I found a link to this while reading Cafe Hayek. If anything else, it stimulates thinking about basic grammatical rules. I know during my phase of that years ago, I rushed out and grabbed the book everyone recommended: Elements of Style.
I'm sure many of you either have it or have read it. I have to say that I'm sympathetic with some of the author's claims, though I don't know if I'd take it to the conclusions he endorses.
Thoughts?
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
Great article. I agree with every example in it. Often the passive is more useful and sounds better than the active. Splitting the infinitive is often necessary etc.
Another thing that should be attacked is the whole 'no preposition at end of sentence' issue. I'm fairly sure that this obsession, as with the split infinitive, is simply an attempted import from Latin, which is a very different language in these two areas. I love Latin, but English is obviously not Latin.
Language arises through use, convention. From a descriptive standpoint, there is no other definition of language. Language is whatever people speak and write.
However, the same can be said of music - music is whatever noises people make to entertain one another. Because I am not an aesthetic nihilist, I do not equate all music - the ditty for a dishwashing soap commercial is not on a par with the Requiem. Hence, there are aesthetically higher and lower forms of music.
Similarly, there are higher and lower forms of language. Just as there can be vehement and insoluble disagreements about what actually constitutes the highest or best form of music, so there can be over language. That said, I believe there is an objective reference outside of verbal debate that actually determines what are better and worse forms of both music and language: the market.
Books and music which people will continue to pay to read or hear, and books and music which are borrowed from by books and music which people will pay to read or hear constitute literary and musical forms of enduring, objective value. Such books and music are objectively aesthetically higher than others.
But yeah, many of the rules in Strunk & White are obviously bone-headed. They remind me of those "corrective shoes" that people used to make their children wear if they were "pigeon-toed" that ended up crippling them later in life. The way people speak in day-to-day conversation may not be an elevated form of language but it's rarely, if ever, grammatically incorrect. Even ESL speakers can be thought of as establishing their own dialect of English... like the Asian ESL speaker who says, "There are so many animal in the zoo and the peoples there are so interesting!" Any Asian speaker will have the same difficulty with number agreement because the primary language they learned as a child simply doesn't have number agreement.
Clayton -
I used to be in ESL
Clayton:Books and music which people will continue to pay to read or hear, and books and music which are borrowed from by books and music which people will pay to read or hear constitute literary and musical forms of enduring, objective value. Such books and music are objectively aesthetically higher than others.
Different music is chosen in different markets, both along geographical and social lines. There is no objective value. The illusion of universality only arises insofar as a given market has a large number of people with aesthetics similar to one's own.
Why anarchy fails
Different music is chosen in different markets
True but a musical scholar can show you in five minutes that almost all music is more similar than it is different. There's a lot going on that you don't even think about in music... consider the fixity of pitches, for example. Different cultures have vastly different scale preferences but every culture that I'm aware has pitch fixity - that means that every culture knows what it means to be "out of tune" relative to its own musical corpus, even if culture A's music sounds out of tune to someone in culture B.
So, it's not as arbitrary as you make out.
1) So, it's not as arbitrary as you make out
It's as arbitrary as every other marketing guess, or custom: which is to say, it something that can be eradicated from ones relevant life the moment one feels the need not to care.
The minute you start thinking,past histories of esoteric subjects are showing anything than arbitrary trends/ or better yet, useful categories for our intersubjective purpose is the minute you idealize something.
"Most people prefer life to death" and "eating steak over eating ramen noodles" only means something if it is a utilizable context of extant reality, the sentences mean nothing in a void unless I am bending things to my will to manipulate for my consumption. When the world comes at you, as it always does, it is on a case by case basis each time evaluated in a unique manner, with unique variables, with unique actors.
To say that soe aesthetic has some objective value due to historians, music theory, or whatever is about saying the same thing that a cheeseburger at McDonalds in 1990 cost 99 cents - or that ketchup was more popular than mustard in 1963. If that's what you mean, that's fine I guess - but instead of calling using the word aesthetics ( a term and concept that probably deserves to be eradicated) , why don't we just say "varifiable past consumer preference"?
2) I like Strunk and White.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
Clayton: True but a musical scholar can show you in five minutes that almost all music is more similar than it is different. There's a lot going on that you don't even think about in music... consider the fixity of pitches, for example. Different cultures have vastly different scale preferences but every culture that I'm aware has pitch fixity - that means that every culture knows what it means to be "out of tune" relative to its own musical corpus, even if culture A's music sounds out of tune to someone in culture B.
This is a much weaker claim than you were making before.
Any universality in such areas as "being in tune" is down to human physiology or whatever, hence all that need be said is that some music is more compatible with our biology than others - something of that nature. Still, this is not universal at all. Where would Rite of Spring be without that off-pitch ultra-high-register bassoon that starts it off? Less primal-sounding, less disturbing. But the criteria you seem to be implying, Justin Bieber would be far more superior to Stravinsky than Mozart is to Bieber (because they are both in tune...in fact, given the digital pitch correction employed for Bieber he would have to be "better" than Mozart in that respect at least).
past histories of esoteric subjects are showing anything than arbitrary trends... is the minute you idealize something.
Apparently, I'm the contrarian here but I have to disagree again. The brain is a computational device (maybe it does more but it does at least that) and it contains "circuits" or "modules" that influence human behavior universally and in definite ways. Human behavior is a manifestation of the circuitry in the human brain. Some of the circuitry in the brain is certainly capable of "learning" ... but then the ways that it learns and the kinds of things that it learns are still manifestations of the underlying circuitry.
There's nothing idealist about this. The brain could have been wired differently than it is, so there is no Platonic ideal dwelling behind the definite behaviors exhibited by the brain. In other words, you can't deduce a brain from some set of first principles. But you can separate between learned and "hardwired" behavior, at least to an extent, and you can investigate what the "hardwired" behavior says about human nature.
Because there is no way to deduce human nature (and thus, general categories of human preference/valuation), only the market or revealed preference can really discover it (inductive process). This is as true of our culinary tastes as it is of our social norms and our tastes in visual or performing arts.
The fact that your frontal cortex (aka "reason" "free will" "higher cognitive ability") is capable of "overriding" certain hardwired circuits in your brain doesn't make your choices arbitrary because the reasons which are sufficient to motivate us to "override" our first impulses are themselves not arbitrary. You don't choose to forgo eating for no reason... you do it so you can lose weight, or save money for something else you want even more, etc.
I think you're looking at biology as something it is not. Nature is a nihilist - when it exists, it is a useful concept for our purposes. I think the better social scientists are the ones who recognize that fact. And once again all I can understand from you is a way we recognize perameters to function and market off of. Get rid of the word aesthetics, as I think it is throwing us off.
If you are talking about scientific type certaintudes, than what you are saying is like "gravity keeps us down" or "hot fire will kill you" -and the whole point is "so what". This is stuff for tradesmen like engineers and doctors to work with.
This is stuff for tradesmen like engineers and doctors to work with.
I don't practice disembodied metaphysics. The point of aesthetics is to study the conditions of individual pleasure or satisfaction. We are all consumers, after all.