I was delighted to find this lovely clip ‘Tricky Linguistics’ from a British show ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (now recognized by most in the US as playing Dr. Gregory House on the TV show ‘House M.D.’. A point made in this funny clip, that our knowledge of language is capable of generating an infinite number of grammatical sentences, is a fascinating property of language that always comes up in an intro to language course. Our knowledge of language can generate a lot of sentences. Even the ones that our stickler spirits don’t like.
People with reasonable education, especially academics, have keener sense of prescriptive ‘correctness’ of language and often lament on ’sloppy’ ‘broken’ ‘bad’ usage of language often found on the Internet or student writings. I notice a lot of those, not only because I can be a bit of a stickler myself, but also because it is interesting what people do.
The other day I heard a friend of mine, a sociologist, say ‘I should have went…’ and immediately corrected himself and said ‘I should have *gone*…’ It wasn’t the first time I heard ‘went’ used instead of ‘gone’ after ‘have’. As an ESL student I learned “to form a perfective, you use the auxiliary ‘have’ followed by the past participle form of the verb”. So it is, for me, a super-fast thought process of “ok…say ‘have’…and then say *gone* after ‘have’”. I tell my students “You don’t say *went* here because it is in the past tense and it is wrong”. But native speakers don’t do it this way. They shouldn’t even think. Their knowledge of language is supposed to only create right things! But he didn’t, and he actually had to go on the process of consciously evaluating what he said and revised his sentence.
I thought this example was interesting, because it almost looks like people are starting to change their rules and use past tense after ‘have’. Is this the beginning of our language change? If we did change our rules and started using past tense, shouldn’t we also allow ‘I should have *ate*’, ‘I should have *wrote*, ‘I should have *gave* up’, and ‘I should have *did* it’? My sense is that it is not that simple, yet.
True, ignorance of the distinction between ‘what you end up saying’ and ‘what you should be saying’ might suggest certain things about your education, etc. (Yes, we still have to take ‘correctness’ seriously.) But it is fascinating, for many linguists, how there seem to be distinctions among ‘what you should be saying’, ‘what you shouldn’t be saying but end up saying sometimes’ and ‘what you never end up saying, ever.’
I just watched the Tricky Linguistics video and it was right on target! As a longtime instructor of public speaking, the entire theory behind when you repeat words and ideas to increase audience attention and understanding or to even increase your own dynamic as a speaker was turned right upside down by that video!
I do think the question of what you say and how you say it is the constant demand of our students when they work on oral communication. And it is a far more complex question to answer then we often take the time realize.
Reply to Suzanne
I loved the Monty Python-ish humor in this clip, Yukiko. Thanks for posting it.
It's interesting about the friend who started to say 'should have went' and then corrected himself. I think there are some mistakes (not that this is one) that educated people seem more likely to make than other people (due to hypercorrection), such as "between you and I." Ordinary speakers who always say you and me are never at risk of putting you and I after a preposition. Another smart person's mistake is pronouncing words like 'processes' with an emphatic 'eez' final syllable (via mistaken analogy with the plural formation of a small group of words like crisis/crises). Or using penultimate as if it meant tippy-top instead of next-to-last.
I am old enough to have witnessed a fair amount of change in the language just during my lifetime. For example, to me saying "I could care less" is just wrong — it's "I couldn't care less" (and parsing both out without the contraction reveals the sense behind it). But could care less was so frequently used that it's not really considered wrong anymore. Change happens fast enough to ultimately force you to choose between being a crotchety old buzzard mourning the usages of your youth or accepting change with grace.
Reply to Wendy
I appreciate you two's interesting comments, and more interesting examples from Wendy!
The 'I could care less' was mentioned in one of the talks at my department (on negation). The person who raised this, a professor from Australia who went to an English boarding school (hence speaks perfect British English) was 'shocked' to hear such examples.
It is really funny how negation drops like that…
Reply to Yukiko
Hey, you wouldn't happen to know the name of the linguist that Steven and Hugh are lampooning in the video would you? A long time ago my mother bought this on tape and we thought it was really funny. Then later I saw the guy who they HAD to be makeing fun of in an educational video in high school. The guy talked exactly the way they portray him in the skit, they didn't exaggerate at all! I've been trying to find out who he is ever since.
To comment on your article though, I have always been bothered by two phrases that seemed to pop up around the mid-nineties: "My bad" instead of "my fault", and "same difference" instead of "same thing". I don't know how long those have been floating around but it seems like every one says them now. It drives me nuts. I agree about the "could care less" phrase as well, I shudder when I hear it.
Reply to Jonathan