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Carpal Tunnel
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I encountered this word in the spelling bee words I posted today. I expected to share most of the opinions expressed by the author, but became progressively disenchanted therewith. I think he grossly underestimates the ability and knowledge of our young people, however correctly he diagnoses their faults.
Please comment.
[urlwww.sspx.ca/Angelus/2002_February/Verbicide.htm[/url]
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here's a clickable link, Dr. Bill: http://www.sspx.ca/Angelus/2002_February/Verbicide.htmI think the author is unnecessarily acrimonious, but that his points are valid overall. In speaking of the loss of vocabulary, he said, This is a national tragedy that goes virtually unnoticed in the media. . I was thinking, "Good grief--it's the media that's caused it!", but then I saw that he gets to that later. I also thought this was really interesting--and I happen to agree with it: our linguistic decline is aided and abetted by academics... They have propounded the idea that everything is relative, hence largely inconsequential, and that the use of language is primarily an exercise in power, hence to be devalued. They have taught, in other words, a pseudo-intellectual contempt for clarity, careful argument, and felicitous expression. Being scholars of their word they also write without clarity, argument, and felicity. Er, I need to qualify my statement, and say that I agree that academics have certainly contributed to the decline of knowledge of the English language. Can't say I've had experience of the rest of his statement. But I had teachers, even in college, who couldn't spell--and textbooks with incorrect spelling! And in my opinion, that is just unconscionable (the books, that is).
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Carpal Tunnel
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Somehow I am confident that the generation he is moaning about will achieve every bit as much as his did.
Grandfathers have always moaned bout the hopeless adolescents, and expected an educational apocalypse. And the growth of knowledge and academic standards have kept right on climbing. I'll bet that one student he moaned and foamed about will be quite successful, and in his turn be worried about the adolescents he teaches.
He needs a much large sampling to make a vaild judgment.
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veteran
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I agree with almost every word he said, except that I disagree with almost all of his suggestions to improve the situation. I think that his analysis is incomplete and that it drives him to improper (and unworkable) remedies.
First a note about his student who got 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT. There are three levels (at least) of vocabulary. I don't know what the technical name for these are, so I'll just invent some and explain. Each person has SOME of their vocabulary from each category.
1. Enumerated vocabulary. This is the vocabulary of the person who knows just lists of words, but may not know the definitions of them. An example would include many people who are very good at scrabble (or it's online knockoff, literati). One of the Scrabble sites says outright that most professional players consider knowing definitions to be a waste of brainspace - and those literati elites with whom I've discussed the matter have agreed without exception. You know that X is a word, but have no idea what it means. This is a small portion of my vocabulary, because I forget them if I don't play they often enough. These include words like ULU, QAT, SUQ, and numerous others. For the stronger players this includes very big words to which many do not know the meanings.
2. Partially functional vocabulary. You know that X is a word, you have a vague notion of its meaning - and you could possibly infer an approximate meaning to the word if you saw it in context; however, you would not normally use the word. (I have a very large chunk of my own vocabulary in this category.)
3. Functional vocabulary. This refers to words that one knows extremely well and which one CAN and DOES use correctly or nearly correctly with ease and with volition. I like to think that I have a high functional vocabulary, but most of my vocab is probably in category 2. Still, I have gradually improved over the years - mainly by forcing myself to use words and broadening my reading habits. I'm not too hard myself, as I suspect that type 2 constitutes the bulk of most people's vocabularies. (In fact, despite two decades of roaming the net, before I came here, I'd met a very few individuals whose functional vocabularies constituted the bulk of their knowledge.)
I've met lots of people who "knew" amazing amounts of words, but could barely construct an intelligible sentence. The other day I was playing scrabble with someone who played ARANEID but didn't know that IM is not a word. (This is a recognized sign of cheating, but I hate making accusations like that, as the conclusion is not a necessary inference.) In the literati boards, I'm a mediocre and undistinguished player. And yet, while I can listen to (i.e. "read") the conversation of the high red elites, I'm continually staggered by their near universal poor grasp and usage of language. Anyone with whom they disagree is a moron. Anyone who doesn't know what they know is an idiot. If someone says something unpleasant, he is told to STFU. One can listen the entire evening and amid thousands of sentences, glean perhaps, on a very luck night, a dozen or so sentences that have any redeeming value. After a few short minutes in the lounge area, I can fell my head becoming lighter as the IQ points seep from my skull.
On the good side: while the net provides people with the ability to communicate without thinking, it also makes it easier to communicate better - for those who have the discipline. We can lament all we like, but the best way I know to encourage others to follow this path is to set a good example. It won't persuade everyone. But if a few younger people can be persuaded, it's a worthwhile investment (of time and effort).
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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I think his arguments are contentious at best, pretentious for the most part, and lack the very qualities he claims to aspire to: in short he demonstrates "a pseudo-intellectual contempt for clarity, careful argument, and felicitous expression." Nearly every one of his points is based on mere assertion (I choose this word with consummate care) and he uses these to frequently extrapolate complete straw men that he then proceeds to knock down ~ for example, his suggestion that the descriptivist school of language studies is of a conspiratorial group which propounded the idea that everything is relative, hence largely inconsequential, and that the use of language is primarily an exercise in power, hence to be devalued. All of my readings and studies in this area points in quite another direction: clarity of understanding, of the kind enjoined by George Orwell indeed, is enhanced by the ability to describe and deconstruct the intellectual and social baggage carried in particular forms and applications of language. To be able to recognise the exercise of prestige varieties of English, for example, does not devalue that variety: it adds to our understanding of when that variety may be appropriate and when not at all appropriate.
