Big Big Question

Language acquisition is an amazing, and amazingly complicated, process. We learn to speak essentially by accident, starting at an age when we’re not competent to feed ourselves or change our own clothes. Which is pretty awesome.

But it’s also a process prone to errors. We pick up phrases incompletely, or incorrectly, and then walk around for years saying this or that wrong. For all intensive purposes, it’s a doggy-dog world, and so on. Eggcorns, they’re called, and everybody’s had (and likely still has) some.

What’re yours? Any specific horrifying revelation memories?

What are some really short phrases that you find deeply meaningful, moving or powerful?

On a lighter note than “This too shall pass”, I’ve always thought this was a brilliantly funny entry into the Five-Word-Acceptance-Speech contest:

“Fools! Release the giant robot!”

Yesterday and this morning, I’ve been involved in the zillionth argument of my life about words. I have these arguments (not generally the angry kind) all the time. They generally take this form:

Someone: Word X means Y.

Me: I guess it does to you. That’s not what it means to me. To me, it means Z.

Someone: Well, then you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean Z; it means Y.

Me: How can I be wrong? Do you mean my definition is non-standard? That most people mean Y and I’m going against the social default?

Someone: No, you’re just wrong. Word X MEANS Y.

At this point, if I question further, Someone either doesn’t want to talk about it any more, or he starts using mystical language that I can’t parse, e.g. “Words carry energy with them, you know.” Sometimes Someone brings up word origins. If you study linguistics, you learn that most origins are pretty murky. But even if they’re crystal clear, linking a word’s meaning with its origin is like linking a building’s purpose with its designer’s original intent: “You can’t move your car factory into there! In the 1930s, that building was built as a warehouse for storing cork!”

To me, it makes complete sense to use words in standard ways. But that’s just a matter of utility. It makes communicating easier. It says nothing about what words MEAN in some cosmic sense.

I guess it also might make sense to defer to some sort of authority, like a dictionary. But I don’t see how we — as a culture — can agree on a specific authority. I think that would be hard to do even within a small circle of friends. Imagine saying, “Whenever we argue about what a word means, let’s agree to go with whatever’s in the New Heritage Dictionary.”

Even if meaning just implies conventional meaning, why are people SO sure they know the consensus. “When most people say ‘Democracy,’ they mean blah blah blah…” How do you KNOW? Have you taken a survey? Based on my conversational experience, as a talker and as an observer, words are very fuzzy and meanings slip all the time from person-to-person. That’s one of the reasons we have so many conversational confusions.

Where does this idea come from, that words have fixed meanings? Why do so many people believe it?

If you believe it, why do you believe it? If you believe my “fuzzy” view is wrong, why is it wrong?

Say you were spending one night in a haunted inn that is located at the center of an ancient English stone circle. Supposing that ghosts, spirits, and so on exist, what would you do, say, or bring to provoke an encounter?

Is doing something repulsive well a valuable kind of art? What merit do you see (or not see) in refined, skillful ugliness in graphic art, music, writing? Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?

What piece of art (door wide open for what qualifies) has most struck you relevant to these questions? What has caught your eye, or makes your point?

(A question by proxy, for Keith.)

When I was growing up (Im 21 now, so when I was 13-14) whenever my sister or I said we hate something my parents/grandparents always told us not to say hate its a strong word. Then I was watching Scrubs and one of the characters mentioned that hate has lost all meaning now a days. The one thing that I can relate it to is to hate crimes. So my question has hate lost its meaning? Or did it used to mean more? Was it related to hate crimes?

Not all people, granted; in fact, it only occurs to me because I personally love ‘em. But there are a lot of folks out there who react negatively to puns or even to the abstract notion of puns. Where’s all this wordplay animus coming from? Did puns beat someone up as a kid?

Lousy novel?  Awful non-fiction?  Horrific columnist?  What’s the worst piece of writing you’ve spent time on in the last year or two?

Accepting as a given that (a) nearly everyone has engaged in some language-related grousing in their lives, and that (b) most of us are aware that this strange half-discipline, this “peevology“, is more about the pleasure of grousing (and even blogging) than anything more righteous and defensible…

What are your language / grammar / usage / paralinguistic peeves? And where did you pick them up? Do you remember when any specific bit of usage first began to drive you crazy — or when you first stopped taking it so seriously?

Have you ever seen a peeve develop in someone before your very eyes? Or, more on the side of the angels, successfully fought one down?

In various contexts, where is line drawn between unconstrained discussion of death and the (recently) dead — including criticism of the deceased and metacriticism of the discussion — and a social expectation of respect for the dead, for the gravity of death as a shared experience?

Where do you think the line should be drawn? Why does the line shift from context to context — what defines the social mores of those different contexts that causes (or permits) the line to shift?

(Inspired by the latest in a long historical string of Metatalk conversations about obitutary thread etiquette.)

Could the state institutions that we currently have (in the form of government, e.g.) exist without some form of written language?