On linguistics, demagoguery, and social justice

Presumably, most of you are aware of the difference between the prescriptivist and descriptivist camps of linguistics. Descriptivist linguistics believe that their job is to study and understand how language works, and to discover the underlying rules, and catalog changes over time.

Prescriptivists, on the other hand, are wrong. They think that they are supposed to choose one narrow way that a language is SUPPOSED to work, and enforce those rules on everybody.

As you may guess, I'm generally in the descriptivist camp. But I DO have a few prescriptivist qualities. First, I believe that different variations of English are associated with different subcultures, and therefore, they act as group identifiers. Therefore, I believe that if you want to identify yourself as a member of a particular group, it is a good idea to learn how to speak in that dialect.

It's not a bad thing for schools to teach a particular set of grammatical rules, pronunciations, and spellings, because that set acts as markers to tell people that you are in the class of "educated", which allows you entry to some jobs and social opportunities.

It is fallacious to count that as "speaking proper English", though. Because all English is equally proper -- it just marks you as members of different subcultures.

The OTHER prescriptivist trait I have is that I fight against linguistic changes that I feel make the language poorer. If we only have one word for a concept, I don't want to see that word used for other concepts, too -- we NEED that word.

We can point to historical documents where "unique" was used to mean "unusual", "literally" was used to mean "intensely/extremely", or "enormity" was used to mean "immensity", but I'll STILL fight to restrict their meanings to "unique", "literally", and "enormity". Because we don't have any other word that means those things. We've got other words that come close to "enormity", like "atrocity" or "calamity", but there's no word that has that precise combination of "conscious deliberate evil" and "vast scope."

However -- in return, I also believe that, if we have several words which DO mean the same thing, we should start separating them out to have different shadings. This happens in practice anyway -- "supervisor" and "overseer" don't really mean the same thing, even though they mean the same thing. But I like nailing them down more specifically, and, when there aren't really very clear distinctions, I like to create useful ones.

For instance: "ethics" and "morals". There's not really a clear distinction between the two, so I make one. I say that "ethics" is based on rules, and can be an intellectual process, and "morals" are based on gut feelings and an internalized sense of right and wrong. If you can answer the question, "But WHY is it wrong?" with something other than, "It just is, okay?", then you're talking about ethics; if not, it's morals.

I've been using that for a decade or two now, and I've seen other people decide that it's a useful distinction, and split them up the same way.

So, the next one we've got is "envy" and "jealousy". And papersky made a distinction in her last book which I really like, and am now going to use, and I'm going to expand it one term further: "spite".

The way Jo put it, "envy" is when someone has something you don't have, and you want it TOO, and "jealousy" is when you want it INSTEAD.

I'm going to add one more to that: "spite."

The beginning condition of all three is "There is a good thing. Someone else has it, and you don't."

In envy, the desired end condition is, "Someone else has it, and you have it."
In jealousy, the desired end condition is, "Someone else doesn't have it, and you have it."
In spite, the desired end condition is, "Someone else doesn't have it, and you don't have it."

Emotion	You Want For You	You Want For Them
Start:	-	+
Envy	+	+
Jealousy	+	-
Spite	-	-

As you can see, by my definition, I don't consider "envy" to be a particularly bad thing in itself. Like most desires, it can become destructive, but, on the whole, wanting good things that other people have? Pretty reasonable.

"Jealousy", I've got problems with. It makes sense in cases where there's only one of something. If there is only one Maltese Falcon, then, if you get it, someone else loses it. Or, "being number one". If you want to win, and you are in a context in which there can be only one winner, then you winning inherently means someone else loses, so it makes sense to be jealous of the winner. In that case, I understand it, even if I think it's problematic. But, if you COULD plausibly BOTH have something, and you want to have it all to yourself? I have trouble understanding that.

And "spite"? I just don't get spite. It's not part of my makeup. I want good things that other people have. Sometimes, if there's only one of a good thing, then I'd want to have it even if it means taking it away from someone else. But I just don't get smashing someone else's thing because you don't have one.

And yet -- that's a big part of our current political argument.

I noticed it a lot in Scott Walker's anti-union rhetoric, and how it was being received. And also in a lot of the rhetoric around the idea of raising the minimum wage.

I saw, and see, lots of people saying, "Why should THEY get more money/benefits/security/whatever than I do? I don't have those things."

Or, even more directly, "Why should minimum wage workers make as much as I do, when I'm better trained and more skilled than they are?"

In a case of "envy", people's response to union members and minimum wage workers getting better working conditions or pay would be to demand better working conditions and pay for themselves.

Or, if people believed that there was a limited pool of resources (and, to a certain extent, there is), they might agitate for their own raises at the expense of other people's. That would be logical, if not particularly kind.

However, what we actually see is people being angry that other people are going up to their level. They would rather take the good thing AWAY from other people, rather than argue for themselves to get it TOO.