To take only one other example at random, because I do not think his arguments even merit full study...
Excise "uh...like...uh" from most teenage conversations, and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon. says our self-appointed expert in the complete analysis of the world. Wrong: it is a matter of highly researched fact that the largest single body of language creativity tends to occur in this group in most communities. Doubtless in his self-obsessed little bubble it is unlikely to have occurred to him to consider that in talking to him most teenagers are unlikely to wish to communicate much at all, so his personal experience of speech habits in this community are probably without external meaning.
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old hand
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You gotta wonder, if use of language is "continutally declining", how it ever got to [the supposedly] wonderful state it started at in the first place. Don't you have to come up before you can come down?
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Anything is better than working today, so I'll bite.
Like TFF, I agree with most of the author's initial exposition, although, again like TFF, I disagree with at least the first few of his "solutions". Rather than suppress the media of choice today, it should be used to further language. However, I'm not sure how to go about that.
I was also left wondering about his final two sentences. His introduction of environmental catastrophe, unexplained, as a reason to pursue the improvement of the use of language is rather, um untidy!
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[rant]
Bill, there are two other reasons for the decline of language in the U.S. which have been discussed in various places and the blame has been squarely placed on school boards and school administrators, the very people who ought to be encouraging better knowledge and use of language.
1. The adoption of standardized tests at various levels of schooling. These are supposed to show how well schools are doing and presumably if students are consistently doing poorly, corrective measures will be taken. What happens in practice is that no teachers and no schools want to look bad, so there has grown up the practice of "teaching to the test". The entire curriculum in the years in which students will take the test is geared almost 100% to the test. Everything else goes to the wall. Which means the students miss out on being exposed to a lot of literature and language instruction that they need. Also, in many places there is now a standardized test that every student must pass to graduate from high school. This also results in teaching to the test, since low graduation rates make the school and its teachers look bad.
2. "Dumbing down" and political correctness. Many school systems have reconstructed their curricula because too many students can't manage the old ones and they are failing. So the way to fix this is to make it easier to pass by requiring less. Then there are the school boards and administrators who have to make fixes which are motivated by PC. This means editing even classic works of literature (Huckleberry Finn is the favorite target for this in places where it hasn't been banned entirely) to avoid passages or words which might give offense to some students or their parents or pastors. Since there are plenty of people who will take offense at lots of expressions, this leads to a lot of bowdlerizing and censorship and, in extreme cases, to outright book banning. To me, all this is simply a form of book burning. I'd like to burn a lot of EdDs, PHDs, MATs, and other academic types who have no qualifications in the subject matter that the schools are supposed to teach and no idea of how to really get kids to learn. Also the pinheads on schoolboards who have no educational qualifications whatever but want to meddle in school policy and impose their own prejudices.
[/rant]
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Well Bob, you're obviously hot under the collar about this. How about cooling down by putting on an old Etonian collar?  http://makeashorterlink.com/?T6EA12F75
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks for that article, CK; I can't say that I'm glad to know that other countries also dumb down their tests, but I am relieved to know that we're not the only ones. Does anyone know whether the Japanese schoolchildren are still being pushed to actually learn things, as ours no longer are, really?
Speaking of hot under the collar: don't get me started on dumbing-down. On the one hand, I can sympathize with school administrators who face a shortening of funds and resources if the pupils perform poorly; BUT--when the alternative is to produce a whole generation of people who can't do basic math or write understandably, and who are ignorant re: a lot of geography and history...dammit. I'm not meaning to imply that this is due to widespread failure by teachers; on the contrary, I have witnessed only a fraction of the things they are required to do, and I can tell you, there's not enough money on the earth to pay me to be one. I haven't studied this "No Child Left Behind" program at all, but I do agree with the premise that the title implies: if some pupils can come out well-learned, like our own inimitable Jazzo, than ALL ought to, if they are capable of it. I sure don't have the answers, but I think a real, lasting improvement would have to involve not only the government from the top level down, but society as well: people tend to live up to, or down to, what's expected of them. And as long as students know they can "get by" with maybe only 50% effort, that's all they're going to put out. As I told the principal and some other parents at my son's school last year, raising expectations would...I KNOW it would...raise test scores overall. Not for 100% of the students, no, but for the majority, yes.
Back to the teachers: I can't imagine what it must be like, having pupils in class whose parents don't care how they perform--and this is completely aside from the outside bans on what teachers can do about it. That's what I meant by societal involvement. I have seen teachers put out HUGE efforts to try and engage their students; but so often these efforts fall flat when they're not reinforced (to say nothing of actual parental discouragement) by the parents! I say that, if an entire class has had enough lessons and opportunities for studying and asking questions, and they all still only score failing grades on a test: flunk 'em all. However, I can't imagine that this would ever be instituted as a solution on a regular basis, these days--the price would be too high. But I can't help thinking that it would take something of a gigantic impact like several years of a low graduation percentage, to shake up some of these parents into rearranging their priorities.
There have always been "pockets" (areas) where, for whatever reason, education is not considered very important. But I'm afraid that it has become more than just isolated pockets, now; it seems to have insidiously pervaded, to one extent or another, most of the country. And that is REALLY scary.
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