The Importance Of Language

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” This quote, once said by a man known as Albert Einstein, directly correlates to a sociolinguistic disease that has infected the worldview of modern society and plagued the minds of the naïve victims imprisoned within its false ideological assumptions. The scientifically-determined name for this disease is prescriptivism, which can be broadly defined as what society determines to be proper and appropriate language. Symptoms include “correct” use of grammar, vocabulary, meaning, pronunciation, and, in the worst cases of this disease, patients show signs of “linguistic etiquette.” Prescriptive grammarians argue

While people talk, they unintentionally but inevitably give off signals regarding unspoken information such as social and personal background, which is why language is said to be “indexical of one’s social class, status, region of origin, gender, age group, and so on.” When members of society are pressured into adopting a prescriptive mentality and change the style and structure of their language in order to conform to accepted norms, they lose part of who they are, especially considering that the “way one thinks is influenced by the language one is born into.” A primary example of this prescriptive view is the way in which colleges present and advertise themselves and the requirements for acceptance to elite universities, all of which can be seen on the Duke University

Most people will not pick up on this, but despite the difference in unique writing styles and preferences, the societal “correctness” of language in which all of the blogs are written is the exactly the same despite the diversity of race, ethnicity, age, origin of birth, and gender of the students who wrote the blog posts. Although the method of information presentation is varied in each post, ranging from journal entries to memoirs, the proper use of grammar, sophisticated vocabulary, calculated word choice, and sentence structure and syntax remains constant throughout all of the blogs. Four of the blog posts were written by Nadine Goldberg, Nadia Estelle-Fiat, Clive Mudanda, and Sarah Haas. Simply by looking at the names and profile pictures of these students, it is obvious that they have different cultural backgrounds. Clive even says in his post that his home is “literally 8,043.24 miles from Durham, North Carolina in Harare, Zimbabwe, Africa.” The Duke website also says that students attending the university “come from public, private and parochial schools, and from all points on the economic, political and geographic spectrum.” These four students most likely grew up in cities or even countries far apart from one another, interacted with different types of people, were immersed in disparate forms of societies, possibly spoke different languages at