those hanging on my ears—a Russian expression meaning, “I’m not pulling your leg.” I’m not pulling your leg.

The French nationals gathered at the Plaza clearly had their butter, money for the butter and the woman who made it (had it all). But, some of them also had a glass up their noses (one too many). No doubt I would have had their posteriors banging on the ground (laughing hysterically) if only I’d read Bhalla’s guidebook.

I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears does more than catalog humorous world idioms. It presents an often-confounding glimpse at the inner soul of foreign cultures. “Language most shows a man,” the British playwright Ben Jonson once wrote. “Speak that I might see thee.” But what do I see when I hear that a Colombian who is hopelessly in love has been swallowed like a postman’s sock, or that drowning the fish in France is to lose by deliberate confusion? I have no idea how to use the phrase, but I can’t wait to try it, even if I drown the fish in the attempt.

(Source: sunrec)

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog’s legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

All these seemingly disconnected events are the symptoms, you could say, of a global epidemic of sameness. It has no precise parameters, but wherever its shadow falls, it leaves the landscape monochromatic, monocultural, and homogeneous. Even before we’ve been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists — from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues — this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes. The fallout isn’t merely an assault to our aesthetic or even ethical values: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact. Catalyzed in part by the urgency that climate change has brought to all matters environmental, two progressive movements, incubating already for decades, have recently emerged into fuller view. Joining natural and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines and policy arenas, these initiatives are today working to connect the dots between ethnosphere and biosphere in a way that is rapidly leaving behind old unilateral approaches to conservation. Efforts to stanch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a “biocultural” perspective that integrates the three. Efforts to understand the value of diversity in a complex systems framework have matured into a science of “resilience.” On parallel paths, though with different emphases, different lexicons, and only slightly overlapping clouds of experts, these emergent paradigms have created space for a fresh struggle with the tough questions: What kinds of diversity must we consider, and how do we measure them on local, regional, and global scales? Can diversity be buffered against the streamlining pressures of economic growth? How much diversity is enough? From a recent biocultural diversity symposium in New York City to the first ever global discussion of resilience in Stockholm, these burgeoning movements are joining biologist with anthropologist, scientist with storyteller, in building a new framework to describe how, why, and what to sustain.

(Source: sunrec, via sunrec)

For what would have been George Orwell’s 99th birthday, here are reflections on his relationship to writing and language from Lawrence Wright:

Orwell’s proposition is that modern English, especially written English, is so corrupted by bad habits that it has become impossible to think clearly. The main enemy, he believed, was insincerity, which hides behind the long words and empty phrases that stand between what is said and what is really meant.

A scrupulous writer, Orwell notes, will ask himself: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What fresh image will make it clearer? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? The alternative is simply “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you — concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”…

…Orwell optimistically sets forward six simple rules to improve the state of the English language: guidelines that anyone, not just professional writers, can follow.

But I’m not going to tell you what they are. You’ll have to re-read [Politics and the English Language (PDF)] yourself. I’m only going to speak about Rule No. 1, which is never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

For me, that’s the hardest rule and no doubt the reason that it’s No. 1. Cliches, like cockroaches in the cupboard, quickly infest a careless mind. I constantly struggle with the prefabricated phrases that substitute for simple, clear prose…

…”Political language,” Orwell reminds us, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.”

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle. Fifty years ago, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald lambasted the Third Edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary for aiming to be “a recording instrument rather than … an authority” and insufficiently censuring such usages as “deprecate” for depreciate,“bored” for disinterested, and “imply” for infer. And in a recent issue, Joan Acocella, the magazine’s dance critic, fired a volley of grapeshot at the Fifth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary and at a new history of the controversy by the journalist Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. Acocella’s points were then reiterated this week in a post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. The linguistic blogosphere, for its part, has been incredulous that The New Yorker published these “deeply confused” pieces. As Language Log put it, “Either the topic was not felt to be important enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one at the magazine with any competence in the area involved.”

According to the sadly standard dichotomy, prescriptivists believe that certain usages are inherently correct and others inherently incorrect, and that to promote correct forms is to uphold truth, morality, excellence, and a respect for the best of our civilization. To indulge incorrect ones, meanwhile, is to encourage relativism, vulgar populism, and the dumbing down of literate culture.

Descriptivists, according to this scheme, believe that norms of correctness are arbitrary shibboleths of the ruling class, designed to keep the masses in their place. Language is an organic product of human creativity, and the people should be given the freedom to write however they please.

These antagonists, to be sure, are not made entirely out of straw. A few tenured radicals (mostly obscure) are full-strength descriptivists, and a few crotchety critics (such as the late Macdonald, as well as John Simon and Jacques Barzun) are avowed prescriptivists. Yet most writers who have given serious thought to language are neither kind of iptivist, and react to such pigeonholing the way Alison Porchnik does in Annie Hall after Alvy Singer pegs her as “New York Jewish left-wing intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, socialist summer camps” and so on. (“That was wonderful,” she says. “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”) Among the Porchniks are the late, allegedly prescriptivist style mavens Henry Fowler, E.B. White, and William Safire, and such allegedly descriptivist writers on language as Hitchings, Lane Greene, John McWhorter—and me.

The thoughtful, nondichotomous position on language depends on a simple insight: Rules of proper usage are tacit conventions. Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things—not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, the Gregorian calendar, and paper currency are familiar examples.