The Language Wars have been waged in the realm of English Literature, Language and Linguistics for years. Both sides of the argument are staunch believers in their position, but are more than willing to concede points to the other sides’ favour. In Bryan A. Garner’s essay, “Making Peace in the Language Wars”, he describes himself as a ‘descriptive prescriber’ (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008, 270), and offers a truce that fulfils both sides of the argument as the crux of his essay. While the separate sides of the argument are relatively easy to define, it seems that no one sticks to them religiously, and the argument is between individuals fighting over individual points. The two sides are that of the descriptivist and that of the prescriptivist.
David Foster Wallace has coined the term SNOOT, which correlates directly with what prescriptivism at its most strict is: “SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose ideas of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column” (Wallace 2005, 69). Garner, on the other hand, makes a very simple definition for prescriptivism: “Prescribers seek to guide users of a language…on how to handle words as effectively as possible” (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008, 266). Descriptivists are not the ‘opposite’ of prescriptivists, but they are at loggerheads with the ideals of prescriptivism since descriptivists simply seek to describe language as it is used. Garner, again, is succinct in his definition of descriptivists: “Describers seek to discover the facts of how native speakers actually use their language” (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008...
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... this essay, however, it seems like there will never be a truce between prescriptivists and descriptivists because status and perceptions of self are inflammatory and extremely emotional.
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Birk and Birk explore the many processes that automatically and often unintentionally, take place during the gathering of knowledge and expression through words. In their book Birk and Birk break the usage of words into sections: Selection, Slanting by the use of emphasis, slanting by selection of facts, and slanting by the use of charged words. When words are used this way they reveal naturally occurring bias of the writer. Upon reviewing the selection from Birk and Birk’s book Understanding and Using Language it is clear that the essay written by Jake Jameson has examples of every principal Birk and Birk discuss. The Birk and Birk selection provides us with a set of tools that enable us to detect bias in the many forms that it takes. These tools reveal what Jamieson favors and make plain the bias present in his essay The English-Only movement: Can America Proscribe Language With a Clean Conscience?
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George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language, first published in 1946, talks about some “bad habits”, which have driven the English language in the wrong direction, that is, away from communicating ideas. In his essay he quotes five passages, each from a different author, which embody the faults he is talking about. He lists dying metaphors, operators, pretentious diction, and meaningless words as things to look out for in your own writing and the writing of others (593-595). He talks about political uses of the English language. Our language has become ugly and the ugliness impedes upon communication. Ugly uses of language have been reinforced and passed down in the population “even among people who should and do know better,” (598). Ugly language has been gaining ground in our population by a positive feedback mechanism.
Lowe, Peter J. Texas Studies in Literature & Language; Spring2007, Vol. 49 Issue 1, p21-44, 24p Academic Search Complete Ebesco. Web. 23 July 2011
S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R Hayakawa, Words with Built-in Judgments. Language Awareness, Readings for College Writers. Ed. Paul Escholz, Alfred Rosa, Virginia Clark. Bedfort/St. Martin’s: Boston, New York, 2004. 229-234
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...rom Fiction." Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication. Comp. Susan D. Blum. New York, NY [etc.: Oxford UP, 2013. 443-58.
Language as a dynamic structure is exposed to constant development, transformation and alteration. Media, society, culture, science, technology and politics are the core factors that contribute towards language evolution. Due to numerous linguistic and extra linguistic factors, newly coined units in the language are in the process of entering and influencing the English language. These new units, known as neologisms, serve as our guidance in understanding the never-ending evolution in the English language. Furthermore, neologisms ease each individual’s process of coping with changes by creating mental bridges between the old and the contemporary. The English language vocabulary is facing constant change, as neologisms enter in a blink of an eye through the media. The mass media being the major source and ground on which English neologisms are coined, plays a significant role of intermediary between the English population as active consumers and the language itself.