Deep down I fear that one day, I will be outed. <\/p>\n
Despite my best efforts to bleat reassurances that I believe that the English language is fluid and changing, and there is no point pretending that there is one correct way to speak it, some linguist is one day going to point at me and yell “Hey! Wait a minute! He’s not a descriptivist! He’s a damn prescriptivist! Get him!”<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I am going to dispute a point I commonly hear from (other) English pedants, in an effort to continue my deception.<\/p>\n
Let me start my deception by distracting you…<\/p>\n
Say the word “can” out aloud. Now, say the word “can’t”.<\/p>\n
Did those two words rhyme?<\/p>\n
In some accents, they do – “can’t” is pronounced kant<\/em>. In most, they don’t – “can’t” is pronounced kahnt<\/em><\/p>\n Why should the suffixed “t” affect the vowel sound? One argument is that it has evolved to emphasize the difference between the two words. Adding redundancy reduces the chance of mishearing the words.<\/p>\n Why do we need both of the words “is” and “are”? Are it really necessary? <\/p>\n A reason why the distinction may have evolved and survived is, again, to add redundancy to the language to help detect (and perhaps correct) misheard phrases. <\/p>\n So, our language and communication has evolved to add redundancy – in the words we select, the sounds we make, sentence structure and the repeating of ideas in a paragraph. <\/p>\n The result is bigger dictionaries and (at a first glance) inefficient speech – but it improves the overall transmission rate of communications in a noisy environment.<\/p>\n Now, consider some of the expressions most hated by English pedants: “ATM Machine” and “PIN Number”. These terms are clearly redundant; the initial acronym\/initialism already incorporates the noun.<\/p>\n I defend the use of such terms. Where words might be unclear or ambiguous, adding such redundancy is a successful way of making oneself better understood. Being clear that you are talking about Automatic Teller Machines (and not any other ATM<\/a>) and Personal Identification Number (and not a sharp sliver of metal) warrants the use of a redundant word here and there.<\/p>\n QED demonstrandum<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Deep down I fear that one day, I will be outed. <\/p>\n Despite my best efforts to bleat reassurances that I believe that the English language is fluid and changing, and there is no point pretending that there is one correct way to speak it, some linguist is one day going to point at me and yell “Hey! Wait a minute! He’s not a descriptivist! He’s a damn prescriptivist! Get him!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,29],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-influencing-others","tag-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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